The US has no hope to even possibly defend surface naval assets in the Taiwan strait or its periphery. A carrier strike group literally doesn't have as many interceptors as the Chinese could fire missiles at them from that distance.

The US will have to leave the Taiwan strait waters to China and attempt to strike as many Chinese boats there as they can from a distance in the air.

Because the US has been ruled by incompetent and corrupt imbeciles since the 70s. And there's now a second generation of incompetent imbeciles in the government who were students back then. If you think they can avert, let alone win this, you're out of your mind. Our best play here is to not intervene on another country's behalf seeing how we couldn't win against a bunch of semi-literate cave dwellers with Kalashnikovs after 20 years and 2 trillion dollars. War against today's China would be unwinnable in _any_ shape or form whatsoever under any circumstances even if we had competent leadership, which is something we do not have, and haven't seen in 50 years.

Watch the YT video linked in the article. China is in the position of strength now. They're on an upward trajectory. We're on a steep downward one. And that won't change until we at least acknowledge the realities of our present predicament, and begin the serious, careful work to rectify it. I see no signs of that even being possible the way things are right now, let alone likely.