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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Nobody knows what the threshold for opening a can of nuclear whopass is. Who's willing to bet a billion lives on it being in a particular spot?

The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing something so absurdly aggressive that you can't not go to war (e.g. invading Japan) I don't see that happening.

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Or maybe miscalculating (I mean here thinking the U.S. isn't willing to go to war but turns out they are) and invading Taiwan. I'm honestly not sure how the U.S. and allies would respond. In my opinion, with the current Chinese administration there's no reason to think they won't continue to act in ways that the West views as aggressive, the question is whether or not we can avoid a war of a misstep. Certainly any military action against Japan (or the Republic of Korea) would guarantee a U.S. military response, but what about other countries? If you're China, it seems like the goal here would be to have Chinese citizens immigrate to countries like Australia and subvert their resolve through their own democracy. We see some of those actions taking place on college campuses in Canada, for example. It's certainly interesting to chat about.

Sadly, Taiwan probably wouldn't get protections from outside nations.

The US is legally obligated to protect Taiwan. Also the US would have to fight even without that because not doing so would be the end of US power in the world. We could NOT afford NOT to fight.

Legal obligations are worth the paper they're written on, when it comes to war between two major world powers. Any decision to retaliate would end up being based on what's best geopolitically for the USA.

Giving up Taiwan, of course, would announce to the world that allies of the US should look for other world power sponsors, because our support is paper thin.

That kind of choice is very costly, and it would take a very unique type of President willing to piss away a century of alliance building.

> The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing ....

That's probably what people said in, oh, 1910 about Germany, Britain, and France.

No probably about it. Pre-WW1 was the first era of globalisation, of the oil barons, including the USA and pre-revolutionary China. Quite a few famous names believed there too much economic and trade interdependence to permit another war. Yet once one country started mobilisation war tipped from impossible to inevitable as the web of treaties kicked in.

I'm not aware of anyone who seriously thought that in 1910. The secret network of alliances existed for a reason, after all.

Both points of view existed back in 1910, that war was unthinkable and that war was quite likely. A reflection of today's acceptance of both viewpoints.

Book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

>The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing something so absurdly aggressive that you can't not go to war (e.g. invading Japan) I don't see that happening.

Have you forgotten about the incompetent fool that the US elected to be in control of the nuclear arsenal?

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