Umm. Because we are now back at the point of a Cold War. That’s my problem.In stead of of moving forward, we are taking two steps back. It doesn’t matter anyway. We are in decline, Russia is definitely in decline, and China will probably be the sole super power this century.
Based on Russia’s history I’m 1000% okay with having them surrounded. They have murdered all over the globe, they have killed their own citizens, they are a communist scum nation. Putin has murdered political foes, locked them up, backed Syria while they gassed their own citizens. They themselves have killed hundreds of thousands of their own citizens when they denounced religion in the name of Marxism under Stalin. that trash country deserves no breathing room and I support all sanctions and all military establishments around them.
None of the above. The Putin regime loves to paint the US and NATO as dire threats, though, because it helps rally the domestic audience around Tsar Putin, and also because it serves as pro-Russian, anti-establishment propaganda for western audiences.
One thing in warfare that historically the United States has done rather well is large scale set piece military conflicts.
That’s not the world we live in today. We have spent 20 years fighting a war with no discernible path to victory, only to lose to half literate goat herders, and religious zealots.
That is no indicator of future conflict though. In order to seize Taiwan, China must win a straight up set piece conflict.
The U.S. cannot afford diplomatically, economically, or militarily to simply allow mainland China to seize Taiwan.
Well here's one version: 'We're going to lose fast': U.S. Air Force held a war game that started with a Chinese biological attack Really, maybe it's just the limits of my imagination, but it's easy for me to think of ways that China could win (preventing us from stopping their invasion of Taiwan), but it's a lot harder to think of ways that the US could win, starting with the most basic: Would the nation unite to defend Taiwan? I'd say no way.
The U.S. was united during the early years of both Vietnam and Iraq. It was only after the conflicts drug on that unity suffered. . Defeat the Chinese in less than a year and we shouldn't have too much trouble with national unity
That's a real mess over there. Obama was arming and funding ISIS. Assad just wants his citizens safe, you have Turkey (an alleged US ally) over there trying to invade. I think the US should sanction Turkey for any aggression over the Syrian border. I'm not even sure why Turkey is an ally. It doesn't make sense and Erdogan has been openly hostile to our military in Turkey.
We have differing memories of that. 1968 was aflame precisely because of Vietnam, and the "unity" on Iraq didn't last more than a few months. Now of course, the country is far more divided than it has since the civil war, so I have zero confidence that the US could be united enough to pull off a military operation of any length against China. However my real issue is that even if the US was united, we would still lose.
By 1968, the Vietnam War had gone on for three or four years. Why you think the U.S. would lose in beyond me. If proximity to a war zone were a decisive factor, the Falklands would be called the Malvinas now.
Well no one here was discussing proximity to a war zone. I've no idea why you brought that up. My post was about the country not being able to be united to prosecute a war.
I figured you had other reasons for believing the U.S. would lose a war with mainland China over Taiwan.