If they’re not then if this somehow does happen then the US will be unprepared and won’t have contingency plans, and things can change very quickly- for example, most people in the US didn’t support going to war in WWII until Pearl Harbor.
You think?
China is already outproducing the US in armaments. That's what happens when you have a much greater manufacturing capacity. What happened to Japan in WW2 is what is destined to happen to the US in WW3.
Did you know that Japan had 3-4 times as many aircraft carriers as the US at the start of 1942? But where the US could produce many more carriers over the next 3 years, Japan couldn't. The US started WW2 with 3 carriers, Japan had about 12. Three years later, the US had replaced all of its losses and had built an extra 150(!) or so carriers, while Japan had none at all.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/22/asia/us-navy-chief-china-...
We need to deter China from invading for the period before internal problems (demography, debt, environment, and lack of avenues for further fast growth which is necessary to keep population content with dictatorship) either makes it a lot weaker, or makes it democratic, both of which is a good solution. It's not such a long time to wait - "peak China" according to most estimates is merely 10-15 years away so a generation from now, they will be less dangerous to us than they are today. Deterring them by at least making sure that invasion of Taiwan, even if likely to succeed, will not eventually worth it, is what we need and it's not all that hard to do. I'm sure Putin regrets invasion of Ukraine big time now and that's exactly the message we need to send Xi: "even if you can probably succeed, it's better to not try".
This is why Ukrainian war is very useful: it provides a reason to increase armament production capacity, which is being done now. That won't be possible in a democracy otherwise.
The "entire free world" (aka 'The West') is not as big in population, and has nowhere near the manufacturing capacity as China alone.
There is a meme around which shows 'The world as the West sees it" which contains just one-eighth of the World's population. Called 'The Golden Billion' by some. The other seven-eighths of the World's population has bad memories of the shit they have received from the "entire free world" over the last several hundred years. And if you look closely, you'll find that they are the ones who refuse to join the West in sanctions on Russia, and are the ones queueing up to join the BRICS, SCO, and other 'non-Western' alliances.
We're coming to the end of a very long era: The Era where Western Nations were the Masters of the World. It's lasted several centuries, but the World is about to revert to the setup before about 1600 where the two powerhouses of the world are India and China as they had been for several thousand years before then.
We in the West are going to have to get used to that.
Foreshadowing much? ;)
NATO countries are little more than self organising drones with their own budgets to buy stuff from the mothership, a legacy of the post-WW2 age of individualism.
Is it a better way to build redundancy into protecting a philosophy?
Some people reckon you cant kill an idea.
