What a Shooting War with China Would Look Like in 2030
The premise of this article is that the United States and the People’s Republic of China are at war in 2030. Not a trade war, not a technology contest, not a proxy conflict: a shooting war, with American and Chinese forces engaging each other directly in the western Pacific, and with nuclear weapons on both sides operational enough to shape the outcome. The premise is counterfactual, but it is not exotic. Every serious wargame of the last decade has run this scenario, and the analytic community has converged on expectations specific enough to summarize. This article assembles them: how such a war would begin, what the first weeks would look like, where it would break, and how it would end. ...