95% of your response is ad hominem or rhetoric.
100% of my post was pure substance, and it's quite clear that you don't intend to respond to the substantive facts that comprise the totality of my post but intend rather to do the very thing that you falsely allege I've done. If I were defending arguments as weak as yours I can see the attraction of taking the cowardly road. Except I'm not a coward.
Not one coherent argument for anything.
If you're trying to prove that you're delusional, you're certainly going the right way.
Just reactionary opinions based on a cold war mentality.
Speaking of dodging substantive questions, were you alive during the Cold War yes or no? Because you really appear not to know anything that you couldn't have gleaned from Internet posts last week.
I base my opinions on evidence and reason
Two problems with that suggestion. First, you don't appear to know any of the facts and second I can't see that you're applying any reason to what you assert.
and I see no evidence that the Chinese government wants to dominate the world.
Get in line! From the time of Richard Nixon going to China until very recently nobody saw any evidence that China was a committed Marxist-Leninist regime that was building its economic and subsequently military power for purposes of world domination consistent with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Your self-imposed blindness is the problem. Most people who benefit from this self imposed blindness are making a ton of money from China, how much are you getting?
Instead, their words and actions seek a multipolar world.
What are you? The last man on the observation squad? We live in a multipolar world. The unipolar moment has come and gone, and if there was ever any mistake about that, take a look and see how things are going in Ukraine.
But I concede that they fully intend to return Taiwan to the control of chinese mainland as it was before Japan stripped it from them.
I think you're really confused about the meaning of "they" as you've used it above. In World War II the allies liberated the Republic of China. The Republic of China still exists we call it Taiwan. The invaders are what we call The Peoples Republic of China.
If the US interferes militarily as we already are by arming them, training them, and prepositioning military assets in the region
Excuse me. We've had military assets in the region for 100 years. We are reconfiguring and repositioning military assets that have been there longer than anybody alive can remember.
to support them then a chinese-Us/NATO war is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Where are you getting this idea that NATO is involved in defending the first island chain west of China? Are you confusing NATO with the Five Eyes? And of course there is an alliance interested in the containment of China by parties also including India.
IOW, by our provocations and interference into an internal matter between two culturally, historically united people, torn apart by foreign powers, then we are actually ensuring the outcome we should be trying to avoid, that is war with china.
The communist overthrow of the Republic of China was not caused by American interference.
I am trying to look at the situation objectively
Which would be helped immeasurably by familiarizing yourself with the facts.
and avoid wasting blood and treasury on yet another foreign war that we will lose.
Preventing the invasion of Taiwan it means projecting power which cannot exclude the possibility that we wind up in a war. I am very interested in
not fighting a war over Taiwan but the road you seem to be pointing toward guarantees it's fall. That is not peace through strength, that's capitulation.
We lost in vietnam, we lost in Afghanistan, we destroyed Iraq without just cause (they never had WMD), we have not learned from our mistakes that some wars are unwinnable.
This is not a war. And playing a strong hand may prevent it from ever becoming one. There has never been a time where are Ukraine and Russia both Slavic states with a long history together have not been in close orbit with one another. By sharp contrast the Republic of China and The Peoples Republic of China have been at sharp odds ever since the communist revolution. These are not analogous situations in any way, shape or form. In fact it's not too much to say that these are absolute opposite scenarios. A comparison to Taiwan was simply a strategy to sell a war in Ukraine to the US people and strategy makers.
The cost to impose our will on others is sometimes too high and a China/US war is going to be yet another one of those lessons.
You remind me of all of my friends on the left to assure me that I'm on the wrong side of history because apparently they know the future. Here's a newsflash, neither you nor they know the future. But we can certainly imagine a policy that would very likely lead to the disappearance of the Republic of China, and the certain rise of the PRC as a world dominating force, and that's the one you are advocating. That is very much between you and your moral judgment I've come to a different conclusion.
Much blood and treasury will be spent fighting china and in the end after much suffering Taiwan will still end up as part of China. and we will have to make peace with China because we are never going to conquer 1.5 billion people who will hate us at that point,
China is on the verge of a population collapse. They have been lying about the number of Chinese in China for more than a decade now, and it's overstated by many hundreds of millions of people. In all likelihood the most populous country on earth is India not China.
The Chinese army is a basket case operationally and it is not clear to me that they could coordinate a joint forces military effort in the immediate offing. However, if you walk away from Taiwan the relative size could cause Taiwan to fall. I hasten to add, the Chinese are correcting their deficiencies militarily at a fairly rapid rate.
Because of China's population collapse, and their current military operational impairment, the United States needs to only stand by Taiwan for another 10 or 20 years in order for this window of opportunity to close on China. If on the other hand, they take Taiwan and gain the benefit of their fastest computer chips combined with military AI, then the road ahead is quite different . . . its world domination.
