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If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. The reality is that

If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.

notaigenerated 2mo ago
There won't ever be an "all out war" of nuclear states with each other. Only via proxies.
- chmod775 2mo ago
  Of course there can be - likely with a gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose. It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.
  - FpUser 2mo ago
    >"gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose." So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.
    - tcp_handshaker 2mo ago
      In case you did not notice, that is exactly what happened between China and India. Disputes at the border are frequent and they fight with sticks: https://youtu.be/T1-Gi_l-024 https://youtu.be/T1-Gi_l-024
    - toyg 2mo ago
      That's what's happening in Ukraine right now, I don't understand why you think it's BS. The point is reaching a situation where one of the parties is ok with going "alright, enough". Not all wars are WWII-level fight-to-the-death conflicts, a lot of them just end with both sides agreeing a new status quo.
  - dualvariable 2mo ago
    Yeah, arguably the war in Ukraine is teaching everyone who is listening that nobody is willing to be the first to use nukes and destroy the planet, which means that nuclear powers can actually fight wars--which is incredibly dangerous, of course.
    - mullingitover 2mo ago
      My takeaway is that Russia, China's vassal, wanted to use nukes and China told them they can't[1]. I don't believe Russia really cares about the rest of the planet. At the same time, China doesn't care if Russia gets a bloody nose on Putin's little vanity project and realizes a nuclear war is bad for their mercantile economy. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-china-urged-vladimir-putin-not-use-nuclear-weapons-in-ukraine/ https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-china-ur...
      - toyg 2mo ago
        This coming from the leader of the other country in a war... I mean, I do find it credible that Xi might have told Putin to think very hard before doing something extremely stupid, but from there to stating that Russia is "China's vassal" and will do whatever they're told by a party who has long been a direct competitor (China and Russia have been solid "frenemies" for a long time, pushing very different views of what "real socialism" looks like)... It's a big jump.
        mullingitover 2mo ago
        The Soviet Union's relationship with China was more of a peer rivalry situation. The Russian relationship with China is nowhere near parity. Russia would fold tomorrow if China withdrew their backing and went along with the US/EU sanctions. So Russia is only able to prosecute their war with China's permission. When your foreign policy is decided by another power, that's the textbook definition of a vassal.
        toyg 2mo ago
  - SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
    I think the biggest risk of war between nuclear powers is from mistakes and accidents that might trigger nuclear escalation/MAD. Systems can malfunction. War can spiral out of control, fast. We had some very close calls in the cold war.
- junofan 2mo ago
  You could fight conventionally over logistics chokepoints. China’s not going to lob nukes just because their oil’s dried up.
  - analognoise 2mo ago
    China imports food and has stressed or extremely stressed fresh water reserves. You take out the method they keep alive hundreds of millions of citizens, you think they won’t launch a nuke? Although for all the strategic thinking we’ve seen out of the “department of war” (that offers gender affirming testosterone shots and then runs out of missiles), I wouldn’t be shocked if you worked at the Pentagon, hahahaha.
    - FuriouslyAdrift 2mo ago
      China is already sending their fishing fleets to just off the EEZ of South American and is rapidly depleting their stock. https://latinamericanpost.com/americas/environment-en/a-silent-crisis-as-chinas-fishing-fleets-threaten-latin-americas-marine-ecosystems/ https://latinamericanpost.com/americas/environment-en/a-sile...
      - maxglute 2mo ago
        This interesting way of saying PRC distant fishing fleet fishing in international waters. Geopolitical drama aside, DWF is like 3% of PRC fishing catch, much of it just luxury consumption or resold globally. Reality is PRC more or less absolute caloric self sufficient on staples, chicken/fish. They import a lot of soy for animal feed but shit hits fan, people eat less pork/beef.
  - maxglute 2mo ago
    [dead]
- bombcar 2mo ago
  They called World War I “the Great War” because they couldn’t conceive of a sequel. Never say never.
- Tadpole9181 2mo ago
  Until there is. We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. But the reality is that throughout history most leaders have been irrational. My country (America) is behaving increasingly irrationally. I've been hearing fringe conservatives calling for nuking the middle east since the early 2000s, but the rot has spread and became deeply religious. Now I hear talk of the end times from the most powerful people in the country, actively building bunkers. Groups of Republicans openly talking about the US being allowed to take whatever we want from anyone we want through war (Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Canada). Almost all of our leadership has been replaced in every branch of government. SCOTUS is clearly compromised and bought. The legislative may as well be dead. Almost all executive agencies have been purged, what remains have had their heads swapped with sycophants. Something like half of the military generals have been turned over. The DoD was renamed to the DoW with cheers, as an alcoholic prison guard was put in charge and has started touting hypermacho religious warrior catchphrases and openly advocating for war crimes. The other day we testimony from judges before legislature who refused to say if Presidents can run for three terms or that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Under oath, just simply refused. And that's before getting into how the President of the United States started a war to distract from his involvement in the highest profile sex trafficking ring in human history, and has continued to use his position to perform insider trading on oil prices repeatedly for weeks. If you said any of this would be happening in 2005, I would have laughed at how "that would never happen in the US". And now it's just... reality. Like Russia. And it seems to have no end in sight. So what actually happens if Trump gets so deranged he hits the red button? And if not him, who will the loonies pick tomorrow - someone who actually believes in "the cause", who doesn't understand it's a grift? And what are the external long term consequences of Trump's actions in countries like Iran and Venezuela and Ukraine? The US is not to be trusted anymore, every country has a clear signal to build their own nuclear arsenal ASAP. We have a river of blood behind us, so are we just expecting to get lucky that no one in Iran, for instance, who gets to a position of power leverages an irrational hate for the US and just... Does it in a religious or hate-driven Armageddon?
  - tharmas 2mo ago
