| Well, you didn't specify a timeline in which the appeasement had to work! You just asked me to name ONE instance where it did and I named a few.
But more to the point is the fact that those nations used appeasement because they had no viable choice. If you think that we are in a position to militarily force China to our will you are mistaken. Sure, we can keep them from invading our soil quite easily, but we couldn't stop them from taking Taiwan or South Korea if we wanted to, let alone fight a major world war on the Asian Mainland with them.
The nuclear option would basically pit the rest of the planet against us because nobody wants a nuclear war. And if you think that only Siberia would be affected you must be unaware that winds blow around the world. The radiation in Siberia would eventually hurt US too, not to mention Russia and the EU.
No, we're in no position to go to war with China unless they did a flagrant act of aggression first, like attacking India or Siberia first. If they did that then the rest of the planet would be on our side. But if we nuked China for, say, retaking Taiwan, then the rest of the planet would be against US, not them.
And again, if full thermonuclear war was already going on between the US and China, that would be Russia's best chance ever to take us out as well and rule the ruins. We don't need to make the same mistake that Napoleon and Hitler made with regard to the Russians, and it isn't just don't attack in winter. It's that the Russians have so much land that they can just move from the poisoned areas to those that aren't. If we tried to nuke all their land area just to deny them that, there'd be so much fallout that the whole planet would die. So unless you want the US to commit planetary murder-suicide, we don't have that option.
China can do what it wants within its own borders and we can certainly opt to boycott if we don't like it. But all we'll be doing in reality is screwing our own athletes who could have won Olympic gold.
Taiwan is indisputably part of China; even Taiwan acknowledges that. It simply claims to be the legitimate government of all China, although the world has dismissed that claim for decades now. Tibet, again, has been Chinese since the time of Kublai Khan and the Dalai Lama ruled in the name of Chinese emperors. It's the same as if Alaska wanted to secede, or the Aryan Nations, from the US in that it is an internal matter from China's point of view.
We might not like what they're doing there, but it isn't our concern. Just as we'd tell them to butt out if they protested our raiding the FLDS compound in Texas.
I also don't agree that they could only do nominal damage to our nation in a nuclear exchange either. They have several hundred ICBMs and can certainly lay waste to the entire West Coast, not just L.A. You might figure that's no big deal because we're 2000 miles away, but there's those prevailing winds again, which blow west to east as often as not. You might prefer being vaporized by a direct hit to puking your disintegrating guts out from fallout.
The fallout from several hundred ICBM-sized nukes in China and North America might be enough to kill us all. The fallout would certainly cover the Northern Hemisphere. Ever read or see "On The Beach"?
It's not worth destroying the world in a pissing contest over the Olympics. |