Replies

No. I think that is the stupidest thing China could possibly do. Our response would horrific.

I don’t fully understand why China didn’t take Taiwan while Clinton was in office – he would have weighed all options and done nothing. With that in mind, the only real deterrent China had for those 8 years was the Taiwanese Defense Force!

I'm not so sure about that. I suspect the sinking of an American carrier would simultaneously terrify every suburban female in America who automatically votes Democrat and elicit en masse cries of outrage from them along the lines of "What are we doing over there in the first place? Seven thousand dead!! And for what? Bring our boys home! Now!" And that's all it would take to terminally undermine our national resolve. And that's not even taking into account the fact that China would be willing to lose the equivilent of our entire population in a war with us. Can you imagine what selective service would be like in this day and age? Good grief, half of our able-bodied young men are either psychopathic urban criminals or mall scum, and the other half would flee immediately to college as soon as the first whiff of "draft" hit the air. China's got upwards of forty million young men who can't get laid because there aren't any women for them. Think that wouldn't make for one nasty tempered source of warrior recruits?

No. I think that is the stupidest thing China could possibly do. Our response would horrific.

Sinking a carrier would probably kill about 2823 sailors... the same number as the WTC collapse. I would have thought our response to THAT would have been "horrific", but here we are with a relatively bloodless coup in Afghanistan (a government that likely had little to do with the actual attack). I'm not sure if our nation lacks the self-defense mechanism to retaliate, or if that we were stayed by the lack of a national target in the wake of 9-11. I guess China would find the answer to that one if they were inclined towards sinking a carrier.

Personally, I think they understand SunTzu and Pearl Harbor well enough to try to find the best alternative to sinking our ships: finding a way to make sure that we won't want to use them at all.

Our response would horrific.

Why? Because we lost a ship in a war? Because this violates the "no one is allowed to shoot at Americans" rule?

I agree with your broader point that such an act would galvanize American opinion. Whether this would guarantee the defeat of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, however, is unclear. Presumably the Chinese would be moving very rapidly, in the hope of presenting us with a fait accompli. They would also try to preserve operational surprise, probably by launching an attack from the springboard of their regular exercises in the area.

A U.S. carrier might conceivably become a target if one were loitering in the vicinity when China moved, but otherwise I don't imagine they would risk the provocation. If no U.S. forces were immediately on hand, the Chinese might realistically hope to have completed the job before we could react. It would be interesting to know whether our subs are routinely covering the Taiwan straight in enough strength to seriously interdict an amphibious movement.