The Dire Strait

What makes America not merely great but exceptional? The answer is equal parts fact and faith, for the US is unique only when it pairs its military, political, and economic might with a transcendent desire to act for the right reasons. Supporting Taiwan’s defense is a defining test of that exceptionalism.

In the face of major geopolitical competition, the mantle of American greatness has demanding implications. But the Trump administration’s transactional approach to global engagement raises questions about the future of US leadership, especially in the neighborhood of our primary peer competitor: China.

Backing Taiwan against Chinese annexation is important to the US not only for what the island provides materially but as a touchstone for America’s continued leadership of a liberal international order—one based on legitimate territorial claims, sovereign self-determination, the rule of law, and freedom of navigation.

The Trump administration has de-emphasized Taiwan’s importance in recent months, and it is unclear if this stems from a belief that the US has already fallen behind China militarily or if America’s waning interest is a strategy to spur an increase in Taiwan’s defense spending. The administration says that prevailing in competition against China and “denying China regional hegemony” need not treat Taiwan as an existential issue. It is mistaken.

Taiwan’s Importance Throughout History

Understanding why Taiwan matters to the US not only helps policymakers and military planners but also provides citizens of liberal democracies (including military personnel) with justifications for policies and conflicts they are asked to support. This is tricky because the Indo-Pacific’s strategic importance and Taiwan’s value have changed over time for China, the US, and even Taiwan itself. While the value of annexing Taiwan is extremely high for China now, so is the value of a free, liberal democratic Taiwan for the US.

The Indo-Pacific’s strategic importance and Taiwan’s value have changed over time for China, the US, and even Taiwan itself.

Over the course of Taiwan’s history, no single group—whether aboriginal, Han Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish—controlled the whole island until the Japanese colonized it in 1895 and subjugated the island’s last independent aborigines three decades later. Before Japan, the Qing dynasty of ancient China declared Taiwan a province but only exercised jurisdiction over the island’s western half, while various aboriginal tribes held the east.

The pre-World War II Chinese Communist Party (CCP) viewed the Taiwanese as a distinct nationality and their anti-Japanese independence movement as a revolution separate from its own. In 1952, Japan formally renounced its claim to Taiwan and signed a treaty ceding Taiwan and the Pescadores to the Republic of China (ROC), which is now Taiwan’s formal name.

Decades later, Mao Zedong still considered Taiwan a secondary concern: “It’s better for [Taiwan] to be in your hands,” he told Henry Kissinger in 1975, “If you were to send it back to me now, I would not want it, because it’s not wantable. There are a huge bunch of counter-revolutionaries there.” Contrary to Beijing’s current claims, China has hardly defined Taiwan as a “core interest” from the beginning, and only started using Taiwan as an ethnonationalist rallying point in earnest from the 1980s.

American valuation of Taiwan has also evolved. The US supported the Kuomintang (KMT) in the Chinese Civil War, but after the KMT retreated to Taiwan in 1949, things changed. In 1950, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson implicitly warned the Soviet Union about expansionism but ceded Asian affairs outside of a “perimeter” that he drew around Japan and the Philippines. When North Korea subsequently invaded South Korea with Soviet approval and Chinese support, Truman decided to defend South Korea and Taiwan, perhaps saving the latter from a CCP invasion.

The Taiwan of 1950 no longer exists, but the Taiwan of today is even more worthy of defense by the US for reasons ranging from US self-interest to ideology. Securing America’s economic interests in Taiwan requires protecting our regional security interests, which necessitates maintaining credibility with allies and partners. This, in turn, demands meaningful defense of sovereignty—a country’s right to self-governance—and particularly of liberal democracies. These are intrinsically linked, and success in them as a set can ultimately justify Americans’ exceptional view of their country.

Trade Requires Security

Taiwan is the critical manufacturing node in the global semiconductor supply chain, and its chips power countless daily technologies. While China produces more chips overall, its technology lags several generations behind the industry’s cutting edge. Taiwan manufactures over 90 percent of the world’s leading-edge logic chips and, in the first half of 2025, traded $107.7 billion worth of goods with the US, making it America’s sixth-largest trading partner. Three-quarters of that trade is US imports, and three-quarters of those imports are advanced technology products, including semiconductors.

