First you are ignoring countries that have already been gobbled up by the PRC like Tibet, East Turkestan,Manchuria, Yunan and South Mongolia etc.
Secondly Mongolia have effectively been castrated by the decade long blockade by Chinese. Mongolia is to China is like Afghanistan to Pakistan.
Same is true for SoKo and Japan as both have been struggling to counter Kim’s mood swings.
ASEAN is like weaker version of European Union. It’s too fragmented to fight China.
Even India have wasted all its options of peaceful coexistence before starting to mobilise its forces. We have done all kinds of appeasements to Xini the pooh despite them arming Pakees with Nukes, Tanks, subs,jets and all kinds of weapons and even buildings roads in occupied Kashmir. We bent backwards for Xi to take a swing. All the while Chinese encroaching in our territories bit by bit.
And I’m not too sure about the will of Americans to fight Chinese.
look what happened in Afghanistan. They barely had few hundreds of operators since last few years, that too not in active combat but mainly as instructors and service providers. But even that was too much for them. And they handed Afghans to Chinese on platter.
Agree on most points, except ASEAN and US.
The areas lost earlier were completely the fault of both the US and USSR for allowing it. We can't do much about it today.
As for Korea, SoKo is far too distracted by Kim, which is why I called it a retarded Siamese twin. A united Korea would have been the worst possible headache for China because it would have given the US a land border to attack China. The 70-80 million people would have given Korea the same level of status as UK, Germany or France.
Japan is more distracted by their own pussy-footing than Kim or China. They need to begin militarising. Their current military strength is only good enough to defend Japan, but htey need to develop expeditionary capabilities if they are to fight China, and they obviously need a significant boost in their defence budget to make that happen.
India followed a policy of appeasement with China because the West did the same, even Taiwan and Japan. There have not been a more retarded bunch of countries ever in history. But, while we have space for manoeuvre over the long term by simply outgrowing China, the West, Taiwan and Japan have no option but to forever be inferior to China.
As for Afghanistan, it was prudent of the Americans to withdraw. The only mistake they did was the failure to make other tribes in Afghanistan more powerful before leaving. A whole generation has passed, so they should have armed and trained a bunch of warlord tribes that oppose the Taliban. Destabilising Russia, Iran and China's backyard was the way to go about it. Maybe the opportunity is still present or already being implemented. In any case the Americans were spending over $100B a year of their defence budget in Afghanistan, and leaving the country has freed up the funds needed to deal with China. They should have done it during the Obama era, after Osama's death.
As for ASEAN, as a collective bloc they are weak today, but that's not the case for individual countries, namely Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia, in the long term. Indonesia's long term projection takes it to the top 5 economies in the world. All three of their populations are expected to be equivalent to today's Russia, Japan and America, so they will have the muscle necessary to challenge China. Merely these three countries will have about 50% of China's population by 2050. At the very least, if these three countries act collectively, it's more than enough. These three also have the best possible geographic advantage in the SCS.
Anyway, dealing with China today requires a collective effort. The US alone can't do it.