> I'm usually not a huge fan of the US rolling in and stomping out governments (and installing their own, of course), but this is one faux-dictatorship where it sorely needs to happen.

It's not a faux dictatorship, it's the real deal.

But, the idea of the US “stomping out” the PRC (or even somehow “just” rejecting it from Hong Kong) and installing its own preferred government is downright insane.

It's not insane, but it would be a horrible and bloody hot war, the likes of which we haven't seen since WWII, and it would probably eclipse WWII in total deaths.

But it's not "insane", because we have precedent for it: it's exactly what happened in WWII: the world's largest economies and industrial powers going into an all-out war, culminating in nuclear attack, and resulting in the deaths of tens of millions. It's happened before, and so it could certainly happen again.

> It's not insane, but it would be a horrible and bloody hot war, the likes of which we haven't seen since WWII

Uh, no.

The US overt, initial war aim would be an existential threat to the Chinese regime, and China is a nuclear power with intercontinental delivery capability. It would see multiple times more total casualties than WWII, and that's just be on the first day that China was convinced that the US was serious about the effort.

Nuclear states don't attack other nuclear states for a reason.

NYC, LA, DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Huston, Dallas are all potential targets if the US declares war. Most of the US army would be going to war with no home to go back to.

If China did a nuclear attack, the US Army wouldn't be involved at all in any war. They'd sit back while the US Air Force and Navy completely nuked China. There wouldn't be an invasion because there'd be nothing left to invade at that point, so no army would be needed.

Remember, the US's nuclear arsenal is far, far larger than China's. Such a conflict would be devastating to the US (and to many other places due to fallout), but China would cease to exist.

>>>> But, the idea of the US “stomping out” the PRC (or even somehow “just” rejecting it from Hong Kong) and installing its own preferred government is downright insane.

> Remember, the US's nuclear arsenal is far, far larger than China's. Such a conflict would be devastating to the US (and to many other places due to fallout), but China would cease to exist.

And if the US's war aim was to liberate the Chinese people from dictatorship, it would have failed miserably in that case, having destroyed them instead.

> If China did a nuclear attack, the US Army wouldn't be involved at all in any war.

The proposal was that the US would attempt to invade, decapitate, and replace the Chinese regime; the idea of Chinese nuclear action was as a response to that.

So the Army would already be involved, and US nuclear annihilation of China would be nuking our own army.

Wow what a horribe viewpoint! I can not disagree with you more here. Can you even begin to imagine the massive scale of casulty and human suffering that would occur in this scenario?

Lets break it down - tens or possibly hundreds of millions of people would die - there would be almost a 100% chance of a hot ww3 but this time with hydrogen bombs, there is a good chance if this happens all life will be wiped off the face of the Earth - starvation on a massive scale, modern society with its on demand supply chains would suffer greatly in a new world war - automated drones targeting people

Even if you could defeat the conventional forces, the ensuing insurgency/guerrilla warfare in mainland china would make Afghanistan casualties look like a teaparty.

You can't force democracy upon people that don't want it and aren't ready for it - it ends disastrously. The US tried to do that in the middle east and failed miserably.

The only success story seems to be South Korea, but I would argue they wanted democracy and fought alongside the US for it.

> The US tried to do that in the middle east and failed miserably.

The problem was less with democracy and more with trying to impose a common state on a set of opposed communities that had previously only been “united” in the sense that the one the US was least friendly toward was effectively oppressing the others, and even that might have been successful has the US had needed its own past occupation experience and preserved and reformed state security institutions rather than disbanding them with no transition plan, leading to an internal war before the US even got started with establishing democracy.

Not, to be sure, that that makes the idea of the US trying to impose democracy in all or any part of the territory of the PRC even remotely sane.

I'd count Germany as a success story, too! First country where democracy stuck after the Americans installed it.

Uh, Weimar republic?

>middle east

I'm not super knowledgeable on the topic, but although the new governments didn't really work out, didn't the mass murders and other atrocities stop with the removal of the old dictator? Those countries may not be "stable" (yet), but is the situation really worse that it was?

> but is the situation really worse that it was?

Was Saddam torturing a limited amount of dissidents and his sons raping and murdering people as they pleased better or worse than ISIS ruling significant parts of the middle east? Was Gaddafi better or worse than Libya in civil war, slave markets being revived etc? Was life under Assad better or worse than civil war in Syria?

Even with bloodthirsty dictators, there's usually a way to make it worse, and NATO/US is pretty good at finding it.

The US had very little to do with democratization in South Korea and were perfectly happy to prop up authoritarian regimes for 30 years before mass protests finally led to free elections. The Korean War was fought to stop communism, not spread democracy.

How should we intervene?

Not that I'm necessarily advocating this, but US intelligence has historically proven extremely adept at destabilizing regimes.

I'd imagine that mostly look like sowing internal discord within the CCP. The party already has a lot of corruption, so most likely many senior officials could be blackmailed and manipulated. The long-term goal would be to weaken the resolve and coherence of the CCP to the point that a non-violent democratic revolution could take place.

This is a quite short-sighted point of view. The real challenge is to establish a stable new regime after toppling the old one. In the case of mainland China that has no prior experience at all as a democratic society, it would have a difficult time adapting (PRC before WWII doesn't count since it was unstable and higly corrupt). Also, a weak goverment is in danger of neglecting to address the internal challenges China faces (tensions with minorities, poverty in rural regions, environmental destruction).

My guess is that US intelligence has several "shadow" arms that have morphed into their own creatures and are no longer the same patriotic beast it was during the cold war. I'm doubtful whether destabilizing China is a real possibility, in the "CIA in Latin America" sense.

Are you usually a partial fan of stomping out governments? So much hubris. So little understanding.