> Assuming you could
Our ability to carpet bomb Beijing or other mainland Chinese targets illustrates US military superiority. I'm not saying that would necessarily be the objective. My point is that any engagement between the two countries would take place in and around Chinese territory and nowhere near US borders. Thus, Americans should want war with China. Neither I nor most educated respectable Americans care about our retards in uniform dying - no matter what, China will lose more than the US.
> How does this state look like
First, please don't compare the Russia-Ukraine situation to what any state-to-state war involving the US would look like. Russia proved itself to be weak. Even its mythical cyber warfare capabilities turned out to be a Potemkin village - nothing more than a bunch of tracksuit slavs in a carpet-wall room stealing credit cards off the internet. Russia has failed to make Ukraine surrender because it has been unable to inflict massive damage to Ukraine and its military. Ukraine is both able and willing to continue fighting. As long as those two things (ability and will) remain in a country, they will not surrender. To make them surrender, you have to destroy their ability and will.
Beating down a country until surrender involves crippling the country's military and economy to the point where population collapse becomes a real possibility in the losing country's collective mind. Either that, or you decapitate the highest level of government until it's no longer able to organize counter-attacks. See Germany (Hitler died, people were starving), Japan (population was starving and we showed we could erase all life from the Japanese Islands), Gulf War (military annihilated and people uprising)
To do this in China, we'd have to destroy their weapons systems and kill a few million chinks. Or bomb a meeting of the senior CCP. Chinks are not known for their bravery, so the population would lose morale in a month.
> How do you do that?
Realistically, the US / Western coalition would not commit genocide because we are good people. We would be happy to see China reset to their 2005 level (and stay there), where they quietly and obediently make our t-shirts and cheap electronics while not attempting to push their weight around in the global matters concerning civilized peoples. To do this, it'll require a regime change and crushing of their military, which can be accomplished with only a few million dead chinks.
And yes, obviously China is on a higher tier than Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. China is uncomfortably stronk, and the US is not omnipotent. This is why people across the West are concerned about China. But we can still step on them far harder than they can step on us.
I highly doubt nukes will ever be used in a war again, but if China does fire theirs, we have more nukes and undoubtedly superior missile defenses.
China would put up a real fight and kill a lot of US military bydlo. But Americans don't care about that, and we'll still kill more chinks than they'll kill Americans.
The US has never been in a war where we've had more casualties than our enemies. In WW2 for example, we lost about 400k people total. On the other hand, Japan alone lost more than 2M. And did you know that nearly 20M Chinese died in WW2 just fighting the Japanese, excluding the famines?
One potential downside of a war with China is that it could open the way for India's uprising, and that is even less appealing than China's uprising. But at least curryniggers are incapable of rising to China's level. The ideal scenario would be a never-ending India vs. China war.