‘But the Confederate military assault on Fort Sumter was orders of magnitude greater, an attack, I’ll repeat, equivalent in its day to the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.’
Well. At Sumter the fort suffered greatly but the sole Union casualty was a horse.
Two Union soldiers died and four others seriously wounded in the surrender.
Those casualties were caused by Confederates as surely as if they had fired the shots.
And the loss of Fort Sumter was more relatively significant than was the damage of ships at Pearl Harbor.
Finally, I’ve posted before another excellent analogy, and that is Guantanamo.
If the Cuban government demanded its surrender and launched a military assault to force that, it would be an unequivocal act of war.
Of course a Democrat President Buchanan/Obama might do nothing to stop it, but a Republican President Lincoln/Trump is made of much different metal.