Crockerland wrote:Moukere wrote:I love this. When you ask Americans if Israel should exist and Palestine, and they say that Palestine shouldn't because the lost the war. Then with China, it's the RoC not the PRC, despite them losing a far more fair fight...
Palestine shouldn't because Palestine was created by Hajj amin al-Husseini specifically to start a war with the purpose of ethnically cleansing the Jews, which the Palestinians then lost and for decades have used suicide bombings, shootings, and stabbings against random Israeli civilians in an attempt to claim roughly a fifth of Israel's territory, much of which isn't even Palestinian majority and some of which, even being Arab,
still has a population that prefers to be part of Israel, and the governments of all Palestinian presidents have denied a two-state solution proposal.
The Republic of China (Taiwan), meanwhile, predates the PRoC, has not responded to their loss of a war by using terrorism against random mainland Chinese civilians, and for the most part just want to be independent on their own little 36,000 kilometer Island that takes up less than a percent of China's total claimed land of 9,619,449 kilometers.
Greater Istanistan wrote:Friendly reminder that American regime change is usually executed with dubious competence even in weak third-world nations, and that anyone expecting to be able to pull it off against America's greatest geopolitical foe is completely delusional as to its functionality. America not only lacks the resources and manpower to sustain it, but it also lacks the basic competence. Remember how badly Iraq went? Iraq has 38 million people and was ideologically shaky to the extreme before the invasion took place. China is a country of 1.2 billion with a proud history, a definite sense of place in the world (it's not the Middle Kingdom for nothing), and a strong nationalist sentiment. More to the point, they've already been there and done that with the Western powers trying to overthrow the government. Any attempts to actually force change in government, or even assert RoC control over the whole country, is doomed to fail in a horrible and bloody way.
The difference being that Iraq's economy wasn't completely dependent on America. If China goes to war with America, America will stop trading with China, and China will collapse as a result.
First, the American-led sanctions regime actually did kill the Iraqi economy, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people. Second, assuming that America wouldn't be hurt just as hard as all those cheap imports disappear and global supply chains break down left right and centre is extremely wishful thinking. Add to that the ensuing pan-Pacific brawl (particularly in the South China Sea) and its complete annihilation of safe American trade with Southeast Asia and India and you've got a complete bloody nightmare for American economics even if they somehow win. Let's also consider that the actual American war effort would hardly be an inexpensive thing, as their only winning strategy would be an offensive against China. The Chinese clearly wouldn't give up just because they lost some sea battles - in order to actually strike a death-blow, the American government would need to carry out mass aerial and land assaults along the Chinese coast against major population centres. The sheer expense of that would be crippling. From an economic standpoint, the United States of America just can't afford full-on war any more than the Chinese can. Assuming we're still in the regime change ballpark, the occupation afterwards would be a total nightmare. Iraq cost between one and two trillion dollars to pseudo-pacify, right? If the United States wants to actually build a democratic government amidst an exceptionally hostile populace, it'll take entire orders of magnitude more than that. With an American economy already reeling from loss of trade, you can guess at exactly what that would do to the USA. That's not even the worst of it - consider the refugees. A full-scale US Marine assault on Shanghai or Beijing against determined PLA resistance would literally displace millions, if not tens of millions, of people. Beyond the mass internal displacement, the masses of embittered Chinese refugees streaming into Southeast Asia, Russia, India, and Japan would make Syria look like a total joke and result in a complete humanitarian collapse that the US would be at least partially responsible for dealing with because it, in this hypothetical scenario, decided to fight a war with China.
In other words, any attempt to replace the Chinese government with US military efforts is myopic and would permanently end American hegemony in the same way that taking on Germany ended England.
Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 8:49 pm
