Trump didn’t say he wouldn’t defend Taiwan

Donald Trump’s July 17 Bloomberg interview prompted headlines to the effect that “the US would not defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion under his presidency,” as the Daily Telegraph complained.

He said no such thing: He said that China doesn’t need to invade Taiwan, which lies within range of as much Chinese ordnance as the mainland cares to shoot at it. The former president and frontrunner for the November US election spoke common sense, as opposed to the face-saving obfuscation of US defense experts – including many from the Trump camp.

The US has the wrong sort of military to fight a land-based power with the world’s most advanced mass production capability, capable of turning out an arbitrarily large number of anti-ship missiles and drones, and US defense analysts have the unenviable task of explaining away thirty years’ worth of compounded blunders.

Trump, by contrast, ignores the experts and notes the obvious. 

“Taiwan is 9,500 miles away. It’s 68 miles away from China. A slight advantage, and China’s a massive piece of land, they could just bombard it. They don’t even need to – I mean, they can literally just send shells. Now they don’t want to do that because they don’t want to lose all those chip plants,” Trump said. 

Strictly speaking, Taiwan is 100 miles from the Chinese mainland and the maximum range of artillery shells is about 20 miles, but China has enough missiles to obliterate the island if it chooses to do so. It won’t, as Trump suggested, not only because it does not want to destroy the Taiwanese fabrication plants that make 90% of the world’s advanced chips, but because it does not want to kill Taiwanese citizens, whom it considers Chinese nationals.

In the event of a crisis, for example, a move towards formal sovereignty by Taiwan, China would blockade the island. The island imports all of its energy, mainly natural gas, and has about three weeks of storage capacity. China need only inform shipping companies of its intent to sink any LNG tanker approaching the island and the lights would go out in Taiwan in less than a month.

China isn’t stupid enough to send landing craft across 100 miles of open ocean. American defense experts such as the Center for a New American Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies stage “war games” about a prospective Chinese invasion to obfuscate the failure of US defense strategy.

No expeditionary force 6,000 miles from home can match the land-based firepower of a nearby peer adversary. In the unlikely event of a full-blown battle between China and the US Navy, the outcome would resemble the destruction of the Russian fleet by Japan at the 1905 Battle of Tsushima Strait.

The U.S. military knows this perfectly well and has explained why in numerous published locations.

Speaking of the PLA Rocket Force, Major Christopher J. Mihal wrote in 2021 in a US Army journal that “The conventional arm of the PLARF is the largest ground-based missile force in the world, with over 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles and with enough anti-ship missiles to attack every US surface combatant vessel in the South China Sea with enough firepower to overcome each ship’s missile defense,” 

The Pentagon’s 2023 assessment of the People’s Liberation Army reported: 

The PLARF’s conventionally-armed CSS-5 Mod 5 (DF-21D) ASBM variant gives the PLA the capability to conduct long-range precision strikes against ships, including aircraft carriers, out to the Western Pacific from mainland China. The DF-21D has a range exceeding 1,500 km, is fitted with a maneuverable reentry vehicle (MaRV) and is reportedly capable of rapidly reloading in the field.

The PLARF continues to grow its inventory of DF-26 IRBMs, which it first revealed in 2015 and fielded in 2016. The multi-role DF-26 is designed to rapidly swap conventional and nuclear warheads and is capable of conducting precision land-attack and anti-ship strikes in the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the SCS from mainland China. In 2020, the PRC fired anti-ship ballistic missiles against a moving target in the SCS.

The PLARF is developing and testing several new variants of theater-range missiles and developing capabilities and methods to counter adversary BMD systems. The DF-17 passed several tests successfully and is deployed operationally. In 2020, a PRC-based military expert described the primary purpose of the DF-17 as striking foreign military bases and fleets in the Western Pacific.

