HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.No, it'd mean fighting for said people. Here's how a war with China over Taiwan would actually play out:
- Large numbers of young American men who've been rendered economically redundant by automation and globalization and whom changing societal norms have denied any chance of marriage and family are drafted and sent off to get shot by large numbers of drafted young Chinese men who're in essentially the same situation thanks to the One Child gender imbalance. In this manner, the American and Chinese status quos both remove threats to themselves
- Large sums of money, either taken directly from American taxpayers or printed, devaluing the preexisting savings of American citizens are given to military-industry complex megacorps to create even more redundant military equipment.
- Various laws to censor dissidence against the status quo and spy upon everyone are forced through, justified by 'wartime emergency'. Needless to say, once the war is over, they're never going away.
- The war is an enormous bloody stalemate at best, insofar as, if either side looks like they're winning the conventional war, their opponent can threaten to go nuclear. At worst, said bluff is called and plebeians on both sides die en masse while the wealthy and politically powerful who created said war in the first place vanish off to their private and/or government-funded bunkers, to emerge once the fallout dies down and use their hoarded technological goodies inside said bunkers to rule even more authoritatively over the survivors who've been reduced to pretechnological barbarianism as essentially feudal nobility.
Perhaps calling it the American Empire is a misidentification, it's the corporatist empire, it just uses the money of American taxpayers and the lives of American soldiers as its cannon fodder.
Maybe all empires are like that, during the glory days of the european colonial empires, the average european plebeian was stuck in grinding poverty, wage slavery, being used as disposable cannon fodder or some combination of the above while the rulers enriched themselves off the plunder of the world.
It'll be interesting to see if in a century, the middle eastern invasions will have been treated likewise and added to the Original Sin of 'your ancestors did colonialism' that we're expected to apologize for.
They are in the sole way that actually matters, specifically, MAD deterrence. Any limited non-nuclear war would be unwinnable, since as soon as once side looked like it'd succeed, the other could simply threaten to blow up the world. All it'd do is waste money and lives.
No, there would be no draft. We have a large enough standing military we can hold Taiwan with the help of the Taiwanese.
China would not go nuclear over Taiwan. If they were willing to go that far to take Taiwan they would have done it already.
There would also be a terrible economic downturn from this, and it would actually hurt the higher ups then help.
Let's put this into perspective about the nuke thing.
Even North Korea isn't going to use them, and they are unstable. The only country that may use them for anything but negotiations in a losing war, if Iran.
And even then, no country will immediately threaten nukes the second they are losing, nit even China. China has numbers and will use those until they are hurt badly, plus by the time such a war happens China would be hurt badly economically, and the war would be a boost to our economy and not thiers, especially since it would give a good reason for sabatoge on the dam...