    >We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. Cough, cough. Who is currently in the White House?
Arodex 2mo ago
>not whatever this spitting match with Iran is. Are you openly saying the president and the secretary of war are lying when they say they have done "massive" bombings of Iran?
- grey-area 2mo ago
  The president openly lies all the time. About his pool refurbishment, the size of his crowds and even how good he is at golf.
  - delecti 2mo ago
    Yep. And when he's not deliberately lying, he's often confabulating as a late-stage dementia patient. In short, Trump is not a source.
- pjc50 2mo ago
  That's an easy one: I don't even have to look at what the facts are to be sure they're lying. Just a question of what about. Although "massive" is a subjective word. Nothing can be as massive as WW2 carpet bombing.
  - codeduck 2mo ago
    Or even what they were regularly doing to grids of rainforest in Vietnam.
- sneurlax 2mo ago
  Are their mouths open and are they making noise? Then yes.
- TaLiTr 2mo ago
  I don't trust anything the North Korean government says without external verification, why would I believe the U.S. government?
- Sabinus 2mo ago
  "massive bombing" is irrelevant. They either have the capacity to achieve their war goals or they don't and the bombing is not achieving US goals. We're apparently up to "asking around for creative solutions"[1] which means Trump started the war with no credible plan of victory. Which means he was ignoring the 'deep state' experts and listening to yes men and Israel, yet again. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/us-military-iran-war-troops-punish https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/us-military-iran...
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
_heimdall 2mo ago
The reality is that fighting any country with a decent military has to be all-out war. We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. A war with China would be the same, it can never be fought from a distance with primarily $1m+ precision surface to surface missiles. Of course I only mean if the war was necessary to fight at all, I don't believe it was.
- ndiddy 2mo ago
  > We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan and Israel because anything on the tarmac in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE is very vulnerable to Iranian drone and missile strikes. All of this means that they're forcing the US to choose between pulling out of the region or accepting losses of personnel and airframes (that likely cannot be replaced in a timely manner) at a level that the post-Vietnam US military has never had to face. I suspect an all-out war between the US and China would go the same way as this one, if not worse. The US military in its modern form has focused on procuring very complex, advanced, and featureful weapons in tiny numbers. The problem is that this means that the US is incapable of fighting a sustained campaign against an adversary that can withstand attacks from American weapons and has a higher production capacity.
  - SR2Z 2mo ago
    The problem is production capacity. The US has gutted the lower-value parts of its supply chains, closed refineries and foundries left and right, and is thoroughly unequipped to even produce cheap weapons at the rate required to support a war. The number of airplanes built in the US during WWII is greater than all the airplanes NOT in that category. Obviously we can't maintain that level of industry during peacetime, but we've fallen so far below that level and are so low on weapons that if another major war starts we won't even be able to rapidly scale up.
palmotea 2mo ago
> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. I think the reason China has no reason to be threatened is the US outsourced most of it's manufacturing to them, meaning China now has more skills, know-how, and manufacturing infrastructure to redirect to wartime production. That was truly a brilliant move by US business leaders and the 90s political elite. Besides creating the military vulnerability, it also helped get Donald Trump election, who they all love dearly.
- thesmtsolver2 2mo ago
  Sorry, but this is only partially informed. 1. The U.S. produces a massive share of global manufactured goods, ranking second globally behind China in total value added. 2. Only low skilled jobs were shipped overseas. Lower-value consumer goods like clothing and basic electronics are heavily outsourced, whereas complex machinery, aerospace equipment, chemicals, and medical devices are largely built domestically https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0222_manufacturing_helper_krueger_wial.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0222_ma... During war with China, the US is not going to suffer due to lack of cheap toys or clothes from China.
  - pendenthistory 2mo ago
    Cheap toys? You seem stuck in the 90s, and you're quoting a 10 year old article. Since then China has taken over the car industry with EVs, solar industry, building more new energy every than the us has installed total, leading in humanoid robotics and drones. WTF are you talking about?
tim333 2mo ago
>fighting China would be a proper all-out war I figure it would probably be like the US backing Ukraine's defense against Russia but backing Taiwan's defense against China. It would probably be quite hard for China to take Taiwan. There's a lot of sea in between and you can see how well Russia's navy has done against Ukraine's drones and missiles.
- ericmay 2mo ago
  I don't think so because China would not be sure what and how the US would be involved and because it would be incredibly risky to attack Taiwan without striking US forces in the area they'll likely attempt to strike US forces in Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The best US strategy is to just arm Taiwan to the teeth by selling weapons to make the invasion as risky as possible. But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.
  - sarchertech 2mo ago
    > is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term. That was their plan until Xi became ruler for life and decided that he wanted Taiwan sooner rather than later.
  - zardo 2mo ago
    > But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term. Yeah, that is certainly the smart play and one China is almost guaranteed to win in the long run. But that won't secure Xi as the leader that reunited the nation. He might prefer the option where he gets a chance at glory to the smart one.
    - bobthepanda 2mo ago
      I think Hong Kong has been enough of a cautionary experience for Taiwan that this is more or less not going to happen willingly.
  - gadflyinyoureye 2mo ago
Paradigma11 2mo ago
But there wouldn't be a Chinese navy left which would give Taiwan and it's allies some breathing room.
- ksudb 2mo ago
  [dead]
euroderf 2mo ago
> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. Well but war will be like this now. Like for ICBMs, with PGMs it's use it or lose it, so lots of ordnance is fired off at the outset (onset?) of hostilities.
jacquesm 2mo ago
Fighting China would be over before it began. They'd stop shipping stuff to the USA and that would be that. The degree to which the USA depends on China should not be underestimated when talking loosely about starting major wars. That's exactly the kind of thinking that got the strait of Hormuz closed.

