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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.