President Donald Trump’s war against Iran is stretching the limits of the nation’s aircraft carriers and leaving the western Pacific without one of the key American warships.

The lack of a U.S. carrier in the Pacific may be short-lived if the Navy deploys another in the next couple of months. But it shows how the open-ended operations with Iran are running some American sailors ragged, analysts say, while the Trump administration further retreats from the Asia-Pacific region and focuses on the Western Hemisphere.

“The administration says that the Pacific is supposed to be the most important behind the Western Hemisphere,” said Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Instead, the U.S. is “doing the exact opposite” of its previously expressed goal of pulling out of the Middle East.

  • shalafiEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Not sure if it’s true, but I’ve heard that Taiwan will destroy their fabs if invaded. Or maybe that a wargame scenario.

    • nednobbins@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      That’s a potential scenario in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. I think it’s extremely unlikely for 2 major reasons:

      1. China has very little incentive to invade Taiwan. At the current trend, China can just smother Taiwan instead. China has repeatedly demonstrated that they can impose a 100% naval blockade on Taiwan and nobody has a plan for how to break that blockade.

      2. Even if China invaded Taiwan, somebody would have to actually do the act of blowing up all the Taiwanese chip plants. That would leave Taiwan without it’s single biggest asset in a post invasion scenario. There’s no reason to think it would reverse an invasion, it would just remove one of their biggest bargaining chip.