notaigenerated 2mo ago

There won't ever be an "all out war" of nuclear states with each other. Only via proxies.

chmod775 2mo ago
Of course there can be - likely with a gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose. It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.
- FpUser 2mo ago
  >"gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose." So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.
  - tcp_handshaker 2mo ago
    In case you did not notice, that is exactly what happened between China and India. Disputes at the border are frequent and they fight with sticks: https://youtu.be/T1-Gi_l-024 https://youtu.be/T1-Gi_l-024
  - toyg 2mo ago
    That's what's happening in Ukraine right now, I don't understand why you think it's BS. The point is reaching a situation where one of the parties is ok with going "alright, enough". Not all wars are WWII-level fight-to-the-death conflicts, a lot of them just end with both sides agreeing a new status quo.
- dualvariable 2mo ago
  Yeah, arguably the war in Ukraine is teaching everyone who is listening that nobody is willing to be the first to use nukes and destroy the planet, which means that nuclear powers can actually fight wars--which is incredibly dangerous, of course.
  - mullingitover 2mo ago
    My takeaway is that Russia, China's vassal, wanted to use nukes and China told them they can't[1]. I don't believe Russia really cares about the rest of the planet. At the same time, China doesn't care if Russia gets a bloody nose on Putin's little vanity project and realizes a nuclear war is bad for their mercantile economy. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-china-urged-vladimir-putin-not-use-nuclear-weapons-in-ukraine/ https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-china-ur...
    - toyg 2mo ago
      This coming from the leader of the other country in a war... I mean, I do find it credible that Xi might have told Putin to think very hard before doing something extremely stupid, but from there to stating that Russia is "China's vassal" and will do whatever they're told by a party who has long been a direct competitor (China and Russia have been solid "frenemies" for a long time, pushing very different views of what "real socialism" looks like)... It's a big jump.
      - mullingitover 2mo ago
        The Soviet Union's relationship with China was more of a peer rivalry situation. The Russian relationship with China is nowhere near parity. Russia would fold tomorrow if China withdrew their backing and went along with the US/EU sanctions. So Russia is only able to prosecute their war with China's permission. When your foreign policy is decided by another power, that's the textbook definition of a vassal.
        toyg 2mo ago
- SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
  I think the biggest risk of war between nuclear powers is from mistakes and accidents that might trigger nuclear escalation/MAD. Systems can malfunction. War can spiral out of control, fast. We had some very close calls in the cold war.
junofan 2mo ago
You could fight conventionally over logistics chokepoints. China’s not going to lob nukes just because their oil’s dried up.
- analognoise 2mo ago
  China imports food and has stressed or extremely stressed fresh water reserves. You take out the method they keep alive hundreds of millions of citizens, you think they won’t launch a nuke? Although for all the strategic thinking we’ve seen out of the “department of war” (that offers gender affirming testosterone shots and then runs out of missiles), I wouldn’t be shocked if you worked at the Pentagon, hahahaha.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 2mo ago
    China is already sending their fishing fleets to just off the EEZ of South American and is rapidly depleting their stock. https://latinamericanpost.com/americas/environment-en/a-silent-crisis-as-chinas-fishing-fleets-threaten-latin-americas-marine-ecosystems/ https://latinamericanpost.com/americas/environment-en/a-sile...
    - maxglute 2mo ago
      This interesting way of saying PRC distant fishing fleet fishing in international waters. Geopolitical drama aside, DWF is like 3% of PRC fishing catch, much of it just luxury consumption or resold globally. Reality is PRC more or less absolute caloric self sufficient on staples, chicken/fish. They import a lot of soy for animal feed but shit hits fan, people eat less pork/beef.
