Will the U.S. Really Defend Taiwan? Washington is strategically unprepared for a crisis and Biden’s policies are hampering deterrence. By Seth Cropsey
Taiwan’s ruling party has a new leader, and the change bodes ill for peace in the Indo-Pacific. Vice President Lai Ching-te, a staunch proponent of the island’s independence, took over chairmanship of the Democratic Progressive Party last week from President Tsai Ing-wen. She stepped down as party leader after the party suffered losses in recent local elections. China will now almost certainly seek to meddle in Taiwan’s 2024 election in an attempt to keep Mr. Lai from winning the presidency. If he does win, Beijing could move quickly to invade.
The U.S. is unprepared for such a crisis. President Biden broke decades of American precedent by stating twice in 2022 that the U.S. would intervene to defend Taiwan if China attacked. Usually Washington has preferred to keep the U.S. security guarantee somewhat vague. On the other hand, no American president has explicitly refused to defend Taiwan, either.
The root of U.S. reluctance to commit formally to the island republic’s defense is the complex diplomatic arrangement that governs Taiwan’s functional sovereignty. The Shanghai Communiqué of 1972, still the foundational document for Sino-American relations, allowed Washington and Beijing to disagree over Taiwan’s status as leaders in the U.S. and China got to know each other. While Beijing’s interpretation of the communiqué argues that the U.S. accepted the People’s Republic of China’s claim to Taiwan, the agreement’s text simply recognizes that, in legal terms, Taiwan and China are both part of “one China.” It thereby endorses the de jure fiction of Chinese control of Taipei while maintaining de facto Taiwanese independence.
Mr. Biden’s remarks caused a stir because a formal U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan would fundamentally violate the Chinese interpretation of the Shanghai Communiqué. American credibility is now on the line, which in theory should strengthen deterrence. China will be significantly less likely to move on Taiwan if doing so means it will have to fight the U.S. as well as the Taiwanese.
But other Biden administration policies complicate the deterrent effect of the president’s remarks. Washington looks to be playing for time—not time to rearm and prepare for a fight, but to reduce Taiwan’s importance to the U.S.
Taiwan’s economy is centered on semiconductor manufacturing. In July Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called America’s dependence on Taiwanese chips “untenable and unsafe.” Congress passed the Chips Act to increase investment in the domestic semiconductor industry. If the U.S. is soon going to make all its own semiconductors, China may conclude that Washington will soon lose its appetite for defending Taiwan.
The Biden administration’s approach to military investments is also sending China mixed signals. Defense spending increased this fiscal year, but only because of congressional pressure. As initially proposed, the Biden defense budget would’ve seen a top-line cut. From this China is likely to conclude that the U.S. views Sino-American competition as economic and political, not military, at least in the short term. This is the only rational explanation for actively limiting the size of the U.S. military and plowing money into a broad-based industrial program full of green-energy moon shots and boondoggles.
Despite these missteps, the Biden foreign-policy team deserves credit for undertaking the slogging work of alliance management. Yet the central reason that China feels emboldened to pressure Taiwan and challenge the U.S. is a shift in the military balance. Until the early 2010s, an attack on Taiwan that triggered a U.S. military response would have been suicidal for Beijing, and would have been a close-run proposition even if the U.S. stayed out. Today the U.S. still holds the upper hand, but only by a little. A Chinese first strike is imaginable where it hadn’t been previously.
In their best light, Mr. Biden’s explicit commitments to Taiwan may defer a confrontation for several years, giving the U.S. valuable time to expand its military-technological capabilities. But this doesn’t explain the lack of actual investment in American military capacity, namely in the defense industrial base and its current ability to increase production. It took the U.S. six years to revamp its defense industrial base before World War II. There is no sign that the Biden administration is preparing to undertake a Roosevelt-Vinson style defense expansion. What investments it is making don’t expand shipbuilding capacity or ensure missile stockpiles remain high.
There is a danger that the Biden administration is simply deluded. Because it is misreading the military fundamentals of Taiwan’s defense, it may not deter China in the short term. More dangerous, however, is the view that Sino-American competition is primarily economic and technological. That gives Taiwan little incentive to fight. An America that no longer needs Taiwanese semiconductors can abandon its old friend, perhaps not in 2024 or 2026, but sometime during the next Democratic administration.
It is Congress’s responsibility to ensure that U.S. policy doesn’t endorse chimerical dreams of deferred competition and economic rivalry without a superior military.
Mr. Cropsey is founder and president of the Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is author of “Mayday” and “Seablindness.”
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