Rather than hijack another thread, I’ll just chain these quotes here:
I’m sorry, I assumed you were implying the USA DoD had imminent plans to attack China, which would be absurd, given our intertwined economies.
The Chinese, of course, are not actually stupid subhumans looking to be gutted by the USA. So a “war started by China” would be even more absurd.
If you mean, in 20 years, after the collapse of high-yield cereal agriculture? Well, maybe, when the global famine hits, if we see new political movements appear, new régimes in place in the worlds’ two largest economies would embrace a world war to decimate each other’s populations? But that’s going to be such a total change in international relations I wasn’t even trying to speculate about that.
We’re both nuclear powers; nuclear powers don’t fight wars with other nuclear powers since they don’t want to be reduced to radioactive ruins. It’s that simple.
I’m certainly not of the persuasion that thinks the U.S. and China will actually fight in the near future, but most wars seem pretty absurd in retrospect. Some you can see coming from a long time before hand if you know where to look, some crop up as a bizarre short-term solution to what is essentially a long-term problem.
So, it’s not likely at all, and it’s absurd to contemplate (outside the Pentagon) in the easily foreseeable future. But it’s not impossible.
It’s very unlikely, because both sides know that they couldn’t hope to win on the other’s territory. No one can invade China and win, and no one can invade the US and win. A skirmish over Taiwan is possible, but still pretty unlikely, because the risk clearly outweighs the benefit, for both sides.
China has a vested interest in maintaining the Kim dynasty in North Korea ( thus threatening South Korea and Japan). It has shown an unwillingness to work with Japan on territorial disputes, hence a problem there. It is currently forcing itself into minor unnecessary territorial conflicts with The Philippines, thus causing the US and that nation to re-engage militarily. There’s no need to mention Taiwan as its history with the US is well-known and it is a constant source of friction between the US and China.
Australia and New Zealand have openly expressed their discomfort with China’s expansionist ambitions. They maintain larger militaries than their size and location in the world would make reasonable unless they felt a threat from China. And the Chinese know this fact.
Even if the US wasn’t obligated by treaty to protect the above nations, much the world’s oil travel through the Straits of Malacca and through the South China Sea. The US has strategic interests in maintaining the safety and integrity of those waterways as it key allies in the region do not currently have the military forces to do so. China’s expansionism may prove to be a threat to that.
Finally, the US has been strengthening its ties to India,Vietnam and Burma. This can’t be sitting well with China as historically, it dominate the region. Since those nations are leaning towards the US and away from China that leave it with two allies:
[ol]
[li]North Korea - Which is essentially a puppet state basketcase more than a true ally.[/li][li]And Russia - Which is also a basketcase and is more an “ally” of China to lessen its weakness in SIberia, its lightly-populated , resource rich eastern half than it is a true partnership.[/li][/ol]
To presume that the US and China wouldn’t end up in conflict simply because both are nuclear powers is to demonstrate a serious misunderstanding of world history and realpolitik. Countries rarely intend to go to war; things happen that prevent them from withdrawing before it occurs.
If we fight a war with China it will because our leaders are stupid. And they are. We fought the Chinese in the Korean War and were happy to call it tie. Eisenhower told everybody it was stupid to fight a land war in Asia, so Kennedy and Johnson went ahead and fought a Soviet/Chinese proxy in Vietnam and we lost.
Bush/Cheney have shown the cost of fighting an overseas war against the worst army on earth.
What are Americans going to say if we ever fight a country with a real army and the casualties from a single battle run into the 1000’s? and we have to start up the draft again?
I think most people here would say screw the Japanese and the Filipino’s and why do I have to pull some Aussie’s shrimp out the fire.
But i have no faith that Hillary, Rubio, Jeb, et al can resist the glory of warmaking…
Our economies are so intricately linked that a war between us, even a very short one, would likely tank BOTH economies, and then the entire World economy. It would be economic suicide for the Chinese to start something with us, throwing a large chunk of their population out of work, shuttering factories and breeding civil unrest.
