[ericmay]

I agree that the US lost a lot of soft power capabilities over the years, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine really reversed most of those loses in short order. What a blessing in disguise for the United States. For example, you mention that a lot of allies are highly skeptical of how reliable of an ally the US is, but you can see actually that when it came down to it the US was extremely reliable in defending Ukraine and bolstering NATO forces, and the issue of Taiwan is a linchpin of US hegemony: it's existential, there's no doubt the US will go to war to defend allies in Asia including Taiwan because failure to do so basically kicks the US out of Asia and destroys those alliances. I think this goes back to my original comment about China's (or at least many of their more hawkish citizens, less so the CCP I believe) misunderstanding about what's at stake regarding Taiwan.

Though I think your point about obstructionist Republicans is well-founded and accurate and extremely accurate when it comes to domestic policies. With that being said I don't see a significant threat there in terms of US vs Russia or US vs China given that even when their vote was mostly inconsequential (i.e. they could try and virtue signal) most members of Congress, either Republican or Democrat, tended to vote to support US efforts against Russian aggression. The Senate was voting something like 99-1 to support Ukraine (don't quote me on the exact bill or bills) when they didn't really need to and could have tried to stick it to the Democrats as war mongering and followed in Trump's footsteps there.

[mschuster91]

> And the issue of Taiwan is a linchpin of US hegemony: it's existential, there's no doubt the US will go to war to defend allies in Asia including Taiwan because failure to do so basically kicks the US out of Asia and destroys those alliances.

For now it is, the interesting question is if the US voter class is ready to go to war again after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan - at least from an European POV it looks like wide swaths of the population do not want further overseas engagements and wish to reduce military spending in order to have more money available to fix pressing issues (crumbling infrastructure, healthcare, poverty, high energy prices). Additionally, while Trump himself is a very vocal opponent of China and I think Taiwan will be secured even if the Republicans win either of the next elections, it is nowhere near certain that Trump as a President will apply the same towards Russia or other enemies of the Western sphere - particularly not given strong indications of both himself and his close environment being influenced by Russia, both financially and via "kompromat" rumors (e.g. the "pee tape" allegation).

[cycrutchfield]

Polling, from even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, says that a majority of Americans support defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. After Ukraine, support is probably even higher. Even more, there is strong bipartisan support for it.

[ericmay]

I think many outside of the US misunderstand the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Outside of political talking points and nightly news, the wars basically didn't exist. I mean if you just turned off the news, you'd have no idea that the US was fighting two wars. The military was at war, but not America. There weren't really any day-to-day effects and to the extent that there were, those are mostly long gone. I don't think that these wars have any bearing on additional US engagement, especially against China or Russia. In other words, I don't think the US is war weary at all, though I do think that out of the issues you mentioned some measure of the population doesn't think they're problems, except high energy prices which I think the US can mostly address domestically. I'd also add from a more realistic standpoint the military isn't preventing fixes for healthcare, poverty, or crumbling infrastructure. What's preventing addressing those issues is that some people don't think they are issues and those that do disagree on how to solve them.

The main threat to the US is dissolution of the democracy, but I think even in that case there would still be strong (maybe even stronger) support for defense of Taiwan because it's an existential issue for the US. For China to invade Taiwan with impunity would dissolve all American credibility in the Pacific and the ramifications of that are significant. It also would kick the US out in terms of trade in favor of China, which would do damage to the US economy.

There certainly is some concern that China may try to engage in a fast, hard engagement with the US and that could cause the US to withdraw, but given the significance of maintaining economic and military interests it's likely that it would just lead to a swift, hard response and from there we're probably in a pretty destructive war. I don't think even Trump or someone similar could prevent a US response here.