A war with China would be, long, brutal and endless – China would use the war to justify further conflict forever if they lose, and would go nuclear

A war involving the U.S. and China could not easily be contained. Warned the Brookings Institution’s : “Neither Beijing nor Washington would accept defeat in a limited engagement. Instead, the conflict probably would expand horizontally to other regions and vertically, perhaps even to include nuclear weapons threats — or their actual use. It literally could become the worst catastrophe in the history of warfare.”

Also offering a sober judgment , both with the American Enterprise Institute:

“If conflict does break out, U.S. officials should not be sanguine about how it would end. Tamping or reversing Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific could require a massive use of force. An authoritarian CCP, always mindful of its precarious domestic legitimacy, would not want to concede defeat even if it failed to achieve its initial objectives. And historically, modern wars between great powers have more typically gone long than stayed short. All of this implies that a U.S.-China war could be incredibly dangerous, offering few plausible off‐​ramps and severe pressures for escalation.”

The consequences of such a conflict would spread globally, with much greater impact than the Russo‐​Ukraine war. Imagine Taiwanese industry devastated from combat or conquest. Allied sanctions against Beijing and its trading partners. Nations big and small pushed to choose sides. Both the U.S. and China interrupting if not sweeping the other nations’ trade from the seas.

At the end, defeat for the U.S. and its allies would be possible if not likely. In recent years  have  Beijing . The best case, after a fashion, appears to be an indecisive and thus lengthy war. : “The overarching takeaway from participants in the war game: If China invades Taiwan, the Indo‐​Pacific region will plunge into a broad, drawn‐​out war that could include direct attacks on the U.S., including Hawaii and potentially the continental United States.” 

The Pentagon is seeking solutions, but projecting power will always remain more expensive than deterring the use of power.

Moreover, this would be the first major conventional war between nuclear‐​armed powers. Both governments might find it difficult to eschew a resort to WMDs in such a conflict. Indeed, the very nature of the battleground would risk escalation. Chinese use of mainland bases would force the U.S. to target them. And the PRC’s targets would at least be U.S. possessions and bases in the Asia‐​Pacific, ensuring civilian death and destruction. Both Beijing and Washington would feel pressure to escalate, which would have no obvious stopping point.

Indeed, the greatest danger might be backing into a nuclear war. No Chinese government could afford to lose, leaving Washington dominant along its border. An American loss would destroy U.S. credibility as global guarantor of other nations’ security. Both governments could come to believe that avoiding defeat was worth almost any sacrifice and cost.

Finally, even an American/​allied victory, whatever that looked like, would likely be only temporary. The losing Chinese ruler might fall, but the Chinese people would not likely accept such a result. Rather, geography, nationalism, and interest would impel a defeated PRC, like defeated Germany after World War I, to reorganize and rearm for a future rematch. Yet the U.S., facing its own aging population and debt tsunami, would be reluctant to spend hundreds of billions annually to guarantee not America’s safety, but perpetually police Asia thousands of miles away.