And even if it was over in a week, that would be the wake-up call for American companies to close down and either bring home those jobs, or send them to some place more friendly, less totalitarian and less likely to cause further supply chain disruptions.
Another interesting point I had read recently was the comparative Port Call treaties that the US has, vs. what China has. Our ships can stop and resupply in virtually every nation in the region. The Chinese have few if any agreements in place and are unlikely to gain any from the nations they’re pissing off with their territory grabs.
Several points of clarification from your historical revisionism:
[ol]
[li]China lost the Korean War - The US decided not bomb their staging or logistics areas in Manchuria, thus allowing them to freely rearm their troops. Also, despite having numerical superiority againt the UN forces, China was unable to move them out of the peninsula or far beyond what is now the DMZ. Hardly a “tie” when you have home field advantage and yet are still unable to win a war.[/li][li]The US never invaded North Vietnam and occupied it - If we had , we would have “won” the war, if it would have been possible to win any such conflict. ALso, there was very limited bombing or naval shelling of North Vietnam until the early 1970s , so North Vietnam was essentially unmolested for the entirety of teh US involvement in teh conflict. Had the US taken sterner measures against North Vietnam the outcome would have been far different than it is was.[/li][li]**The US didn’t “lose” in Iraq **- The idiots running the war moved the goalposts. The Iraqi military (what was left of it) was destroyed and Saddam was deposed. That was the goal and it was accomplished. Trying to bring democracy to an artificial construct was the hubristic decision that Bush/Cheney made that produce the poor results that we experienced.[/li][li]You are apparently not “up” on the latest in military technology - China’s military is 25-30 years behind that of the US. They are mainly staffed and trained to suppress internal dissent and they have no historical ability to wage an aggressive war against a competent enemy (India in 1962 was a joke and they were humiliated against Vietnam in 1979). They have limited force projection meaning that they would have to resort to nukes and risk teh destruction of their nation when they reached the limitations of their conventional capabilities. And the US even has the edge when it comes to nuclear weapons.[/li][/ol]
China would end up far worse in any conflict with the US as they have no history of defeating a technologically superior foe. They haven’t won a naval engagement in over 200 years and they have no experience in fighting an air war. This means that in any conflict which doesn’t include fixed ground wars which might favor China’s large population are going to result in a quick and painful defeat.
China has a lot going against it in a war, they’re still trying to master the technology of military jet engines, for example. But we can’t win a naval battle against them because they don’t have a navy. We can drop bums on them but that doesn’t accomplish much, and I wouldn’t want to be in a supercarrier task force sailng within attack range of land based defenses. China’s weakness. like that of Japan and Germany, is that they are dependent on imported energy. It would be easy to cripple their economy at shipping chokepoints off the Australian coast, but why cripple the world economy too? Funny enough, Australia seems to be suffering greatly from global warming but a mainstay of their economy is exporting coal to China.
Win or lose in war is determined by your strategic goals. We failed to unite Korea or Vietnam, therefore we lost. Invading North Vietnam would have meant war with the Soviets and Chinese, it was never an option. Starting a wider war with China probably amounted to the same thing back in the day in Korea.
Don’t be foolish enough to think the Iraq war was ever about anything other than securing an ally and establishing a major military presence from which to dominate the Arab world. That counts as a loss, too.
China actually has a sane nuclear policy, not building a 1st strike force but only one that has enough survivability to take out the major cities of whoever attacks it, India, Russia, or Hillary.
War doesn’t have to make economic sense. The notion that countries can’t or won’t fight each other because of economic ties is a very old one, and has been proven wrong time and again. The idea that the great powers of Europe wouldn’t fight each other anymore because of how economically intertwined they had become was being floated about right before World War I started.
That doesn’t matter; the fact that both could destroy the other does matter. America had a decades long cold war against Communism and failed to go to war with either the USSR or China despite how aggressive America was and how much it hated Communism. India and Pakistan have failed to go to war since both have acquired nukes, despite hating each other and being next door.
We’re not going to go to war because there’s no profit in the destruction of your own country.