What Does 'Challenging the U.S.' Mean?

If China isn’t likely to attack U.S. bases or territories in the Pacific, the strained comparison with imperialist Japan doesn’t work very well at all.

I have been rereading this bad Robert Kagan essay. There are a lot of shaky assumptions in Kagan’s argument, but this is the section that I keep coming back to:

But while an attack on Taiwan would not have the same effect on Americans as the attack on Pearl Harbor [bold mine-DL], the U.S. is already very anxious about the threat of China, even when an attack on Taiwan is only prospective. It would be foolish for the Chinese to assume that such an attack would not prompt the American public to support a far more aggressive approach.

As to-be-sure qualifiers go, this is in a league of its own. Kagan is so intent on shoehorning China into his comparison with revisionist powers of the past that “challenge the U.S.” that he imagines that a Chinese attack on Taiwan might prompt Americans to endorse a “far more aggressive approach” without considering whether most Americans even want the U.S. to fight for Taiwan. Why would the public be inclined to support a “far more aggressive approach” if most of them don’t believe that Taiwan is worth fighting over?

An attack on Taiwan would be a terrible and outrageous thing, but it would not have remotely the same political significance in the U.S. as an attack on American soil or even on an allied country. The question of intervention would split the country, and it would probably be one of the bitterest debates over intervention we have ever had. The interventionist side might prevail (it usually does), but I suspect that opposition to such a war would be considerable.