Is There a Case for Defending Taiwan?

By schreiberVIS @Adobe Stock

America’s Founders warned future generations against involving themselves in the affairs of foreign nations, and for a long time that approach benefited America greatly. Then, America’s worst president by far, Woodrow Wilson, took America into World War I and ended the non-interventionist period of American history. Since then, there have been attempts at reducing America’s involvement in global affairs, but to little success. President Donald Trump has worked harder than any president in memory to make peace and to remove America from the “foreign entanglements” the Founders cautioned against. But there are still those who push for involvement abroad. At The New York Sun, Grant Newsham makes the case for defending Taiwan from China, writing:

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.

Read more here.