The calculus is extra interesting because Xi won't invade unless he thinks the US will blink, a calculus Saddam famously got wrong when he invaded Kuwait.
I like your optimism, but are you forgetting Iran?
> What's looking increasingly likely, though, is that China under Xi will invade Taiwan, and then the US will be in the hard position of having to choose whether it will blink, or back up its pledges to defend the island with action.
It's a very specific scenario. Officially, Taiwan isn't an independent country, the US has no relations with them and doesn't have a pact of mutual assistance or promises to come to its aid. In case China invades what it and most of the world officially consider to be a part of China ( One China policy, almost all countries in the world recognise the PRC as the single China), the US can close its eyes and it wouldn't have violated any treaty or anything of the like, or they can join the war under some pretense.
> The calculus is extra interesting because Xi won't invade unless he thinks the US will blink, a calculus Saddam famously got wrong when he invaded Kuwait.
He got it wrong because the US, and most notably their ambassador to Iraq, shat the bed spectacularly bad leading him to believe he will get away with it. I recommend the Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups book, it had a chapter on that debacle.
You all enjoy your daily dose of the two minute hate on China while they prep you to accept the next war over something that isn't in your interest. I don't want to be the China defender here (I think they have pluses and minuses), but the war propaganda has been relentless for about two years now and increasing in frequency. It (proximally) traces back to Obama's pivot to Asia, Trump's desire to pin responsibility for the COVID disaster on anyone but the US and populist nationalism, and Biden's continuation of both deflecting attention from COVID and satisfying the warlords and profiteers that hover around DC with their hand out. However, at its root is a pervasive cold-war anti-communism in the US elite (even if reasonable people can debate if China is really communist) combined with military Keynesianism that constructed the military industrial complex in the post-war era and diverts money intentionally from anything that would ever help any normal person.
It also is a hang over from the western imperialists being driven out during the Chinese revolution, beat at their game by poor peasants. Now they fear those peasants will set up a compelling and competing world trade system that will knock the decaying American Empire out of its bloody time in the sun.
The solution is really easy. Just laugh at the TV when they tell you to hate the people making your iPhone and go into the streets when they start firing shots in "defense" half-way around the world far outside their territorial waters like they always do.