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All fair concerns for you to have, just not ones I share. I genuinely don't think it matters at all if Ted Cruz knows the population of Iran, because its population isn't one of the relevant metrics for our decisions.
I guess what I'm trying to understand about your view is why knowing the scale doesn't matter.
Bigger country = need more bombs = less bombs to deter China. Why isn't that important to understand?
I guess you can respond by saying "well we should simply make more bombs", which is correct, but the political party who is more willing to make bombs is currently in power and they're not exactly going hard on increasing defense production (happy to be proven wrong here, I would like USA to be stronger vs China than it is).
If Ted Cruz overplays America's hand due to ignorance, we all suffer
How do you imagine us suffering? What harm are you imagining China inflicting on us if we use too many bunker busters in Iran? China will never harm the US mainland, because mainland threats against nuclear powers don't happen. Perhaps, if we ran out of resources for awhile, we wouldn't be able to protect Taiwan. But, really, Taiwan belongs to China as it is -- same as Cuba is ours. We shouldn't really be protecting them anyway, we should be building our own domestic chip manufactories.
Collapse of the current global trade/finance system that massively benefits America would cause harm.
Our lives are subsidized in many many ways by this system.
Perhaps you think the current system has made Americans lazy and complacent consumers of trinkets (not wrong), but the violent end to the system will still cause a lot of harm to the people around to experience it.
Also yeah, losing the chip fabs (and the rare earth metals, and the pharmaceutical precursors, and the machine tools, and innumerable other inputs) would be devastating to scientific and economic progress. All those things could be onshored eventually, but that process would be unfathomably painful (and longgggg).
Also losing the ability to sell stuff to a massive fraction of the world's population
I don't think China's going to collapse global trade if we bomb Iran too much. They're rather reliant on it, too, you see.
Hypothesized chain of causality:
America expends large numbers of munitions on Iran > this lowers China's risk of making a play for Taiwan over the next ~5 (10?) years > China makes a move for Taiwan > both juggernauts slug it out > during the conflict, global trade collapses > depending on who wins the conflict (or if it even ends, it might just turn into a stalemate with occasional explosions), global trade potentially never recovers, and the world bifurcates a lot > we all are worse off as a result
In your worldview, am I to understand that the reason China doesn't start World War 3 is because it fears America will bomb Taiwan into oblivion, and thus, if at any point we seem like we can't glass the entire place, they will invade?
No, where did glassing Taiwan come from?
China doesn't start world war 3 because of all the various American missiles that are likely to blow up Chinese things before they could complete their strategic objectives. There's also lots of American missiles that prevent Chinese missiles from blowing up American things.
If America uses massive quantities of its offensive and defensive missiles, they can't use them against China.
If America bombed Iran with only JDAMs/bunker busters and never fired any cruise missiles or defensive interceptors then sure, that's "free" (we'll ignore airframe wear).
Your chain of causality there suggests that it's our munition reserves -- and our ability to launch them at Taiwan if China invaded -- keeping China in check. That is, we'd render Taiwan useless before they could extract any value out of it. It's not like we'd start lobbing missiles into mainland China over Taiwan!
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