Jonathan D. Caverley
To hear many tell it, the future of the United States’ security—and, indeed, the world’s—rides on Taiwan. “A self-governing Taiwan anchors Japan’s defense and denies China a springboard from which it could threaten U.S. allies in the western Pacific,” wrote a collection of authors in Foreign Affairs, including Matt Pottinger, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s deputy national security adviser. Speaking before Congress in 2021, Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, described Taiwan as “critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests.” Ratner also testified that defense of Taiwan is his department’s “pacing scenario,” or the primary guide for U.S. military planning and operations. On the topic of Taiwan, contemporary analysts often invoke General Douglas MacArthur’s description of the island as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” and “submarine tender.” Others have cited Admiral Ernest King—the World War II U.S. chief of naval operations, who said Taiwan was a “cork in the bottle”—to suggest that it geographically contains China’s ambitions.
There are many reasons to help defend Taiwan: its significant economy, its microelectronics prowess, its mature democracy, the effect its seizure might have on U.S. credibility. But keeping China’s military in check is not one of them. Taiwan is a small, 90-mile-wide island just off China’s vast coast. If it became a fully armed Chinese province, the difference in military power between Beijing and Washington would barely shift.
China already possesses formidable space, land, air, sea, and cyber systems designed to detect and destroy U.S. and allied naval and air platforms far from the mainland. It does not need the island to menace the United States. Taiwan would give China a new place to base its systems, but the advantages that come from putting its weapons on the island versus the mainland are marginal.
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