I would disagree. China routinely threatens U.S. naval vessels which transit disputed regions of the South China Sea, and maintains a large battery of missiles pointed at Taiwan, an American diplomatic ally. They have also developed hypersonic anti-carrier missiles, and are rapidly expanding their blue-water navy.
They are rapidly expanding a blue water navy from a tiny starting point (e.g. recently bringing online a Ukranian aircraft carrier (not a super carrier) doubled their carrier force) and have a few remote naval bases, but their strength, to the degree it exists, is locally strong and externally mainly soft power.
There is no question the US would abandon Taiwan the same as Macarthur pulled back to the southern half of Australia in WWII. Pragmatics argues this -- as pragmatics argue against China actually attacking Taiwan militarily any time in the next 30 years. E.g. bombing Hon Hai would degrade Chinese manufacturing unacceptably.
For example, I believe China could easily organize and fund far more terrorist attacks than, say, bin laden ever did. Furthermore, their terrorist attacks could much more easily utilize nuclear material.
Aside from nukes, which would draw an obvious and unstoppable reprisal from the U.S., China does not have the military capability to meaningfully threaten the U.S. They don't have the aircraft, ships, subs, landing craft, etc. And again, I don't know why they would want that.
They do have the means to threaten their regional neighbors, though, and some of them are U.S. allies. That's the WWIII threat: that Chinese regional aggression sucks the U.S. into a military confrontation on China's turf.
I do agree to the extent that though the US would win any initial skirmish the long term viability of such an effort close to or on the Chinese mainland is probably not great.
Then again I can't come up with any reason the US would want to fight a war with China either (or vice versa), but who knows these days.
Russia actively attacks US election infrastructure
Running a few ads, with a small budget, or having some fake Twitter accounts post things that millions of others are already saying, in my view does not constitute an "attack on the US election infrastructure".
Our elections were hacked with...real physical hacks
That would be news indeed. Source?
People are dying in the streets from the actions taken by violent right-wing people who are directly encouraged by language from RT and from the President
Source?
constantly gather support to jail people who have committed no crimes
Source? Please name one person currently in jail in the US that has not been convicted of a crime and does not have a criminal case pending. Again, that would indeed be news.
There's no need to insult me to start with. Please abide by the HN guidelines and do not just start insulting people. Let's just talk about all this and get right to the content:
> Running a few ads, with a small budget, or having some fake Twitter accounts post things that millions of others are already saying, in my view does not constitute an "attack on the US election infrastructure".
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking about specifically hacking the voting infrastructure and removing voters from the voting rolls. You're going on about ads or something with a small budget (???) but I have no idea what you're talking about.
Here is a citation that Russia directly hacks the elections themselves: https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/russia-election-hacking...
> That would be news indeed. Source?
Oh yeah, that is the biggest news of the last two years. I picked a source and cited it.
> Source?
Well, Heather Heyer was murdered in this fashion.
> constantly gather support to jail people who have committed no crimes
Well Beto for one! Ted Cruz trying to drum up support to jail Beto O'Rourke last night was wild. Scary and sad :(
The amount of money Russia spent on Facebook ads.
> Well, Heather Heyer was murdered in this fashion.
That was tragic. Evil, even. But you said "People are dying in the streets from the actions taken by violent right-wing people", and when pressed for evidence, you cite the only instance that has happened in two years. But you claimed more than that. You claimed "people" (plural) "are" (present tense). You have dramatically overstated a real, horrible, but still one-off instance into a general trend.
> Well Beto for one! Ted Cruz trying to drum up support to jail Beto O'Rourke last night was wild. Scary and sad :(
Ted Cruz is trying to drum up support for getting re-elected, nothing more. (You've seen this before. Note that Hillary remains completely un-locked-up.) It's sad, all right, that Cruz would use this tactic. But Beto isn't going to jail, win or lose, unless he actually does something, no matter what Cruz says in a campaign situation.
I intended no insult, nor did I post one. I simply pointed out that there were glaring factual issues with your comment. I apologize if you misinterpreted what I said.
Of course China is not currently a military threat to the US, at least at the level deserving attention of a US president (e.g. random encounters in the Spratleys are jostling, not escalation).
I certainly don't think this is a responsible practice but it's interesting to consider it in a game theoretic context.