Deterring Chinese military aggression against Taiwan, a self-governed island just 100 miles from China’s coast, is the Pentagon’s most daunting military challenge. War games envision a naval and air campaign led by U.S. forces in Japan to defeat a Chinese assault. But if that fails, what other tricks might the United States have up its sleeve?
Last week, Rep. Seth Moulton (Mass.) — one of the Democratic Party’s leading voices on defense, and a member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party — mentioned one. What if Washington emphasized that a Chinese takeover would lead to the destruction of Taiwan’s world-class microchip industry — specifically its flagship firm, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.? China might be less likely to spill blood and treasure, Moulton suggested, to capture a broken economy and shattered technological base.
Speaking at a Milken Institute panel in Los Angeles, Moulton said: “One of the interesting ideas that’s been floated out there for deterrence is just making it very clear to the Chinese that if you invade Taiwan, we’re going to blow up TSMC.” He continued: “I just throw that out not because that’s necessarily the best strategy, but because it’s an example of the debate that’s out there. And of course, the Taiwanese really don’t like this idea.”
They certainly don’t. On Monday, Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng, was asked about Moulton’s remarks. He shot back with a warning. Taiwan News reported: “The defense minister said that the armed forces are responsible for defending Taiwan and its people, materials and strategic resources. Therefore, ‘if they want to bomb this or that,’ the armed forces will not tolerate this kind of situation, Chiu said.”
This spat is clarifying. As China’s threatening activities have increased over the past decade, Washington’s ties to Taipei have steadily tightened. But that doesn’t mean Taiwan’s interests and America’s will always be identical.
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One reason the United States is invested in Taiwan’s security, in addition to the island’s crucial geographic position and free political system, is its mastery of semiconductor manufacturing. As Tufts University historian Chris Miller showed in his 2022 book “Chip War,” Taiwan’s 20th-century leaders intentionally built a microtechnology industry tightly integrated with U.S. markets in part to increase the island’s strategic value to Washington. “As Americans grew skeptical of military commitments in Asia” amid the Vietnam War, Miller writes, “Taiwan desperately needed to diversify its connections with the United States.”
The island’s technological savvy also makes “unification” more desirable to Beijing. And if Taiwan were about to fall under Chinese Communist Party control, of course it would be in the United States’ interests to minimize China’s economic-technological windfall. That might not entail “blowing up” TSMC, but many of Taiwan’s semiconductor corporations presumably contain equipment with sensitive applications that could be sabotaged, disabled or whisked away.
The Biden administration has been excoriated for leaving $7 billion in U.S. military equipment in Afghanistan as that country fell to the Taliban in 2021. It’s hard to imagine that a White House on the cusp of losing Taiwan wouldn’t think about how to ensure that dual-use technology worth far more doesn’t fall into the hands of a great-power rival. This might devastate the global economy, but China’s subordination of Taiwan would have catastrophic economic consequences on its own.
Some tension between Washington and Taipei on the subject — at least behind the scenes — might be helpful. The United States has less ability to deter China from invading or blockading Taiwan if the island doesn’t prepare urgently for its own defense. Ukraine’s experience under Russian attack has shown that once an ally holds off an invasion, the United States is more likely to come to its aid.
Yet Taiwan’s military response to the threat from China has been slow. Its low defense spending relative to countries such as Israel is often explained by Taiwanese voters’ expectations of U.S. protection. Others might calculate that the stakes of China’s threats are not as high as the United States says, and that their lives might be able to continue mostly as normal even if Beijing did alter the cross-strait status quo.
Not if the island’s leading industry were destroyed in the process. Moulton’s suggestion might not just make China think twice — it could pressure Taiwan’s political leaders to beef up the island’s defenses.
Liberal internationalists sometimes imagine the United States makes military commitments around the world for ideological reasons, or that its priorities and those of the world’s democracies are inseparable. But military commitments are unlikely to endure under pressure unless they serve U.S. strategic and economic interests.
Washington and Taipei share a vital interest in Taiwan’s independence, but the two governments are still seeking a strategy that can deter a rising China without provoking a military assault. We will need more boundary-pushing thinking like Moulton’s. But that won’t be possible so long as the polite foreign-policy world understands geopolitics as a liberal humanitarian mission. The United States needs a clear vision of its own interests in the Taiwan Strait in order to successfully defend them.