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That said, it is suspicious that you absolutely preclude the possibility of military conflict with China. Our Pacific allies have no such illusions.

With the exception of Taiwan, our allies are much more concerned with North Korea. Even with Taiwan, everybody knows that an invasion of Taiwan would be far too costly for China, militarily, diplomatically, and economically, and under the Chinese way of thinking, it's simply not worth the risk. China is a country that invaded a fully militarized Vietnam to make a point and then quickly pulled out rather than risk heavy losses or getting dragged into a war or proxy war with the Soviets. China wasn't willing to take on the Soviets over Vietnam, and they aren't willing to take on the US over Taiwan or South Korea or Japan, even before they began intertwining their economy with our economy.

The reason why it's not worth the risk, and the reason why I preclude the possibility of military conflict with China is that China has invested far too heavily economically in the United States, Japan, South Korea, and yes, even Taiwan, albeit indirectly.

Chinese investments in the US are not the actions of a country looking to go to war with us, but if China wants to hurt us, they can do so, right now. Here in September of 2012.

They could devastate us without firing one single missile or launching one single fighter.

They don't need their stealth fighters. They don't need nukes and ICBMs. They don't need their crappy Russian aircraft carrier or their cruise ships turned troop transports. They could up and try and pull out all of those investments they've made in the US and in US companies over the past 20 years out. They could cancel all of the partnerships that Chinese companies have forged with US companies. They could stop shipping goods to us.

That would devastate our economy. People just think our economy is bad now. We would look back fondly upon 20% unemployment. 10% unemployment, our grandkids would think we were just fibbing them.

As for 1980s nuclear weapons and 1980s fighters, the Chinese can easily work on countering our fighters, and they have been. Nukes though, as you say, are a deterrence, and the Chinese cannot counter them, because nobody wants to risk a single nuke getting through.

What I am suggesting is that it's kind of useless for us to spend the large amount of money trying to get the F-22s back in production, when if this is about aerial superiority, we should be looking at the next generation of Chinese and Russian fighters and not the Russian fighters that we originally designed the F-22 to handle.

But that's assuming that China wants a war with the US. They don't. Evey billion they sink into the US economy is yet another billion reasons why they won't go to war with us.

I think Romney is just playing politics as well.