[nl]

> If there were actually even a small US confrontation and say a couple of US frigates were sunk ... don't underestimate how Americans will rally under the wrath of that offence.

I suspect you are drastically overestimating the US public's appetite for another war. In the last few years the US has been run out of Iraq by Iran, Syria by Russia and Afghanistan by the Taliban. I don't see much appetite for going back to any of those.

[porknubbins]

Those essentially local attempts at occupation and state building are completely different to a potential hypothetical symmetrical war with China that implicates the whole global order.

[nl]

> US public support for a war over Taiwan is modest: one recent poll found significant majorities of foreign policy elites supporting US intervention, but only about 40 per cent of the American public backing it. (Even that figure likely reflects soft and reflexive backing; the country has not fought a major war against a peer adversary for two generations, and in the event of catastrophic US losses amidst perceptions that the war was unnecessary, public support could collapse very quickly.)[1]

And if the last 10 years of US politics has taught us anything it is how vulnerable the US is to arguments that cause division. China has plenty of money, and plenty of people who will be economically hurt by a war. It's pretty easy to make an argument against defending China.

[1] https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/countering-china-...