On the eve of the last US presidential election (late October 2024), I published the following column in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that both Trump and Harris had flawed approaches to Taiwan: Trump, because he saw economic coercion as a sufficient deterrent, and Harris, because she saw Iran as a more formidable adversary than China.
One and a half years later, Trump has inverted his position, turning to aggressive military force against Iran, which has not proven to be a serious adversary to the United States. At the same time, we have seen how his threat of tariffs against China, now borne out, has proven to be a weak deterrent of anything, particularly given China’s stranglehold on rare earths. As the US expends materiel ahead of replacement rates against Iran and relocates forces from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, the Second Trump Administration seems to be sliding into the very fallacy I warned Vice President Harris against.
How Trump and Harris Both Misread Taiwan
Originally published in the Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2024 (print edition)
In James Taranto’s Weekend Interview “Trump Tangles With the Journal’s Editors” (Oct. 19), the former president wouldn’t commit to using military force to defend Taiwan, instead emphasizing his preference for tariffs. Such an aversion to military force, while sometimes tactful, misreads the security situation in the Taiwan Strait. China has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to taking the island nation by force.
In that event, even stringent economic sanctions would be useless. Beijing will have already “priced in” the attendant costs of an invasion or blockade, which itself would create world-wide economic disaster due to the choking off or destruction of Taiwan’s advanced semiconductor industry.
Economic sanctions are mostly toothless when used against a nation pursuing what it considers to be a core security interest. The levies didn’t deter Russia from its occupation of Crimea in 2014 or in Ukraine since 2022. Nor did they dislodge Myanmar’s genocidal military junta from power or halt Iran’s military engagements in the Middle East. The U.S. trade blockade on Cuba has produced no results in more than 60 years. Threats of sanctions didn’t prevent China from abrogating the Sino-British Joint Declaration or running roughshod over Hong Kong.
China has spent years building an alternative global economic order to weather aggressively enforced Western sanctions. Tariffs would be even more useless, raising prices on U.S. consumers rather than inflicting costs on Beijing.
Mr. Trump isn’t alone: Vice President Harris has also made comments that reflect a poor reading of the Chinese threat. Her recent assertion that Iran is America’s greatest adversary is risible. The Iranian regime may threaten the Middle East, but its impoverished country has a gross domestic product orders of magnitude smaller than that of the U.S. Iran’s Air Force is aging, dependent on fossilized F-14s, and the state evidently isn’t even capable of safely transporting its own president.
When asked if she would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, Ms. Harris insisted that “we need to make sure we maintain a ‘One China’ policy,” rather than continuing President Joe Biden’s pledge to use military force to repel an unprovoked invasion.
The fantasy, beloved by Europeans, that economic sanctions or tariffs would deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan must end. Only a credible security deterrent backed by American military might will provide a meaningful deterrent against Beijing’s belligerence.