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Why do you expect that nuclear bombs would be the weapon of choice if China wanted to knock out US bases in the Philippines? The comparatively short distance from the mainland, relatively difficult setting for air defense against numerous low-flying targets and likelihood that China would consider its immediate neighbours to be soft-power targets to some extent all point to it being a good use case for their rapidly evolving drone technology. I'm also not sure if nuking a base in the Philippines would be seen as safer than nuking Guam - American servicemen would die all the same, and my sense was that most of the world, America included, does not even think of Guam as an area with a civilian population. If the US leadership at that point is at all concerned with the opinion of the peanut gallery, nuking a US (directly involved belligerent) base and large numbers of hapless civilians of a third country that happened to be in the way will surely be seen as giving the US more of a moral mandate to nuke back than just nuking a US base?
(Remind the world that the Guamese exist? Might take too long on global thermonuclear war time if done afterwards, and inspires questions about colonialism that nobody particularly wants to deal with. Grant it statehood? Altering the hair's-breadth equilibrium of US politics in such a fundamental way is usually not seen as worth the political capital it would cost.)
(edit:
What do you see about that sub? The substance seems essentially indistinguishable from /r/worldnews or the long-degraded /r/geopolitics, except everyone is LARPing as an FP writer.)
To be clear, I don’t think a nuclear strike on the Philippines is intrinsically likely, but conditional on the war going nuclear, the Philippines might well be prioritised over Guam as a first target primarily because it wouldn’t set the precedent of targeting American soil.
For example, imagine the US loses a carrier, and decides to respond with an SLCM-N strike on a Chinese command vessel. China decides it needs a symbolic strike to respond, but doesn’t want to move too far up the escalation ladder too fast, so it hits an isolated but operationally significant US base in the Philippines. Civilian casualties might be comparatively low; if you hit Fort Magsaysay Airfield for example civilisation casualties might be in the low thousands, similar to what you’d get from hitting Guam.
Right, but will the Chinese interpret (and expect the Americans, and other observers, to interpret) Guam as American soil for this purpose? In a limited (non-MAD) nuclear exchange, it seems that optics/bystander moral buy-in would matter nontrivially for escalatory decisions, and accepting any civilian nuclear casualties in the Philippines (and of course fallout, which is still itself treated as beyond the moral pale to inflict upon someone) would surely, in descending order of confidence, (1) be seen as making China more deserving of retaliation in the eyes of third-party bystanders and (2) the same in the eyes of the American public. It would also put everyone else hosting American bases on high alert - Japan might grit its teeth and mostly sit out a Taiwan invasion, but how would that calculus change if it also had to make a snap decision between kicking the Americans out and having Okinawa nuked?
(On that matter, there is perhaps some argument that if the Chinese do prefer to fire a warning shot at American overseas bases, the Japanese ones would be preferable over the Philippine ones? In a CN-TW conflict scenario, Japanese hearts and minds would be as lost to the Chinese as Polish ones are to the Russians over RU-UA; the same can't be said of the Filipinos)
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Maybe just read this post again and take a breath. How would this post sound to an objective person?
This is not going to happen anytime soon. The Philippines are not a priority for China. There's not going to be a nuclear war between US and China. Etc.. Etc...
It might be a good time to think about your social media diet.
Counterpoint- if the specter of WW3 with Russia is enough for Trump-aligned parties to want to cut ties with Ukraine to hedge risk and cut potential costs, the specter of WW3 with China is enough for non-Trump aligned parties to want to cut ties with Trump-aligned parties to hedge risk and cut potential costs.
I'm fully open with calling both of them hyperbolic, but hyperbole has a lot of sway in the governing coalition of the current white house, and those who embrace hyperbole on one side of the world don't exactly get to claim that others are being unreasonable for similar framings of concern on the other. The use of the framing as legitimate enough to drive sudden shifts in US policy likewise legitimizes the use of framings by other parties, including in directions against american preferences.
Are they really worried about WW3 or does that just sound better than telling everyone that it's an inherited forever-war that's been unwinnable at any worthwhile cost for over a year and they don't feel like squandering air defense munitions on it indefinitely with China looming?
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