National Review: The United States Should Defend Taiwan

I don’t support going to war with China over Taiwan.

This is the surest way that I can think of though to bring down the American Empire and expose every domestic weakness that has accumulated over the past forty years. It is a question on the same level of whether Britain should go to war with Germany to defend Poland. Maybe it is even worse than that because Taiwan is a renegade Chinese province.

National Review:

“The United States should defend Taiwan if China attacks it. Not out of altruism — although it would benefit Taiwan for us to do so — but out of self-interest. Our enlightened self-interest, surely, but self-interest all the same. It is important to understand clearly why this makes sense, because if defending Taiwan is to be a reasonable course of action, we need to be much better prepared, and remedying the deficits in our defenses will require substantial and sustained political support. Building that support will not be easy, since it is far from obvious why defending a small island lying just a hundred miles off the Chinese coast against the enormous might of the People’s Republic is in Americans’ interest. …

Our overriding purpose now must be to achieve that level of defense for Taiwan, through our efforts and Taiwan’s own. Bewilderingly, though, both we and Taiwan are failing to do this despite its being well within our power. The time is long past for dilatoriness. We must drop everything else and ensure that we and the Taiwanese themselves procure and deploy the military forces and systems needed for Taiwan’s effective defense. If we don’t, our future countrymen will very likely ask why we failed to take such modest steps to avoid catastrophic defeat — and worse.”