I suppose US coast guard can attack Chinese coast guard the same way I can attack a tank with rock. It just will not be effective.
How do you figure that? American Coast Guard ships aren't crappy. They can really muck things up and stir up trouble in our territories and neither side would resort to shooting but it would just make us look bad that we're not able to carry out our duty of closing our waters to hostile forces.
That is true. I doubt we will ever get into the interception stage in the first place. But in rare chance that they do, see 2016.
Link it. I don't know what "see 2016" means.
That is very true, which is exactly why I propose using murder of Chinese civilian to justify arresting relevant organisation responsible for it inside Chinese territorial water. The latter of course includes Taiwan and Kinmen itself.
Yeah, well if you're at the place where you are calling Taiwan and Kinmen Chinese and using forceful arrests of Taiwanese forces to enforce it, then you're pretty much ready for the final escalation. The CCP just isn't there yet. We don't want to do this now.
We can agree to disagree here. Salami slicing helps smoothing the eventual military operation. If China is strong Taiwan will be taken either way. Domestic opinion believe it or not does matter a lot to the party. See the Pelosi visit event. The revoking mid line is a nice salami slice, but the party did have to extend the naval exercise well beyond needed for the slice to ease domestic opinion.
That's to normalize Chinese military presense near Taiwan and extending exercises is a very low risk move so doing that to sooth the public is fine. But when deciding on huge strategic advances with significant risk to escalate, the CCP never defers to public emotions and rightly so.
It will not happen. If US want it to happen it can deploy either way, like it does with military instructors, not that it would help at all.
But it can happen. If the US sense that there is need and advantage, it can. The US Coast Guard is present in Asia, you know.
It is a good sign. While the loss of 2 life is tragic, the concern is the subsequent response to bury the evidence, playing hard ball. Taiwan cannot be allowed to normalize murdering Chinese civilian and get away with it.
They're really not attempting to. Everything we're seeing shows this to be a horrible accident they can't take back so they first tried to hide it but that failed too. I see nothing in their actions that shows they want to normalize murdering anyone.
This is the reason I call for a harsh response. If for some reason Taiwan decide to back down on this, it can be treated as isolated incidence. They will be punished with 'only' blocking of patrol.
Well if they escalate and they meet us with force around Kinmen, of course we would escalate that force until they back down but this is them already backing down. They said 1 asshole thing about being authorized to use lethal force in their patrols and basically totally fucked off home, and they got home to a bunch of people who said that their behavior was completely at fault. This is the current situation so imagining situations where they go head to head with us near Kinmen makes no sense. They're meek so preventing their patrols in that area is a sufficient outcome and success for us in this incident. There we can agree even if perhaps not in hypothetical situations.