China claims to have automated factories that can manufacture 1,000 cruise missile motors a day. It can also produce as many anti-ship drones of the kind used effectively by the Houthis against US ships in the Red Sea. These are easy to shoot down with modern anti-missile systems, but a US destroyer can carry only 100 interceptors in its hold. China can fire as many projectiles as it wants from land. China also has about 60 silent diesel-electric submarines and about 1,000 4^th– and 5^th-generation aircraft.

The US built the wrong kind of military, something that no Pentagon-funded think tank or prospective office-seeker wants to admit. Donald Trump by contrast stated the obvious: China’s enormous size and proximity to Taiwan constitute an overwhelming, insuperable advantage. Surface ships, moreover, are sitting ducks for modern missiles, just as the lumbering battleships of 1940 were vulnerable to dive bombers and torpedo planes. 

Today’s situation resembles the eve of World War II, when battleships were the largest line item in the defense budget of every major power except Russia. Victor Davis Hanson observes in The Second World Wars that Germany and Japan made the mistake of building battleships rather than carriers, and that probably cost them the war. After Japanese bombers sunk four US battleships at Pearl Harbor and Britain’s Repulse and Prince of Wales near Singapore in December 1941, no navy started work on a battleship again. 

No matter how much of its existing capability the United States assigns to East Asia, China’s home-theater advantage in missiles and drones can overwhelm it. That makes nonsense out of the now-popular meme of “prioritizing Asia” over Ukraine, a theme promoted by a former junior Pentagon official, Elbridge Colby, reportedly under consideration for a senior national security post in a new Trump Administration.

Just what the United States might prioritize – perhaps 155mm howitzers and Patriot air defense systems – and how this would help against a deluge of Chinese missiles has never been explained. The US should aim for “a balance of power that is consistent with our reasonable differences,” maintaining the status quo over Taiwan, Colby said in a recent interview. 

Translated into real-world circumstances, that means China will let the United States pretend to be a Pacific power, and pretend to threaten an invasion of Taiwan while Taiwan pretends to defend itself. Taiwan won’t provoke China by promoting sovereignty, and all sides will save face. Face-saving flummery of this sort might keep the peace, but it would depend not on a balance of power, but rather on Chinese forbearance.

Using a million-dollar interceptor to shoot down a $5,000 drone is a losing proposition. Even if America could make enough interceptors to keep pace with China’s missile output and US ships could carry enough of them to counter Chinese attacks, the cost of conventional missile defense is prohibitive.

Directed-energy weapons, including laser and microwave devices, have the potential to destroy projectiles and drones cheaply, but prototypes of such devices can only stop slow-moving drones. Focusing a laser on a ballistic long enough to burn a hole in it isn’t easy, and an enormous amount of R&D would be required to deploy directed-energy weapons effectively against modern missiles.

The Pentagon’s 2025 budget includes just $780 million for directed-energy weapons research, less than the cost of eight F35 fighters.

Drone swarms also have the potential to screen against missile attacks, but this technology also faces formidable obstacles. Drones have a short range and would have to be launched from a platform less vulnerable than surface ships, for example, from a submarine. The US has built just six submarines in the past five years.

Trump has spoken often of building a missile shield for the American homeland, in emulation of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. That’s exactly the right idea, but would require a drastic reordering of defense priorities and a radical transformation of the US military. 

Trump also hinted in the Bloomberg interview that the prospect of massive tariffs on Chinese exports to the US, promoted by advisers like former Special Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and economist Peter Navarro, constitutes a negotiating stance.

Tariffs do “two things,” Trump said. “Economically, it’s great. And man, is it good for negotiation? I’ve had guys, I’ve had countries, that were potentially extremely hostile coming to me and say, ‘Sir, please stop with the tariffs. Stop.’ They would do anything. Nothing to do with economic, they would do—you know, we have more than economic, we have other things like let’s not go to war. Or I don’t want you to go into war in another place.”

Trump also reiterated his April invitation to Chinese car companies to build plants in the United States.