Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
Geography is a tough thing and the configuration of the world can't be changed.
True. It's noteworthy that no one else has been able come anywhere close to our ability to use that to an advantage. No one, though the Chinese are working on that. I doubt they will succeed in your lifetime. No other nation will be able to afford to try, barring a European Union -- also unlikely in your lifetime.
We very well may get over the embarrassment, it is hard to embarrass somebody with no shame...
Again, let me remind you that nations are not people; they don't get embarrassed or get shamed -- only some of the people within the nation may be embarrassed. That, as is said, is their problem...
.. but that hole in the barrier of islands won't be so easy to overcome. Politics, internal, external, our or theirs, the map won't look so good for the USN hence the Japanese and everybody else.
I'm somewhat surprised that an airplane driver thinks those Islands form any kind of barrier at all in this era.

Be careful with the pundits and think tanks, most of them are 30-40 years behind the times strategically and operationally. All of them must have and / or see crises to survive.
As an additional surprise for you, I think you are wrong also when you say this about Red China "they're likely to be far more sensible and pragmatic than the US where the worldwide or even long term domestic consequences will not outrank immediately beneficial partisan political ploys."...Totalitarian police states have proven to be mostly quite poor at figuring the best long term course of action. Maybe the ChiComs will be different, I would guess not.
I suggest that most nations, even the very democratic ones and certainly including the US and most of the rest of the so-called western world have problems determining the best long term courses of action. As Niels Bohr said "Predictions are very difficult, especially about the future." Actually, that's probably an old Confucian adage -- from China. Errors by the Chinese because they are communist and a totalitarian state aren't really the potential problem; that they are Chinese and have some very significant problems of their own which are not attributable to their governance and which they try to conceal from outsiders are the factors that will force them to a pragmatic solution and because they are totalitarian at this time, everyone in the country will at least on the surface support what is done. If, as is quite probable, they become less totalitarian fairly rapidly, that won't change my prediction about the possible future -- but it hamstrings yours.

OTOH and regrettably, our politicians have shown a complete willingness to disregard obvious consequences for short term political gain and our electorate is too fragmented to force the issue. That's true today. A couple of years may make a difference but I'm skeptical. As a long time Asia watcher and an even longer time American, I'd bet on the Chinese being the more sensible of the two of us. We have developed a system that needs crises to make government work; they do not have such a system and in fact, hate crises as potentially destabilizing.