While the Stars Align
China is watching its closing window. Here is what the calculation actually looks like from the outside.
Written June 2026. This is the fifth and final piece in a sequence. The tribal reversal that set everything in motion is in When the Team Matters More Than the Strategy. The intellectual framework connecting it all to Zeihan's structural predictions is in The Accidental Superintendent. The Ukraine side of the argument is in The Best Deal Nobody Wanted to Make. The Iranian chokepoint architecture is in One Does Not Simply Close the Strait. This piece is the capstone.
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Peter Zeihan posted a question on May 21 that his community has been wrestling with ever since. With the United States distracted and depleted by the Iran war, should China seize this opportunity to invade Taiwan? His answer was direct. China imports about 80 percent of the crude it uses and about 75 percent of that comes from the Persian Gulf, where the US Navy is sitting right now. If China made a move on Taiwan, the United States would shut off energy flows, and within a year China would fall into what Zeihan described as "a post-apocalyptic wasteland, complete with famine that kills half of their population." So on the surface, short term, yeah. Now is a good time. But none of this has changed anything about China's overall vulnerabilities.
That last sentence is the one worth sitting with. The question this piece is trying to answer is not whether now is a good time for China to move on Taiwan. The question is whether there will ever be a time that is not constrained by the same vulnerabilities Zeihan has been documenting for a decade, and whether China understands that the window it is watching is closing rather than opening.
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In February 2022 Russia made a calculation. The demographic decline was already visible. The energy revenue that funded the military was structurally dependent on European customers who were actively diversifying away. The NATO expansion that Moscow had tolerated for decades was approaching a boundary it calculated it could not absorb. The window for acting while Russia still had the conventional military capacity to matter was closing. So it moved.
Three years and roughly one and a half million casualties later, Russia has consumed the bulk of its pre-war armored vehicle inventory, burned through its professional officer corps, and is running on mobilized conscripts and North Korean infantry filling gaps its own recruitment cannot cover. The country that entered the conflict as a peer competitor to American conventional forces has demonstrated in real time, against a non-NATO opponent with no air force, that its military was significantly less capable than its reputation suggested and significantly less capable than it was before the war began.
The closing window theory of Russian aggression is now confirmed by the outcome. Russia did not move from strength. It moved from desperation, and the desperation produced exactly the kind of poorly planned, under-resourced, strategically incoherent operation that desperate actors produce when they convince themselves that acting now is better than waiting for conditions that will never improve.
China is running the same calculation. The parallel is uncomfortable precisely because it is structurally identical.
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China's demographic window is closing faster than Russia's was in February 2022. Fewer than eight million babies were born in China in 2025, the lowest number since records began in 1949, marking the fourth consecutive year of total population decline. With roughly 5.6 births per thousand people China now ranks among the world's lowest-fertility societies, closer to aging European economies than to the image of a rising Asian power. The country will lose nearly 60 million people in the next decade, roughly the size of France, with the annual population decline projected to hit 7.6 million by 2035.
The working-age population peaked around 2011 and has been shrinking ever since. Analysts estimate that fixed investment growth effectively stalled in 2025, based on adjusted data suggesting official figures overstate investment performance. GDP growth that once regularly exceeded ten percent has decelerated to around four and a half percent, with the World Bank projecting it falling further to 4.4 percent in 2026 without a meaningful shift toward domestic consumption that has not yet materialized. China used to grow its way through structural problems. The growth engine is slowing precisely when the structural problems are accelerating.
Xi set a 2027 military readiness target for Taiwan not because 2027 is strategically optimal but because the demographic and economic math suggested it was roughly the last moment before the structural pressures become visibly irreversible. Not I am strong enough to win. But I am less weak now than I will be in five years and the window is closing.
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The Russian backstop that was supposed to complicate American Pacific planning is now a damaged client. Putin arrived in Beijing on May 19, days after Trump had been there, and China leveraged Russia's weakened bargaining position to extract favorable energy pricing. The country that signed a comprehensive strategic partnership with Iran in January 2025 watched that partner's proxy network get degraded across five theaters in ninety days and is now watching Iran negotiate at American terms over Hormuz reopening and enriched uranium removal. The alliance architecture China built to create strategic depth around its Taiwan calculation has been systematically dismantled by events it did not plan and cannot easily reverse.
The energy picture is the most immediate constraint and Zeihan named it precisely. China imports about 80 percent of its crude and about 75 percent of that comes from the Persian Gulf, where American naval power just demonstrated in real combat conditions that it can project decisive force, neutralize Russian-supplied air defense systems, and reshape the regional security architecture at scale. The US Navy is sitting on China's energy supply right now. Chinese crude imports dropped roughly 20 percent year on year in April as the Hormuz disruption rippled through Asian energy markets. Strategic stockpiles are being drawn down. The alternatives, discounted Russian pipeline gas covering roughly six percent of Chinese needs and Iranian discount crude running below one million barrels per day for the first time in months, have been simultaneously compromised by the same conflict China was watching from the sidelines.
