If carriers are being used to help support Taiwan in this hypothetical, they are obviously fair game and sinking them isn’t escalatory, right? We don’t get to go to war and declare the troops fighting the war off limits to retaliation.

If that was how it worked, why wouldn’t China declare all their transport boats sacrosanct?

If we think our retaliation to getting a carrier sunk would be to end the world, we should probably not use them.