Maybe the next time The One sends another U.S. destroyer steaming stately through the South China Sea, thinking he's taking a strong and defiant stand for freedom of the seas, the ChiComms will retaliate by dusting Guam:
[Red] China is expanding its ability to strike at Guam with a wider range of conventional weapons that could potentially endanger American interests in the area, according to a just-released government study, Foreign Policy reports.
Although the immediate threat to Guam is considered low, the report, released by the U.S.-[Red] China Economic & Security Review Commission, states that Beijing's "commitment to continuing to modernize its strike capabilities indicates the risk will likely grow going forward."
In other words, we're underestimating our enemy again. The immediate threat to Guam should NOT be considered "low". Always better to err on the side of caution, after all.
Of particular concern is the DF-26 intermediate-range missile, the first of its kind in [Red] China's possession that can reach Guam, a strategic Pacific island on which the U.S. has some five thousand soldiers and considerable forces such as four nuclear powered submarines.
This is precisely what the immediate threat to Guam should not be considered low. I would suggest, to the contrary, that aside from destroying U.S. warships, Guam will be among Bejing's most likely U.S. targets when they attack us. The principle is much the same as why the Japanese erred on December 7th, 1941, by including Hawaii on their strike list. None of their other attacks - Wake Island, yes, Guam, even the Philippines - would have cracked the barrier of rabid isolationism that held the U.S. in its suffocating grip, but sneak-attacking sovereign U.S. territory was enough to break that grip and get America into the Second World War. I don't think the ChiComms will make that same mistake, assuming that they don't go for broke (i.e. conquering the U.S.) immediately. If their strategic objective for now is to dominate the Western Pacific like Imperial Japan once did, they're not going to strike Hawaii or the continental U.S.; but Guam would be another story, a little island on the other side of the Pacific, technically U.S. territory but without the emotional attachment to rile an American public that these days probably has never heard of Guam, and doesn't know it's a U.S possession if they have. And it would eliminate perhaps the only "forward base" against the ChiComms that we still have, since I don't think we can rely on Japan or South Korea for much longer.
Would the United States under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump go to war with Red China over Guam? Hardly. The first two would concede it and withdraw from the Western Pacific, and Trump would already have started that war long before Guam was erased.
[Red] China's apparent intentions are to have the capability to deter U.S. responses to Beijing's territorial claims in the region. Just this week the U.S. Navy deliberately sailed close to one of the disputed islands in the South China Sea that Beijing occupies in order to defend freedom of navigation in the area in which a massive amount of trade passes annually between the Indian and Pacific oceans.
The ChiComms will "bloody our noses" by taking out Guam, expecting the message to be sent: Get out of the Pacific Rim area or else. And we will comply, or we will lose the "or else" as well.
Barack Obama always said that his legacy would be an America reduced to the level of the rest of the world. Well, this is what it looks like. Kind of a crappy view, huh?
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