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You should. A nuclear exchange would be a disaster for humanity. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Iranians would be a huge loss to the world. The loss of human capital and consciousness would be a tragedy, the suffering would be immeasurable.
Oddly, I think the Iran war probably precludes a Taiwan war in the near future because two things have become clear. Iran has demonstrated the USA's superiority in technological warfare to an absurd degree. The United States and friends were able to decapitate the Iranian leadership, they've been able to operate with impunity over Iran, they were able to land a small force and operate an airstrip inside Iran during a war. If the USA is even marginally interested in fighting China, it will be extremely costly for China, and especially for the Chinese leadership elite. But also, the Iran war has apparently hastened the decline of American influence abroad. Niall Ferguson brings up, over and over, that this could be the American Suez crisis. America's irresponsible behavior is causing rifts within the alliance system, the special relationships with the anglophone countries are gone, NATO could die. American may have sacrificed its alliances in Europe for its "alliance" with Israel. This increases the odds significantly that Taiwan peacefully unifies with China, with no American opposition, because China grows in power and prominence and Taiwan eventually sees the hand writing on the wall.
As for the blockade war, I can see the logic, but a lot depends on China and India. If China sends a naval escort for a Chinese flagged ship, what happens?
Do you know what website you're on?
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This is not an opinion shared by what I believe to be, at this point, a majority of Americans. The younger cohort would not mind if Israel were glassed, the older cohort would not mind if Iran was glassed especially if America does not need their oil. Neither would support those actions, but they would not consider it a huge loss either.
The only drawback considered is the normalization of nuclear warfare.
It doesn't matter if it's an opinion shared by 99% of Americans, or 48% of Americans, or just me personally. It's morally correct and believing otherwise is wrong.
That's the problem. To the young, glassing Israel is the morally correct thing to do, the same way the right thinks glassing Iran would be the morally correct thing to do. It's incredibly easy to make people do horrific things as long as they feel good and right and morally correct, and I think you already know this, because you're old enough to have seen the madness of social justice.
Right or wrong doesn't matter in a democracy - it just means there are more of them. And fundamentally, when people can't be trusted with the power to decide who rules them, the entire edifice built on democracy implodes. It's happened a lot in countries other than the US; many places given the option to vote for their own leaders vote in autocratic dictators who immediately do autocratic dictator things.
Come the 2028 voting cycle, I expect to see a lot of handwringing over how much the opinions shared by enough of those who vote matter.
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It could quite easily have the opposite takeaway. We've now seen that even a pariah state can exert a surprising amount of leverage against the superpower next door, even with only a fraction of the military power. And we've seen that said superpower can't reliably affect regime change simply by dropping a few bombs, boots on the ground are likely required.
It's been clear for a while now that reunification with mainland would be a massive boon for the Taiwanese economy, but I doubt the Taiwanese people would want it.
I thought boots on the ground was China's Plan A?
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You are correct, of course, my not caring is about their polities qua polities. My frustration is that there is little one could do to ensure better outcomes. Similar how life under the Taliban is obviously terrible for a lot of people, but there is preciously little the rest of the world can do to fix it. We do not have the will to permanently occupy Afghanistan, Israel and Iran permanently (or until they wisen up and become slightly less murderous in another century or so), and I don't require an EA impact analysis to notice that past occupations have been terrible on a QALY-increase per dollar spend metric (and a lot of other metrics beside that).
I would liken dealing with such countries to dealing with a chronically suicidal ex-partner. Of course you care if they suicide (or nuke each other), but you also don't want to spend the rest of your life doing crisis intervention. Bombing Iranian enrichment facilities, or having your ex committed to a psychiatric hospital for some time is a stop-gap measure which kicks the can down the road, but makes the problem worse in the long run.
Nobody has the stomach to occupy Iran or have someone long-term committed for suicidality. If someone wants to kill themself, or a regime is willing to pay the price of tens of millions of their civilians being murdered in reprisal for them murdering tens of millions of 'enemy' civilians in turn, that is hard to prevent.
Personally, I would have preferred to take my chances with a timeline in which Iran gets a nuke earlier but also does not have a history of Israel and the US bombing the shit out of them for a few decades to delay their nuclear program, and hope that both sides would be rational enough to play cold war like responsible adults.
With Trump in charge, your guess is as good as mine.
Generally speaking, I think that China is unlikely to start a war in a theater it can not win, and I do not see them winning a naval war in the ME against the US (though I am also not very well informed on relative naval capabilities).
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