During the Beijing meeting on May 15, Xi stated that Hormuz must remain open and free of tolls, that China would stop supplying military equipment to Iran, and that China would help pressure Tehran toward a deal. Trump then announced that China had agreed to buy American oil, with Chinese tankers heading to Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska. China has not formally confirmed the purchase agreement and details remain to be finalized, but the direction of the negotiation is not ambiguous. The country that built its strategic posture around Iranian chokepoint leverage as an indirect check on American power just told the country whose Navy controls the military situation around that chokepoint that it would like to buy that country's oil instead.
American Energy Secretary Chris Wright explained what happened in six words. "This is a card you can play once."
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The semiconductor dimension is where China's closing window calculation becomes structurally different from Russia's in ways that matter for the outcome.
Russia had no equivalent asset to the one it was attacking. Ukraine had grain and geography and remarkable military resilience, but no single production capability that the global economy was structurally dependent on in ways that would mobilize every major power against the attacker regardless of their position on the underlying territorial dispute.
Taiwan has TSMC. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces roughly 90 percent of the world's leading edge chips, the three nanometer and below processors that power every advanced military system, every AI data center, and every flagship smartphone on earth. There is no second source at this level of production on any timeline shorter than five to ten years. The entire global technology supply chain, including China's own military modernization program, runs on chips that only one company in one location currently knows how to make reliably at scale.
A Chinese move that damaged or disrupted TSMC production would not just provoke American military response. It would impose a technology supply shock on every advanced economy simultaneously with no substitute available on any meaningful timeline. The coalition that would form against China in that scenario would include countries that have no position on Taiwan's political status but a very strong position on maintaining the semiconductor supply chains their entire industrial base depends on. China cannot wage a modern war without the chips it cannot make, produced by the company it would be attacking.
The January 2026 trade deal, in which Taiwan committed $250 billion in semiconductor investment in the United States in exchange for tariff relief, is the hedge being built before the window forces a decision. Every TSMC fab that comes online in Arizona reduces the catastrophic consequence of a Chinese move and therefore reduces Chinese leverage over American decision-making in a Taiwan scenario. The hedge is not complete. The leverage has not yet been eliminated. But the direction of travel is clear, and China is watching it happen.
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The honest complications deserve acknowledgment before this piece closes.
The United States munitions depletion from the Iran conflict is real. Zeihan estimated roughly half of deployable long-range munitions were consumed in the Persian Gulf campaign and that rebuilding those stocks will take five to ten years. That is the honest version of why now might actually be a better time for China to move than 2028, and it is the one scenario Zeihan named where the calculation might work. The reduced PLA ADIZ incursions into Taiwan in early 2026 suggest China is not moving immediately, but the same caution restraining China now will not hold indefinitely if the munitions gap remains and the demographic math keeps running.
China is also pursuing the Taiwan question through political channels simultaneously. The CCP's engagement with KMT Chair Cheng following her April meeting with Xi is an explicit attempt to present the KMT as the party of peace ahead of Taiwan's 2026 local elections and 2028 national elections, contrasting it with the DPP's defense cooperation with the United States as the obstacle to stability rather than its guarantee. The closing window calculation is not purely military. It is operating through economic, political, and informational channels simultaneously, which is what makes it more sophisticated and more dangerous than a simple force readiness question.
Trump's 2026 National Defense Strategy contains zero direct references to Taiwan. The 2022 version described Chinese actions as threatening stability across the Taiwan Strait. The omission is either deliberate strategic ambiguity or the early signs of the scenario Zeihan described as "strategically idiotic" but "not unprecedented." "It would not be the first time this year," he wrote. The tribal dysfunction this archive has documented across four previous pieces applies to the China challenge as much as to Ukraine and Iran. The leverage is real. The window is closing on China. Whether the American political system can sustain the strategic decisions required to capitalize on those conditions across administrations is the one question the structural argument cannot answer.
The regional architecture for reducing American direct exposure while maintaining influence is embryonic but developing. Japan joined the Balikatan exercises as an active participant for the first time, practicing amphibious defense and deploying unmanned surface vessels in the Luzon Strait. Japan is now planning to export its Mogami-class frigate to New Zealand. The architecture is becoming more load-bearing every month, but it is not yet load-bearing enough to substitute for American commitment. Gulf states want to exist and make money. Europe is watching from the shore while American energy secures the shipping lanes their economies depend on and offering commentary. The architecture being built is real. It is not yet complete.
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Russia moved through its closing window from desperation and lost everything it was trying to protect. China is staring at the same window. The demographic math is running. The Russian backstop is damaged. The energy vulnerability is exposed in ways that no strategic analysis could have made visceral before the Iran conflict made it real. The semiconductor trap cuts both ways and China knows it.
Zeihan predicted the superpower. The Accidental Superintendent stumbled into fulfilling the conditions. The Ukraine piece documented the European backstop degradation. The Iran piece documented the chokepoint architecture exposure. This piece asks the question the sequence was always building toward.
While the stars are aligning for China to make its move on Taiwan, there is one big issue. Energy. The country on the other side is holding the fuel. The island in the middle is holding the chips. And the window China has been watching is closing, not because America planned it that way, but because the structural conditions Zeihan documented a decade ago are producing the outcomes he predicted through a vessel nobody predicted, in ways nobody planned, on a timeline that is running out.
China's last best calculation is not whether to move. It is whether the window is still open enough to move through before the architecture being built around it becomes too complete to overcome.
So far the answer has been not yet.
The question is how much longer that answer holds.