- maxglute 2mo ago
  [dead]
bombcar 2mo ago
They called World War I “the Great War” because they couldn’t conceive of a sequel. Never say never.
Tadpole9181 2mo ago
Until there is. We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. But the reality is that throughout history most leaders have been irrational. My country (America) is behaving increasingly irrationally. I've been hearing fringe conservatives calling for nuking the middle east since the early 2000s, but the rot has spread and became deeply religious. Now I hear talk of the end times from the most powerful people in the country, actively building bunkers. Groups of Republicans openly talking about the US being allowed to take whatever we want from anyone we want through war (Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Canada). Almost all of our leadership has been replaced in every branch of government. SCOTUS is clearly compromised and bought. The legislative may as well be dead. Almost all executive agencies have been purged, what remains have had their heads swapped with sycophants. Something like half of the military generals have been turned over. The DoD was renamed to the DoW with cheers, as an alcoholic prison guard was put in charge and has started touting hypermacho religious warrior catchphrases and openly advocating for war crimes. The other day we testimony from judges before legislature who refused to say if Presidents can run for three terms or that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Under oath, just simply refused. And that's before getting into how the President of the United States started a war to distract from his involvement in the highest profile sex trafficking ring in human history, and has continued to use his position to perform insider trading on oil prices repeatedly for weeks. If you said any of this would be happening in 2005, I would have laughed at how "that would never happen in the US". And now it's just... reality. Like Russia. And it seems to have no end in sight. So what actually happens if Trump gets so deranged he hits the red button? And if not him, who will the loonies pick tomorrow - someone who actually believes in "the cause", who doesn't understand it's a grift? And what are the external long term consequences of Trump's actions in countries like Iran and Venezuela and Ukraine? The US is not to be trusted anymore, every country has a clear signal to build their own nuclear arsenal ASAP. We have a river of blood behind us, so are we just expecting to get lucky that no one in Iran, for instance, who gets to a position of power leverages an irrational hate for the US and just... Does it in a religious or hate-driven Armageddon?
- tharmas 2mo ago
  >We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. Cough, cough. Who is currently in the White House?

Arodex 2mo ago

>not whatever this spitting match with Iran is. Are you openly saying the president and the secretary of war are lying when they say they have done "massive" bombings of Iran?

grey-area 2mo ago
The president openly lies all the time. About his pool refurbishment, the size of his crowds and even how good he is at golf.
- delecti 2mo ago
  Yep. And when he's not deliberately lying, he's often confabulating as a late-stage dementia patient. In short, Trump is not a source.
pjc50 2mo ago
That's an easy one: I don't even have to look at what the facts are to be sure they're lying. Just a question of what about. Although "massive" is a subjective word. Nothing can be as massive as WW2 carpet bombing.
- codeduck 2mo ago
  Or even what they were regularly doing to grids of rainforest in Vietnam.
sneurlax 2mo ago
Are their mouths open and are they making noise? Then yes.
TaLiTr 2mo ago
I don't trust anything the North Korean government says without external verification, why would I believe the U.S. government?
Sabinus 2mo ago
"massive bombing" is irrelevant. They either have the capacity to achieve their war goals or they don't and the bombing is not achieving US goals. We're apparently up to "asking around for creative solutions"[1] which means Trump started the war with no credible plan of victory. Which means he was ignoring the 'deep state' experts and listening to yes men and Israel, yet again. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/us-military-iran-war-troops-punish https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/us-military-iran...

