Taiwan invasions guarantees spill over

Noah Buchan, "The world after a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan," Taipei Times, 7-14-2023, https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2023/07/14/2003803158-- 嘉玮

Nuclear weapons would proliferate. Global trade would end. The semiconductor industry would be destroyed or come under the control of an expansionist and authoritarian regime. Democracies would face a crisis of legitimacy and the alliance system developed and led by the US since World War II would be shattered. These are some of the predictions made in a report by six national security specialists if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) attacked Taiwan and Taipei fell. It makes for grim reading.

The World After Taiwan’s Fall says that such an event “would likely be far-reaching and deeply negative, perhaps even catastrophic” to not only Taiwan, but the Asia-Pacific region and the globe. It argues that the US and its allies have not sufficiently appreciated the strategic implications that such a Chinese victory in a war over Taiwan would generate. And they haven’t planned for this possibility.

“Put bluntly,” editors David Santoro and Ralph Cossa write in the introduction, “today neither the US government nor allied governments (let alone the respective publics) have sufficiently assessed the strategic implications of a successful PRC invasion of Taiwan. There is still a lack of urgency about the severity and gravity of this problem and the impact for them, the region and the world, should the island of Taiwan fall into Chinese hands.”