Trump's Iran War Foreshadows China Conflict Catastrophe
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- The author warns a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan would dwarf the Iran strike in scale, noting Taiwan lies barely 100 miles off the Chinese coast but more than 6,000 miles from the American mainland — making it "far easier and less expensive to deter than project power"
- Leon Panetta's view that Beijing wouldn't challenge American resolve over Taiwan is dismissed as "wildly optimistic," since Taiwan "matters not at all for America's direct defense" and few Americans even know where the island is
- The Pentagon was left "desperately short of munitions" vital for a China contingency after just six weeks of bombing Iran, described in the analysis as "a middling power at best"
- No Asia-Pacific allies have committed to joining a U.S. defense of Taiwan, which would make them "a permanent enemy of the region's most powerful nation" without nearby state support
- U.S. war games consistently project devastating American losses — two or more aircraft carriers, one to two dozen ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of personnel — even when Washington wins
- Chinese naval pressure on Taiwan's 23 million people has escalated steadily, per the Wall Street Journal, with forces "constantly flying, sailing, probing and patrolling close to Taiwan"
- The author recommends Washington sell Taiwan anti-ship missiles suited to defeating blockades, rally industrialized states to threaten trade penalties on Beijing, and consider relaxing allied proliferation rules while keeping military force as a last resort
Why it matters: Decades of "strategic ambiguity" over Taiwan have shielded U.S. policymakers from a public reckoning about whether defending the island is worth a nuclear-armed peer conflict. The Iran campaign exposed how quickly a regional war depletes stockpiles, yet no sitting president has asked Americans whether they would accept those costs in a far larger Pacific war with no allied commitments locked in.