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

_heimdall 2mo ago

The reality is that fighting any country with a decent military has to be all-out war. We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. A war with China would be the same, it can never be fought from a distance with primarily $1m+ precision surface to surface missiles. Of course I only mean if the war was necessary to fight at all, I don't believe it was.

ndiddy 2mo ago
> We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan and Israel because anything on the tarmac in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE is very vulnerable to Iranian drone and missile strikes. All of this means that they're forcing the US to choose between pulling out of the region or accepting losses of personnel and airframes (that likely cannot be replaced in a timely manner) at a level that the post-Vietnam US military has never had to face. I suspect an all-out war between the US and China would go the same way as this one, if not worse. The US military in its modern form has focused on procuring very complex, advanced, and featureful weapons in tiny numbers. The problem is that this means that the US is incapable of fighting a sustained campaign against an adversary that can withstand attacks from American weapons and has a higher production capacity.
- SR2Z 2mo ago
  The problem is production capacity. The US has gutted the lower-value parts of its supply chains, closed refineries and foundries left and right, and is thoroughly unequipped to even produce cheap weapons at the rate required to support a war. The number of airplanes built in the US during WWII is greater than all the airplanes NOT in that category. Obviously we can't maintain that level of industry during peacetime, but we've fallen so far below that level and are so low on weapons that if another major war starts we won't even be able to rapidly scale up.

palmotea 2mo ago

> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. I think the reason China has no reason to be threatened is the US outsourced most of it's manufacturing to them, meaning China now has more skills, know-how, and manufacturing infrastructure to redirect to wartime production. That was truly a brilliant move by US business leaders and the 90s political elite. Besides creating the military vulnerability, it also helped get Donald Trump election, who they all love dearly.

thesmtsolver2 2mo ago
Sorry, but this is only partially informed. 1. The U.S. produces a massive share of global manufactured goods, ranking second globally behind China in total value added. 2. Only low skilled jobs were shipped overseas. Lower-value consumer goods like clothing and basic electronics are heavily outsourced, whereas complex machinery, aerospace equipment, chemicals, and medical devices are largely built domestically https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0222_manufacturing_helper_krueger_wial.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0222_ma... During war with China, the US is not going to suffer due to lack of cheap toys or clothes from China.
- pendenthistory 2mo ago
  Cheap toys? You seem stuck in the 90s, and you're quoting a 10 year old article. Since then China has taken over the car industry with EVs, solar industry, building more new energy every than the us has installed total, leading in humanoid robotics and drones. WTF are you talking about?

tim333 2mo ago

>fighting China would be a proper all-out war I figure it would probably be like the US backing Ukraine's defense against Russia but backing Taiwan's defense against China. It would probably be quite hard for China to take Taiwan. There's a lot of sea in between and you can see how well Russia's navy has done against Ukraine's drones and missiles.

ericmay 2mo ago
I don't think so because China would not be sure what and how the US would be involved and because it would be incredibly risky to attack Taiwan without striking US forces in the area they'll likely attempt to strike US forces in Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The best US strategy is to just arm Taiwan to the teeth by selling weapons to make the invasion as risky as possible. But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.
- sarchertech 2mo ago
  > is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term. That was their plan until Xi became ruler for life and decided that he wanted Taiwan sooner rather than later.
- zardo 2mo ago
  > But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term. Yeah, that is certainly the smart play and one China is almost guaranteed to win in the long run. But that won't secure Xi as the leader that reunited the nation. He might prefer the option where he gets a chance at glory to the smart one.
  - bobthepanda 2mo ago
    I think Hong Kong has been enough of a cautionary experience for Taiwan that this is more or less not going to happen willingly.
- gadflyinyoureye 2mo ago

Paradigma11 2mo ago

But there wouldn't be a Chinese navy left which would give Taiwan and it's allies some breathing room.

ksudb 2mo ago
[dead]

euroderf 2mo ago

> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place. Well but war will be like this now. Like for ICBMs, with PGMs it's use it or lose it, so lots of ordnance is fired off at the outset (onset?) of hostilities.

jacquesm 2mo ago

Fighting China would be over before it began. They'd stop shipping stuff to the USA and that would be that. The degree to which the USA depends on China should not be underestimated when talking loosely about starting major wars. That's exactly the kind of thinking that got the strait of Hormuz closed.