Another US military debacle coming in Asia?

Responding to Gordon Campbell on why China isn’t a real military threat
http://werewolf.co.nz/2023/08/gordon-campbell-on-why-china-isnt-a-real-military-threat/

Related: The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan
Report by Mark F. Cancian , Matthew Cancian , and Eric Heginbotham
https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargaming-chinese-invasion-taiwan


China isn't a military threat because it is more interested in doing business than making war. Gordon Campbell's threat assessment in military terms is unpersuasive. If you go through the US track record in post WWII warfare, it's not all that impressive, beyond its interminable nature.

First of all, the US didn't win the Korean conflict. It actually, embarrassed itself. Initially, China inflicted stunning battlefield defeats on US armed forces in the field. After, the US was unable to dislodge China from North Korea for two years. If one thinks about how poor China was at the time, the military inability of the US armed forces to defeat them should be a lesson to military planners. Wars are fought in a military and geopolitical context.

The Vietnam War was another disastrous debacle for the US military. No need to elaborate.

"Wars" such as Grenada or Panama have little evidential weight. It's laughable that they are even brought up in a context of potential war with a great power. They were colonial operations.

The US struggled for years to suppress resistance in the second Iraq War, after conducting a devastating attack on Iraqi infrastructure and Iraq's armed forces. Iraq a second or third rate military power already debilitated by sanctions and a prior war at that. The war in Afghanistan was a another loss. Of course, one of the major lessons in these wars, was the US cannot afford to take many casualties in far away places politically because the issues in contention although labelled vital national security interests by the US MIC really weren't. Americans asked to put their lives on the line in some contrived military adventure, intuitively come to recognize that. Military conscription has been off the table since Vietnam. Demagogues in the Congress are rewarded by their corporate sponsors, among them the war contractors and weapons manufacturers, to revel in their own war mongering rhetoric. They are far away from the battlefields and the US media will cover for them. The US is reluctant to put its own armed forces on the line in Asia. This is why the US is prodding Japan, South Korea, Philippines, and Australia to step up and take the blows for it. This also reflects an implicit recognition that the US military establishment can't dominate China alone.

The notion that the US would win a war with China in the far east after losses and difficulties with much smaller and less resourceful countries is just bluster. There are several military experts on the Chinese theater who say there is no military solution to the Taiwan issue. Some of them believe the US would suffer massive losses if not outright military defeat. In such circumstances where the US might feel compelled to use nuclear weapons, the military option begins to look absurd, as it should.

People often forget the importance of near and far in warfare. Keep in mind the US and its allies couldn't even mobilize adequate military resources to support its Ukrainian proxy war against Russia. That effort, now appears to be on the verge of collapse despite years of US preparation, training and guidance.

It's just the utter stupidity of war in a successful, prosperous part of the world, like East Asia, that deters rational players from pursuing military conflict. But the US and UK unrealistically locked in their 19th Century imperial outlook of innate superiority, not just culturally, but economically and institutionally in a tragic way, don't seem capable of changing direction.