If you care about what people think of you then you are their hostage. Act. Don’t care. What will the Russian people do. Please be specific.
Wholeheartedly support the next authoritarian strongman who promises to avenge the insult from the West?
OK. I’m great with that. Someone who agrees to step into the next X mark on the floor, because the
people support him/her.
It’s actually an ideal result after an assassination. They will use strong words but won’t actually attack any independent country anymore.
Which is why after we killed a few of their leaders Islamic Terrorists became all bark and no bite 
Well, Ray Dalio thought the chance of conflict between Chiba and the US was pretty high. In previous threads on this topic, he has been criticized for being close to China, although his logic is pretty clear and I enjoy his analyses.
But no. Too much for both sides to lose and too little to gain. I think both sides are very cognizant about the relationship. Although concerns about Taiwan exist, I also think the Ukraine debacle has also caused China to reconsider the strength of their allies and Western resolve.
A black eye for America. Nothing fatal to the country.
let’s all take a moment to appreciate how far the goal posts have moved in the span of a single post. From “it’s actually an ideal result” to “a black eye, but nothing fatal to the country”.
We’re using too much metaphor. Not sure what you are really talking about. I thought it was 9/11. What are you talking about?
The fact that assassinating enemy leaders often backfires by giving the next strongman a grievence to point at in order to unite the country behind him. You claimed this isn’t a problem because said strongman will be so terrified of being assassinated that they’d be all bark and no bite to the point that this is actually an “ideal result”, and I pointed out that this is demonstrably not true, and that despite “beheading the snake” multiple times, Islamic Terrorism has not been defanged as a threat, and in fact our ill conceived actions have resulted in an INCREASE in the appeal of these ideologies.
Killing the leader of the other side is often unwise. First off of course is that it invites escalation and retaliation. In addition, such a killing damages the chance of reestablishing peace through diplomacy.
Yes, precisely. Talk of assassinating Putin is absolutely ridiculous; there’s absolutely no plausible way this plays out other than WW3.
Again I was positing a different sort of world, kind of like we see in science fiction / fantasy, where the societies simply have very different moral & social organizations.
In that world, assassinating some hostile country’s leader does not result in mass warfare, because mass warfare is Simply Not Done. It might well result in a counter-assassination attempt, maybe many of them until one succeeds, but that’s it.
Nowadays we fight an industrial breed of warfare that, at least potentially, harnesses the complete industrial and economic might of the populace & business is service of wrecking the enemy industrial economy as well as the enemy’s military machinery. But that’s not how wars were fought 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.
We can at least imagine a democratic and peaceful world society where the reaction of the public to psychopathic power-addicts is more like “That’s niiice. Go play with other losers like yourself and leave us normal people alone”, rather than elevating the psychos to power and mass adulation as we do now and then following their ego-driven orders into mass death and economic and political ruin. Or as a mostly sane society ourselves (at least during this administration) having to deal with an opponent society, e.g. Putin’s Russia, that has clearly elevated a psycho to the drivers seat.
All of this is a hijack to the actual thread the OP is trying to have here, so I’ll shut up now. And yes, a Modest Proposal unlikely to be enacted on any planet occupied by current version Homo sapiens
A total war between the US and China would last for years.Global supply chains would be massively disrupted. Forget any global action on climate change during those years. Just the opposite, as war production increases so will emissions. Whatever comes after that war, if it ends, will be a hellscape.
An incident of a dozen ships sunk on each side would freeze world trade for years. At least for me the results are simply unimaginable. The world would never be the same.
A question arises from recent events in Ukraine. Is it possible for the US to both support Taiwan militarily and remain technically neutral towards China, in the event of a Chinese invasion? Currently the US and NATO are able to back Ukraine in many ways without actually engaging Russian forces. Just ship weapons in through Poland, and the Russians have to deal with it. Taiwan, as an island is much more vulnerable to a total blockade. If the Chinese choose that route it would mean a direct confrontation.
You’d have to define what “technically neutral” means. And what you think technical neutrality would buy anyone in the real, practical world.
I think neutrality is a long way back from what the US/NATO is doing in Ukraine. e.g. the Swiss were neutral in WWII. They sure as hell weren’t delivering weapons to one side or the other, or even to both. Neither were they calling for war crimes tribunals against either side.
When the US was not yet directly in WW-II, but was delivering many metric boatloads of arms & supplies to the UK, the Germans called out the lie that that behavior was consistent the with US’s claimed neutrality. And the world agreed, reluctantly, with the Germans. Not that that agreement took any concrete action beyond press releases.
Back to China / Taiwan / now:
If in some Bizzaro world the Chinese invaded Taiwan then left the eastern approaches to the island unguarded the US could certainly physically deliver arms & supplies. But that assuredly would not be legal technical neutrality. Nor would it be seen to be such by anyone, least of all the Chinese.
You’d be substantially guaranteed to have a Lusitania incident in the next few hours or days. And like the original Lusitania, what was aboard the ship would almost not matter to the follow-on actions by both sides.
We don’t have to call it “neutrality” then. You are correct in that is much different from genuine neutrality such as Switzerland practices. But it is something short of war, and I do not think the US will be able to pull off this sort of aid in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. With regard to the US aid to the UK in WW2, the situation is different. The UK was generally in control of its own coastal waters, and Taiwan would not be. I dont see any way the US could provide the sort of assistance that it provides to Ukraine without fighting the Chinese military.
Agreed. Which is why I was a bit confused by your question / thought. Supplying Taiwan without directly fighting the Chinese would require really improbable cooperative behavior by both sides. Not gonna happen.
That is what I meant, I apologize for any confusion
There have been a lot of statements made by various politicians, but the US doesn’t even officially recognize Taiwan as a Sovereign State.
I don’t think there would be much public support for US troops shedding blood to defend them.
Quote: “Taiwan maintains full diplomatic relations with 13 sovereign states”