“America just needs to sit back,” insists Joseph Solis-Mullen, author of The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Dangers. This, he says, is the best reaction to an admittedly aggressive China.
On his podcast, Tom Woods asserted that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be “a net-negative for the overall cause of human liberty” before asking Solis-Mullen: “So is your position that that’s a very unfortunate thing but there is absolutely no way the United States is going to defeat China over Taiwan, so what’s the point in trying?”
Solis-Mullen answered in the affirmative: “the U.S. would lose an attempt to block China from absorbing Taiwan.”
To illustrate, he noted that “it’s 80 miles off the coast of China,” and said “imagine someone trying to invade Cuba, for example, and the United States was determined not to let them. Of course, they couldn’t.”
An unfortunate formulation, since the U.S. is not threatening to invade Taiwan; China is!
Better to have said, imagine an eastern hemisphere power trying to protect Cuba from an invasion by the U.S. Since to this day you can find American politicians advocating a conquest of Cuba, the analogy is more nearly exact.
And perhaps for similar reasons as to why Cuba remains unconquered, Taiwan is actually defensible — especially with U.S. naval and air support.
While a recent CSIS war game showed massive death and destruction should China surprise Solis-Mullen by launching an amphibious assault, it in turn found China’s navy devastated and the attack repelled. Ian Easton’s look at The Chinese Invasion Threat also concluded that Taiwan can defeat a PLA invasion force.
Today, treaty obligations require the U.S. to come to the military defense of Japan and the Philippines, both under threat from China. The Taiwan Relations Act mandates that we provide Taiwan (which lies between them) with the wherewithal to defend itself and President Biden has repeatedly pledged direct U.S. military assistance should China launch the unprovoked attack the CCP regularly threatens.
Solis-Mullen advocates we abandon these obligations. He seems to recognize it means a complete U.S. withdrawal from Asia and Chinese Communist Party “domination,” but his notion that it “will not impact our prosperity at all” is naïve.
Sitting back to watch another evil empire gobble up free peoples would be, as Tom Woods put it, a huge blow “for the overall cause of human liberty.”
Seems like the wrong armchair position.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Sit Back, America?”
Taiwan has not been part of China for over 500 years. China has no right to Taiwan and letting them invade without consequences, would be a horrible mistake. It won’t stop there.
The New World Encyclopedia says that Taiwan was annexed by the Qing Dynasty in 1683 and then ceded to Japan in 1895. After the Japanese defeat in WWII, it went back to China, which was still ruled by nationalists. The island has an indigenous population that goes back millennia but it would appear that Chinese history in Taiwan is far more recent than five hundred years.