Defend Taiwan: The Reason Why

Sometimes it’s worth thinking about why you think what you think. Take the Republic of China on Taiwan. Defending Taiwan is an article of faith in some quarters. Yet not everywhere.

A year-and-a-half ago an Asia security expert advising the American military and reportedly now under consideration for a job in the Trump administration told a small group, including me, that Taiwan should not be defended.

The argument? The Chinese military is too strong, so we’d lose if we tried to save Taiwan. The American military would be savaged and our standing worldwide as well. Thus, we must let Taiwan go. Can’t be helped. That’s a handsome way to describe preemptive surrender.

America’s undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, now drafting our national defense strategy, doesn’t go quite as far, but in his confirmation hearing he remarked that Taiwan is important but not “existential” for America. So it’s worth reviewing why Taiwan’s freedom matters.

Let Taiwan fall under Chinese Communist control and several things happen — none of them good for America or the free world, not to mention the Taiwanese themselves. Militarily, it’s a huge advantage for the Communist China’s People’s Liberation Army.

For starters, the First Island Chain is broken. The PLA will have solved a longstanding strategic problem of how to penetrate the chain of islands stretching from Japan down to Malaysia that obstructs easy access to the Pacific. Properly defended, the islands hem in the PLA.

Taiwan is right in the middle. Imagine a castle wall being breached. Operating from Taiwan, the PLA swings to the north and surrounds Japan. Move down to the south, and Australia is cut off.

The PLA gets ready access to the Central Pacific and beyond.

This includes the hitherto “safe” zone formed by the Freely Associated States — Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. This east-west “corridor of freedom” is the main logistics route for Yanks operating in the Western Pacific. Everything gets harder, or impossible, if the American military has to fight its way to the fight.

PLA objectives extend across the entire Pacific Ocean — all the way to Latin America. China is laying in the needed port and airfield infrastructure in South America. The new port at Chancay, Peru, is just one example.

Looking beyond the military aspect there’s a huge political and psychological effect from 23 million free people coming under Chinese Communist domination.

First, it demonstrates that American military power could not prevent a free people’s enslavement. American financial and economic power and pressure against the PRC couldn’t either. As ominously, American nuclear weapons couldn’t stop the PRC.

Originally published by The Sun. 

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AUTHOR

Grant Newsham

EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.