The Taiwan Catastrophe
What America—and the world—would lose if China took the island.
www.foreignaffairs.com
The Taiwan Catastrophe: What America—and the World—Would Lose If Chin…
Taiwanese soldiers at a military base in Taitung, Taiwan, January 2024
Taiwanese soldiers at a military base in Taitung, Taiwan, January 2024
Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters
Washington and its allies face many potential geopolitical catastrophes over the next decade, but nearly all pale in comparison to what would ensue if China annexed or invaded Taiwan. Such an outcome, one U.S. official put it, “would be a disaster of utmost importance to the United States, and I am convinced that time is of the essence.” That was General Douglas MacArthur in June 1950, then overseeing occupied Japan and worrying in a top-secret memo to Washington about the prospect that the Communists in China might seek to vanquish their Nationalist enemies once and for all. More than 70 years later, MacArthur’s words ring truer than ever.
Then, as now, Taiwan’s geography matters. 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. But unlike in the 1950s, when Taiwan was under the authoritarian rule of Chiang Kai-Shek, today the island is a full-blown liberal democracy—whose subjugation to Beijing’s totalitarianism would hinder democratic aspirations across the region, including in China itself. And unlike in MacArthur’s time, Taiwan today is economically crucial to the rest of the world, by virtue of its role as the primary producer of advanced microchips. A war over the island could easily cause a global depression. Yet another key difference between MacArthur’s time and today is the flourishing of a wide network of U.S. allies across the Indo-Pacific, countries that rely on U.S. support for their security. A Chinese seizure of Taiwan could trigger a race among nations to develop their own nuclear arsenals as U.S. security guarantees lost credibility.
In recent years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has shown an impatient determination to resolve Taiwan’s status in a way his predecessors never did. He has ordered a meteoric military buildup, instructing Chinese forces to give him by 2027 a full range of options for unifying Taiwan. These signals are triggering debate in Washington and elsewhere about whether Taiwan is strategically and economically important enough to merit protection through the most challenging of contingencies. But make no mistake: whether one cares about the future of democracy in Asia or prefers to ponder only the cold math of realpolitik, Taiwan’s fate matters.
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DEFENDING DEMOCRACY
When MacArthur wrote his memo in June 1950, Communist insurgencies were convulsing Southeast Asia, and the Korean Peninsula was teetering on the brink of war. The military utility of Taiwan—then called Formosa in the West—beckoned. “Formosa in the hands of the Communists,” he wrote, “can be compared to an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender [a ship that supplies submarines] ideally located to accomplish Soviet offensive strategy and at the same time checkmate counteroffensive operations by United States Forces based on Okinawa and the Philippines.” MacArthur explained how imperial Japan, which ruled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, had used the island as “a springboard for military aggression” beyond East Asia and warned that Communist forces could do the same.
But MacArthur was thinking about far more than basing, emphasizing that Taiwan’s people should be offered “an opportunity to develop their own political future in an atmosphere unfettered by the dictates of a Communist police state.” He even highlighted Taiwan’s importance as a net exporter of food in postwar Asia and as a future “prosperous economic unit.”
The dynamics MacArthur highlighted remain relevant today, some more than ever. Eventually, Taiwan’s citizens did indeed seize the opportunity “to develop their own political future” by building a full-fledged democracy off China’s coast. If that system were extinguished, Beijing would have erased the world’s first liberal democracy whose founders include many people of Chinese heritage—and, with it, living proof that there is a workable, appealing alternative to Beijing’s totalitarianism. In 1996, the Taiwanese voted for the first time to directly elect their president, whose maximum tenure was newly shortened from two six-year terms to two four-year terms. Four years later, they elected an opposition-party president, ending the political monopoly of the Kuomintang, the party that had ruled the island since 1945. Over the past two-plus decades, democracy has only deepened its roots in Taiwan, which enjoys an orderly transition of political power every four to eight years.
Taiwan is ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit as the world’s eighth most “fully democratic” polity, ahead of every country in Asia and even the much older democracies of the United Kingdom and the United States. Its people enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of association. Taiwan also has one of the most economically equitable societies anywhere, with a relatively low disparity in income distribution despite having among the highest median incomes. Its per capita GDP overtook Japan’s in 2023.
Over the past two-plus decades, democracy has deepened its roots in Taiwan.
Taiwan ranks sixth in the world for gender equality, according to a UN Development Program index. Women hold more than 40 percent of seats in Taiwan’s national legislature, the highest percentage in Asia and well ahead of the United States, where just 28 percent of members of Congress are women. Taiwanese have twice elected a female president, several of its leading cities are led by female mayors, and the incoming vice president is female. Taiwan’s respect for the rights of indigenous peoples (with designated legislative seats) and minority groups stands out, too. In 2019, Taiwan became the first society in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.
Taiwan is a democratic standout in another important respect: its faith in democracy is growing at a time when many democracies are doubting their system of government. A Taiwan Foundation for Democracy poll in 2023 found that three-quarters of Taiwanese believe that although there are problems with democracy, it remains the best system. And in a refreshing contrast with the United States, younger people were especially likely to hold that view.