“Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” former President Donald Trump told Bloomberg on June 25. “It’s 68 miles away from China.”
In a wide ranging interview, the 45th president sounded as if he were willing to abandon the self-governing island to Beijing, which claims it as its 34th province. As Bloomberg noted, “Trump makes it clear that, despite recent bipartisan support for Taiwan, he’s at best lukewarm about standing up to Chinese aggression.”
Other news organizations were not so charitable. A New York magazine headline screamed “Trump Invites China to Invade Taiwan If He Returns to Office.”
The U.S. does not have a formal treaty commitment to defend Taiwan. Instead, the U.S. for decades has maintained a policy termed “strategic ambiguity,” not telling either China or Taiwan what America would do in the case of imminent conflict.
Strategic ambiguity was developed in part to prevent Taiwan from invading China, but after the democratization of the island that has not been a concern. Despite the change in circumstances, Washington, while moving closer to Taipei, has nonetheless kept the policy in place.
As Jonathan Chait correctly wrote about strategic ambiguity in that New York piece, Trump “is blowing it to smithereens.”
Trump, with his Bloomberg interview, also smithereened America’s official “One China Policy.” Washington, pursuant to that policy, recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the sole legitimate government of China, acknowledges the fact that Beijing claims Taiwan, maintains that Taiwan’s status is in fact unresolved, and insists that any resolution of status have the approval of the people of Taiwan. American policy, as the State Department reiterates, is based on the “Three Communiques, the Taiwan Relations Act, and the Six Assurances.”
And now it is based on a Bloomberg interview.
In that interview, Trump “rocked the boat,” as retired U.S. Air Force General Blaine Holt told me. The former president complained that Taiwan had stolen America’s semiconductor business —not true, American companies were determined to outsource chip fabs — and that Taiwan must have, as Holt puts it, “skin in the game,” in other words, the island must pay for its own defense.
Taiwan spends about 2.5% of gross domestic product on defense, not a bad number but not nearly enough considering the Chinese invasion threat.
There is a behind-the-scenes issue about Taiwan’s defense spending, however. For years, the island wanted to spend more but American administrations refused to sell weapons. Even when presidents agreed to make sales, the Defense Department slow-walked them, often delivering paid-for items years late.
Taiwan has complained. In May, a bipartisan congressional delegation went to Taiwan and, after meeting with President Lai Ching-te, promised that the U.S. was “moving forward” on sales.
America’s less-than-robust response has had consequences, disheartening friends on the island and convincing some that they should bandwagon with China. China’s friends have been able to paint America as unreliable.
Trump, paradoxically, could remedy the situation. After all, he hinted that America would defend Taiwan if it bought more American weapons. “I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy,” the Republican presidential candidate told Bloomberg.
Trump got that wrong because Taiwan is about as important to America as America is to Taiwan. After the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 — Trump points out his successor’s inexcusable failures there — Taiwan has become around the world the critical test of American credibility and resolve.
“If the U.S. were to stand idly by while Xi Jinping’s China annexes Taiwan, it would open the door to China rapidly subsuming U.S. interests around the world in a cascading effect,” Charles Burton of the Prague-based think tank Sinopsis told me. Fail to defend Taiwan, and America’s alliance structures could fail. What Trump does not understand is that, without allies, Americans would have to defend their country at their borders, not far away from the homeland as is presently the case.
Since the latter part of the 19th century, Washington policymakers have drawn America’s western defense perimeter off the coast of East Asia, and Taiwan sits at the center of that line, where the South China Sea and the East China Sea meet.
Taiwan’s islands protect the southern approaches to America’s “cornerstone” ally Japan and guard the northern approaches to the Philippines, also a U.S. treaty partner. As a result, Taiwan prevents the Chinese navy and air force from surging into the western Pacific — and operating close to American shores.
Moreover, American business would be crippled if Taiwan’s chip-making business were to fall into China’s hands. One firm on the island, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, makes 92% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors.
And most fundamentally, in these days of the Communist Party’s unrelenting assault on democratic governance, America cannot allow Beijing to take over any democracy, especially one as important as Taiwan.
Taiwan can even be Washington’s primary weapon against the Chinese regime. Although the people in Taiwan overwhelmingly do not consider themselves “Chinese,” the people in China, due to decades of regime indoctrination, do so.
Because the people in China see the Taiwanese as Chinese, Taiwan’s vibrant democracy undermines the core Communist Party narrative that the Chinese people cannot govern themselves. At a time when the Party is attacking American democracy almost every day, the next American president should not give up any weapon against China’s communist regime, especially a weapon as powerful as this one.
In short, defending Taiwan is a core American interest.
