Tell me how the US-China war ends

The Pentagon is spending lots of time these days wondering how to defeat China in a possible future war, potentially over Taiwan – an island polity of 23 million people (and much of the world’s semiconductor manufacturing base) that China considers a wayward province but that America considers an important democratic friend. The goal, of course, is to deter China from any attack by denying it a plausible path to victory. That is all well and good. But one element is often lacking in the many war games and contingency analyses that are done within as well as outside the…