A blogger at Instapundit, Ed Driscoll, has approvingly linked to a post advising that the United States abandon the Republic of China, often called Taiwan. “Read the whole thing,” Driscoll advises.
One component of the whole thing is this passage: “What makes the problems of the Ukraine and Taiwan even thornier is that neither has a valid pretense [sic] to administrative independence. Instead, both real or prospective conflicts are among the last sortings-out of two civil wars” (The Pipeline, “Minding Our Own Business,” Michael Walsh, May 26, 2025).
CCP propaganda
The part about the ROC is standard-issue Chinese Communist propaganda. Why parrot it?
The Republic of China has never been governed by the mainland and has been “administratively independent,” i.e., a country, for decades. There’s a legislature, a presidency, elections, laws, national self-defense, the whole kit and caboodle. This fact is unaltered by the fact of civil war between the Kuomintang and the communists that ended with the flight of the Kuomintang to Taiwan or by the unwillingness of the PRC to leave the ROC alone.
Some readers at Instapundit are also confused. One asserts, among other things, that “China has spent the past 50 years preparing for war with Taiwan” and also, as an additional numbered point, that the United States “cannot deter China. Cannot prevent an invasion of Taiwan and cannot stop one.”
I invite the author of these two claims to relate them to each other. Does preparing for decades preclude being deterred for decades?
The Instapundit reader confronts us with a double dose of ineffectiveness. The U.S. can neither prevent nor stop an invasion of Taiwan. Which sort of makes one wonder why the People’s Republic of China hasn’t simply attached Taiwan to itself sometime between 1949 and 2025. Surely any massive and ruthlessly aggressive country determined to conquer a much-smaller nearby country and also possessing the very convenient advantage of being unstoppable would not waste any time about the matter.
China has been threatening to annex Taiwan for decades. It hasn’t, not yet. Has something or other deterred it? Could the support of the U.S. for the Republic of China and the selling of weapons to the ROC have contributed to the effectiveness of the deterrence? What about the support of allies in the region who are also threatened by China?
We can all agree that the People’s Republic of China has not been deterred from preparing for war.
Crushing blow
Another Instapundit reader disputes Walsh’s claim that “the loss of the island would not be a crushing blow to American military interests in East Asia.” In reply, the reader says:
The US has committed to the defense of Taiwan. Allowing the CCP to take Taiwan will unravel the US–East Asia security alliance like a broken string of pearls coming unraveled.
It will put South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and arguably even Australia and New Zealand under the Chinese thumb. They will exert their “do it or die” influence east as far as Guam. Maybe beyond to Hawaii.
If you want to see the Empire of China controlling all of East Asia and the South Pacific, this is a good way to go about it.
Taiwan must be defended.
That a PRC conquest of the ROC “would be a crushing blow” to the wider region or to U.S. security interests in the region is not absolutely certain either. But it is uncertain only in the way that winning a major battle in a war would not certainly bring the winner of the battle closer to winning the war. The Instapundit reader’s assessment is much more plausible than Walsh’s, which Walsh does not bother to explain or defend.
Also see:
StoptheCCP.org: Video: “Why Should Americans Defend Taiwan?”
StoptheCCP.org: “Three Ways Red China Might Not Grab the Republic of China”
StoptheCCP.org: “What War Between Beijing and Taipei Would Really Mean”
