You are missing one thing: any weapons flying into China will result in stuff exploding in New York and Washington. US carriers will be sunk, and there is no appetite in the US for either scenario.
Anyway, the whole thing won't require a single shot. The island and the mainland have close economic ties; people that determine taiwanese policy are heavily invested in China. All the tough words that are being said are for public consumption.
A regional conflict over Taiwan is highly unlikely to result in ICBMs headed for NYC and DC, because China knows that’s effectively the end of modern China. And sinking carriers would also be a very risky escalation given the ability of the US and other allies to retaliate.
I do think you’re right that Taiwan will ultimately lose without much warfare, because Trump is a world-class coward and rolls over for every autocrat who looks in his direction.
If carriers are being used to help support Taiwan in this hypothetical, they are obviously fair game and sinking them isn’t escalatory, right? We don’t get to go to war and declare the troops fighting the war off limits to retaliation.
If that was how it worked, why wouldn’t China declare all their transport boats sacrosanct?
If we think our retaliation to getting a carrier sunk would be to end the world, we should probably not use them.
Strikes by the US inside China are highly unlikely for the same reason.
As for Trump, he is simply pragmatic. Taiwan is indefensible from the military standpoint. I would not count on allies too much, because Europe's remaining 1 1/2 soldiers cannot make any difference, and the UK can barely get its ships out of the harbor.
Anyway, all of this is just a show.
Strikes by the US on Chinese military facilities are vastly more likely than ICBM strikes against civilian population centers on the other side of the world, for obvious reasons.
Then you proceed to write that China can't sink US carriers that are there to destroy Chinese ships and kill Chinese people. Next, you say that the US bombing China would not cause ICBM nuclear warheads on US cities.
So how does war work? Only one side gets to fight?
It’s revealing that you can’t differentiate between hitting military assets actively engaged in a conflict, and hitting civilian population centers on the other side of the world.
Yep. The side that sits at the keyboard of a basement computer shooting at zombies.
Here is my suggestion to people who want the US to play part in Taiwan/China affair: they should take their broomsticks and volunteer. And that includes the war in Ukraine, too.
Anyway, the whole thing won't require a single shot. The island and the mainland have close economic ties; people that determine taiwanese policy are heavily invested in China. All the tough words that are being said are for public consumption.