by WorldTribune Staff, May 19, 2025 Real World News
If China does act on Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping’s goal of annexing Taiwan, what would the United States do to prevent it? Or would it do anything?
‘The people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family. No one can sever our family bonds, and no one can stop the historical trend of national reunification,’ Xi Jinping said in a New Year’s speech televised on state broadcaster CCTV.“A while back an Asia security expert advising the U.S. military and maybe in line for a Trump administration job told a small group, including me, that Taiwan should not be defended,” Col. Grant Newsham, author of the new book “When China Attacks: A Warning to America“, wrote in a LinkedIn analysis.
Why? The security expert believes the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “is too strong, so we’d lose if we tried to save Taiwan. The U.S. military would be savaged along with our standing worldwide. Thus, we must let Taiwan go.”
The undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, doesn’t go quite as far, but in his confirmation hearing he remarked that Taiwan is important but not “existential” for America.
In the analysis excerpted here, Newsham outlines the implications of not defending Taiwan:
Let Taiwan fall under CCP control and several things happen — none of them good for America or the Taiwanese themselves.
Militarily, it’s a huge advantage for the PLA. 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 access to the Pacific. Properly defended, the islands hem in the PLA.
Imagine a castle wall being breached. Operating from Taiwan, the PLA can surround Japan and also isolate Australia.
Related: U.S. Army reorganizes for modern warfare, but could it recover post-invasion Taiwan?, May 6, 2025
And the PLA gets ready access to the Central Pacific and beyond.
This includes the hitherto “safe” zone formed by the FAS — Palau, Micronesia, Marshall Islands – the main logistics route to the Western Pacific. Everything gets harder if the US military has to fight its way to the fight.
PLA regional objectives extend all the way to Latin America. China is building the needed port and airfield infrastructure in South America.
Looking beyond the military aspect there’s a political and psychological effect from 23 million free people coming under CCP 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.
Lose Taiwan and Asia will turn “red” overnight. Every country in the region will cut a deal with Beijing.
Beyond Asia, every country that was counting on American protection would have serious doubts.
The United States’s reputation would be shot. It would gradually it would be forced back to the American west coast. Globally it will be on the ropes.
Even in the US a constituency will declare that America must manage its decline gracefully. Taiwan isn’t the hill to die on, they’ll say. They never say which one is.
Mr. Colby may think Taiwan isn’t existential for America, but it terrifies Beijing. A vibrant Taiwan democracy puts the lie to Beijing’s claim that only it can govern China, since according to the Party, Chinese people require a boot on the neck.
How does the CCP explain Taiwan — consensually governed, with all the freedoms Americans take for granted, and economically prosperous? It can’t…
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Analyst: Why it’s not okay to let communist China have Taiwan added by Editor Two on May 19, 2025
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