Trump Threatens China With a “Big Price” for Covid

“but do you have any evidence that you change the ultimate area under the curve?”

I don’t but I’m a spectator. However, I’m fairly certain (in my opinion I should perhaps say) that if the UK had adopted Sweden’s approach we’d be in a much worse mess than currently. The UK having a far denser population with many commuter towns surrounding large cities. If we hadn’t locked down the economy it would have taken a vast hit anyway as people curtail their activities naturally. The health service would’ve been overwhelmed. As things stand we flattened the curve but now it’s coming back following the relaxation in restrictions and here we go again. The strategy was always to flatten the curve, there was never a belief it would go away for ever because it’s so infectious. No one knew how successful we’d be at developing antibodies or what the long term affects of contracting the disease are. As things stand I haven’t seen anything to suggest that’s changed, other than nasty long term affects are becoming apparent, being dubbed Long Covid.

The suggestion, by some people, that just the vulnerable should shelter and others get on with their lives, in my opinion is an illustration of what a selfish society we live in.

I do not think I mentioned use of ICBMs but was speaking only of conventional warfare. China will not sink anything, they do not have the kill chain that requires. Do you know how big the ocean is? And how small by comparison an aircraft carrier group is? They are huge but in a sea as large as The South China Sea they are less than microbes.

In conventional warfare the Chinese cannot even beat India. Isolated within their own borders they have well over a billion people to feed, this year has been nothing short of a disaster for their farmers, flooding has ruined a great deal of their crops this year. They are dependent upon food imports. And will be for some time, if they are blockaded they will starve. And that could well be the goal if war does happen. Not to the point where millions die of hunger, but to cause the people to rise up against Xi and the Communist Party. They have had a tase of affluence now, and some limited freedoms, they are not going back to the bad old days.

If the Chinese did engineer Covid and set it lose then they well deserve whatever they get for that crime.

In Korea our weapons were essentially the same on all sides, we had no real technological superiority where they had a vast numerical superiority.

The Rand analysis you say argues against such a war I believe is this one.

I say it does not argue against such a conflict but rather for one early since the American advantage would diminish over time till by 2025 our advantage would be far less, that is an argument to pick a war sooner rather than waiting.

“As of 2015, U.S.losses of surface naval and air forces, including disabled aircraft
carriers and regional air bases, could be significant, but Chinese losses, including to homeland-based A2AD systems, would be much greater. Within days, it would be apparent to both sides that the early gap in losses favoring the United States would widen if fighting continued. By 2025, though, U.S. losses would increase
because of enhanced Chinese A2AD. This, in turn, could limit Chinese losses, though these would still be greater than U.S. ones.”

The only argument for waiting is the belief that the Chinese people will cast off their totalitarian government in favor of a more open and democratic China. We still cannot rule that out, but Trump himself has a sudden extremely urgent need for such a war, it might be the only thing that can save his political prospects and even now may be too late to attain that goal.

The other thing that voids this analysis is that it is analyzing a conventional non nuclear war between the US and China, where the war I am talking about would be between China and the US, UK, India, Australia, Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, maybe the EU to some extent, and very possibly the UN.

In the Rand study the trigger for such war is longstanding disputes that boil over. Maybe even started accidentally by an incident such as the forced landing of one of our planes on Hainan Island in 2001.

Rand is assuming: We postulate that a war would be regional and conventional. It
would be waged mainly by ships on and beneath the sea, by aircraft
and missiles of many sorts, and in space (against satellites) and cyberspace (against computer systems). We assume that fighting would start
and remain in East Asia, where potential Sino-U.S. flash points and
nearly all Chinese forces are located. Each side’s increasingly far-flung
disposition of forces and growing ability to track and attack opposing forces could turn much of the Western Pacific into a “war zone,”
with grave economic consequences. It is unlikely that nuclear weapons would be used: Even in an intensely violent conventional conflict,
neither side would regard its losses as so serious, its prospects so dire,
or the stakes so vital that it would run the risk of devastating nuclear
retaliation by using nuclear weapons first. We also assume that China
would not attack the U.S. homeland, except via cyberspace, given its
minimal capability to do so with conventional weapons.

The basis for my speculation on this subject is that it is possible that China created this viral pandemic in a lab and intentionally released it to global effect. If this is true as Trump claims, or at least implies, then there is no nation of the globe that has not been made war upon by China, outlawed bioweapon war. Every nation has dead from this virus. Every economy impacted, the evening news last night reported that there were more than a third of a million new Covid cases in just the last 24 hours.

It could be quite difficult to defeat China militarily on the ground in the event of a war, but I say and still maintain that given the Chinese provocation a way would be found, and China cannot stand up to the combined powers of the world who have decided it is time for communist party of China to go.

Of course if the Chinese people oppose their own government in this process it will be far harder for Xi and his military to survive long. And the Rand argument is flawed in that it proposes a situation in which the US, fighting at least at first alone against China has no toe hold on the mainland, that would not be the case now as India would be attacking via the Tibetan Plateau. Also, China would have to reinforce Hong Kong at great cost to prevent a toe hold there since HK is bitterly resisting it’s enslavement by China with the violation of the treaties which handed HK back to China with guarantees of it’s freedom and autonomous status that are now being suppressed.

Many people think the US sees assessments such as the warnings on cyber security threats and simply does nothing about them. That is false. Our planners do pay heed to such warnings and they come up with counter measures that are quite effective. And I can tell you from my own service that our military is far more advanced than the general population seems to think it is.

For me it boils down to the reasons to undertake such a war in the first place. If there is a valid and global cause such as undisputable proof China released a bioengineered SARS Covid virus then the results would be a foregone conclusion, the determination to bring the Chinese power structure to an end in that case would make the results inevitable.

If on the other hand the trigger is the expediency of Donald Trump’s political survival the illegitimacy of such a war would likely mean we would eventually prosecute the war alone after a relatively short time and we likely would not prevail in the long run.