Taiwan and the Unmaking of the American Idea
Nearly 8,000 miles Southwest of Washington, on an island the size of Maryland, the wide spectrum of American foreign policy interests inflects into an ouroboros.
Since 1979, Washington’s foreign policy establishment has held that we should make every effort to protect Taiwan from invasion by the People’s Republic of China while avoiding direct confrontation with the same. We have done this by asserting our right to defend Taiwan and the people that live there, without necessarily promising to do so. For 43 years — with one exception — this policy of strategic ambiguity has been enough to keep the peace across the Taiwan Strait.
But as the United States and China steel themselves for a particularly dangerous decade, onlookers are asking louder and more frequently whether a war-weary America could afford to defend Taiwan in the event of a full-scale invasion. Equally apt, though rarely asked, is whether it can afford not to.
The case against defending Taiwan is painfully obvious. Doves at the Quincy and Cato Institutes at least have the courage — or perhaps just misplaced confidence — to say aloud what many in Washington will admit only privately or not at all: that it is not in the United States’ interest, under any circumstance, to become embroiled in a shooting war with the People’s Republic of China. Up and down Massachusetts Avenue you can hear them proselytizing: Any and every move Washington makes is one likely to anger Beijing, a refrain repeated ad nauseum by our newspapers of record. More respectable are the handful of graybeards — academics who have pondered much too long, else public servants grizzled by decades in the churn — who warn of the incalculable humanitarian fallout that would accompany a U.S.-China conflagration. “The difference,” they will bequeath, though really in more of a comment than a question, “is that China has nuclear weapons.”
Reader, the risks of defending Taiwan are insurmountable. If I were Commander in Chief on the eve of invasion, no logic could compel me to ask American servicemembers to lay down their lives in defense of the island. There is no earthly reason — not our geostrategic position in Asia, credibility to allies and partners, or sustained access to semiconductors — that would give me the strength to withstand the deafening wails of parents whose children were called upon and sent to die in the Pacific. No ironclad set of talking points or well-argued essay can overcome what seems to most Americans these days an indefatigable truth: It is not our fight.
But to admit that we are bound by such naked self-interest forces an uncomfortable, existential reckoning: The reason the “Taiwan question” feels so personal, even for Americans who have never been there, is because our impulse to pay a terrible price in defense of the values we hold dear is an immutable component of the American Idea.
If not Taiwan — or Ukraine, or Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Burma, or Rwanda before it, then under what circumstances would the United States ever be willing to incur unconscionable costs in defense of freedom? If the answer truly is “never” — if it is and always was pure realpolitik — then what good is American leadership in the world? And why should I, an aspiring Washington bureaucrat, bother dedicating my life to preserve it?
The liberal international order as we know it is sustained by the myth of American exceptionalism. It is an ethos born of great men who made hard sacrifices in defense of abstract values and faraway peoples. It is a history that originates in the second World War: of one maverick president hellbent on defending Britain from Nazi onslought; of our subsequent efforts to liberate Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and twice Iraq; and of our role as a champion and benefactor of countless institutions designed principally to promote freedom and human rights around the world.
Cynics take pleasure in pointing out that the American Idea is just that — a myth. The American people were recalcitrant to enter into World War II up until the moment Japan struck the U.S. homeland. Thereafter, our nation was duped repeatedly by a political class that over-indexed on the threats posed by communism and then terrorism. We are hypocrites, charlatans who wrap ourselves in the flag: At the same time we rallied against Soviet kleptocracy, we supported unspeakably cruel regimes simply because they were “our bastards.” Just this month, President Biden shunned a meeting with the leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, citing human rights concerns, and in the same breath agreed to meet with Mohammad bin Salman, who four years ago approved the brutal execution of an American journalist.
Of course I know that the American Idea is a lie, but in my heart it can’t be. I won’t allow it. Because the alternative is a truth too ugly to contemplate: That all of it — yes, all of it — the speeches we gave, the accords we signed; the wars we launched, the enemies we vanquished; the trillions we spent, the millions we killed — that all of it was for nothing. To admit that yes, even America is shackled by the logic of great power politics, is to admit that the years we spend toiling away in Washington do not serve any higher purpose.
It can’t be. Our history may be embellished, our politics broken, but the American Idea is real. It lives in the daily motivations of the millions of public servants and military personnel who have devoted their lives to making their country, and the world, a better place. You can feel it in the halls of the State Department. You can see it buried at Arlington. You can taste it in Freedom Fries, smell it at a Memorial Day barbecue. And you can hear it around the world — in the boasts of Chinese students marching toward Tiananmen Square, and in one young Russian musician’s requiem for a country that may no longer exist. Reader, I am convinced: It is right to take pride in our herculean efforts to defend the weak. And as for our countless, incalculable failures at the same, God damn it, we deserve some credit for trying.
Few cases are as morally black-and-white as Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine or a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan: Weak states held at risk by their more powerful, revanchist neighbors. The unjust wars wrought by autocrats in Moscow and Beijing are categorically different from the moral and strategic failures that plagued America’s wars of choice. We should not hesitate to call them what they are — Evil — and we should resist them with every fiber of our being.
I pray there never comes a day when the United States will have to choose whether to defend Taiwan. Honestly, reader, I doubt that we would. I worry most about what that means for Taiwan — but part of me can’t help but wonder what it would mean for ourselves. For if we Americans are unwilling to wield our power in defense of liberty, I ask you in earnest:
Who are we?
