Why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the near future seems likely

A lot of what I'm going to say is conjecture based on my own observations. Take it with a grain of salt.

It seems to me that there will likely never be a better time for China and Russia to attempt to sweep the USA off of its feet than right around election time in the USA. In my view, they would have to be idiots not to take advantage of the dominoes which are lined up for them.

These things are hard to predict obviously, but there are a number of things that would make a more imminent Chinese invasion of Taiwan (in months) more likely than not:

• If China invades Taiwan, there could be a pretty swift 30%-40% drop in the big tech stocks (NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, GOOG, AAPL, META, and TSLA), and that would amount to something like 20%-25% of the value of the NASDAQ being lost. Then it would probably plummet much further in the days after, not only due to those tech stocks crashing, but global trade. To put things in perspective, the Great Depression started when the DOW plunged by 13% in a single day, and over 3 years dropped by nearly 90% from its peak. The market was nowhere near the size it is today (it was around 150th of the size it is now). https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stock-market-crash-1929.asp
• The US is spread a bit thin dealing with Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen. Some big think tanks have done simulations to try to see how a war between the US and China over Taiwan would turn out, with mixed results, but usually indicating heavy losses on both sides. https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargaming-chinese-invasion-taiwan
• The US recently promised to make any Taiwan a "hellscape" for the Chinese, indicating that they intend to create a sort of autonomous vehicle defense perimeter around the island. It seems unlikely that China is going to wait around for the US to put that capability in place. https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2024/06/18/2003819527
• The USA is more divided and polarized than it has ever been. People don't trust institutions anymore, and in some cases for legitimate reasons. For the illegitimate reasons, it's partly due to political parties and narcissistic politicians/cult leaders, but also misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda campaigns through social media, organized by both Russia and China. Most people are unhappy with either Presidential candidate, but a Trump win seems to be what Russia and China want, because he is not only incompetent, but sows chaos among the population and is viewed as more of an isolationist who may leave Taiwan and Ukraine to fend for themselves. Personally, I think there's not a chance in hell Biden wins anyway, but if there was, it's well known that in times of war, people tend to choose more authoritarian leaders. A pre-election war would very likely see Trump re-elected (I'm sure he would say "It wouldn't have happened if I were in there!").
• China has embedded itself in USA infrastructure, hardware, and software for decades. International cyber warfare to-date has been pretty minimal, but as the USA is taking actions to try to crack down and disable China's capabilities, it could spur China into using the capabilities they have, while they still have them. https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/fbi-says-chinese-hackers-preparing-attack-us-infrastructure-2024-04-18/
• China has been increasing their own nuclear weapons stockpiles, in addition to their military spending and overall naval capabilities much faster than the USA. Even though it's often said that the USA spends 3 times as much as China on the military budget, it's believed that China's military budget is actually very close to the same as the USA's. https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/keeping-up-with-the-pacing-threat-unveiling-the-true-size-of-beijings-military-spending/
• China has been stockpiling resources for years. They have entire warehouses full of raw materials that aren't being used. Nobody really seems to know why, but it seems like that would come in handy in a war. https://www.cfr.org/report/chinas-stockpiling-and-mobilization-measures-competition-and-conflict
• The AI race is pretty much the new Cold War. Many believe that whoever gets the most superior AI the fastest controls the world. Now, since there are killswitches for the microchip production plants in Taiwan, it's unlikely China would be able to take control of those factories. Still, the fact that those factories exist in Taiwan, and the USA has made the more advanced chips which are produced there inaccessible (for the most part) to China, means that they probably view it as advantageous to wipe out the chip supply of the USA, since that will likely delay or completely stop significant progress from being made by the USA in the AI realm. This would flip the script and give China time to get their own more advanced fabrication plants and AI industry kickstarted and force the USA to play catch up, if China isn't too busy with war that is.
• Xi Jinping isn't a spring chicken. Much like Putin, he may want to restore China to the status of a great empire before he dies, that way Chinese history will remember him fondly.
• China and Russia have developed a very cozy relationship. Russia has largely evaded the impact of sanctions by buying from the Chinese, who mark up the prices of their own imports and resell to Russia, bypassing sanctions. At the same time, China continues to buy (and stockpile) oil and other resources from Russia, and if there were a conflict, they could be fairly insulated from energy market prices due to this relationship. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/indirect-china-russia-trade-is-bolstering-moscows-invasion-of-ukraine/
• The BRICS nations have the ultimate goal of becoming the world's reserve currency, so if the US dollar were to collapse, it's very possible they could actually achieve this.
• There are some patterns, such as the war/economic cycles (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave ) which have been analyzed by numerous historians for ages, and the current time period coincides with some of them; although it isn't understood how much the accelerated technological/economic development since WWII could have sped up or slowed down these cycles.

Now, there are also some reasons China might not invade Taiwan:

• They hold a lot of US dollars in reserves. An economic crash or the collapse of the dollar would wipe out a lot of their own wealth, but maybe they have some sort of insurance or don't care (seems unlikely but who knows).
• We do have a global economy, and China does import a lot from the USA, so cutting that relationship could likely cause a lot of strain on China, but then again the USA exports services more than hard goods nowadays, so the impact on them may be minimized to some extent, But inflation would still probably be an issue.

There are many things we don't know, and I'm just a dude who reads too much. At the end of the day, this is all speculation, but it seems to me that China and Russia are unhappy with the status quo, and they probably won't have a better opportunity to act for a very long time.

A lot of people say, "China doesn't start wars". But the best time to start a war is when it isn't expected by your enemy.

Am I wrong? Best to be prepared just in case anyways.

Edited: Fixed a couple typos