Taiwan manufactures over 90 percent of the world’s leading-edge logic chips and, in the first half of 2025, traded $107.7 billion worth of goods with the US.

Economic fallout from a global semiconductor shortage due to an invasion of Taiwan would be orders of magnitude greater than that during the COVID pandemic, which significantly impacted the price and availability of consumer electronics, cars, weaponry, and other goods relying on advanced chips.

Despite expected increases in American production from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act (including from Taiwan’s production in Arizona) and other global competition, Taiwan’s portion of the world’s production of wafers—the slices of silicon from which chips are made—is projected to remain relatively constant through at least 2032. Taiwanese law also requires domestic production to stay at least one generation ahead of overseas production, so the US will rely on Taiwanese-manufactured high-end chips for the foreseeable future.

This is the “silicon shield” argument, which states that Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is so indispensable that it would restrain China from attacking or prompt the US to go to Taiwan’s defense. But semiconductor access alone, however strategically important, is likely insufficient to do either. Economic effects by themselves are too far removed from their potential military impacts to deter, as there are too many economic substitutes and workarounds available.

Where Security Meets Credibility

The physical access necessary to sustain US economic ties with Taiwan can only be guaranteed by maintaining American security interests across the Indo-Pacific. Much of the world’s post–World War II economic prosperity was driven by maritime shipping, and now, over 80 percent of global trade and about 60 percent of oil are transported by sea. Enforcing freedom of navigation in international waters and keeping critical maritime routes open to all requires military commitment beyond the island of Taiwan itself.

American security interests necessitate maintaining the integrity of the first island chain, which lies along the East Asian coast. For China, the clearest maritime paths eastward run to Taiwan’s north and south. A US-friendly Taiwan protects strategic sea lines of communication between Japan, Korea, and the Philippines and ensures that they are open to global trade, rather than Beijing-managed maritime highways.

For China, the clearest maritime paths eastward run to Taiwan’s north and south.

Without regional support, the US would be forced to operate in the Pacific from a homeland more than 6,000 miles away, while China operates from but a few hundred miles away. Ceding Taiwan’s geography would create a cascading security risk, compounded by China’s ability to push forward its strongholds and cut off critical maritime routes in the region.

Overseas Basing and Global Reach

To form dependable alliances and partnerships, the US must itself be reliable. In this way, America’s security and credibility are intertwined. Both can only be built over time, the former with reliable military capabilities, and the latter with sustained integrity.

The US is formally committed to maintaining the capacity to counter threats to Taiwan’s security and way of life, including providing Taiwan with defensive arms. Sustaining the first island chain’s integrity also bolsters the United States’ stronger security agreements with other regional partners.

As the region’s leading security presence, America must defend Taiwan to maintain its credibility to both allies and adversaries. The US could not allow China to seize Taiwan and still retain its own material and reputational preeminence in the world. Broken faith has material consequences, and the US will find it harder to pursue its economic interests, protect its way of life, and shape world affairs when other countries lose trust in American power.

The US could not allow China to seize Taiwan and still retain its own material and reputational preeminence in the world.

The US primarily backstops other countries, but that dynamic is not unidirectional. Lowering the American security umbrella across the Pacific could lead regional allies to revisit military force designs that now intentionally complement American capabilities.

One bulwark of superpower strategy is establishing permanent military bases on other states’ sovereign territory, a strategy sustainable only through imperialist coercion or scrupulous cooperation. The US and its allies largely maintain their military bases through peaceful agreement and often at the host state’s behest, rather than through imperial occupation.

While imperial expansion affords some immediate advantages, a power projection strategy that relies on the willing cooperation of other sovereign states due to American integrity and reliability is far more challenging but has ultimately been more efficacious. For all the United States’ might, it cannot project globally without assistance: Even small organizations like the Houthis can effectively hold critical global shipping passages hostage.

Weakness over Taiwan will further encourage adventurism by expansionist states and other opportunistic groups around the globe. President Trump seems less interested than his predecessors in constraining that, but letting Beijing swallow Taiwan would degrade American capacity to defend its interests and ultimately cede to China uncontested regional dominance and significant advantages elsewhere.

That would be a world in which the US occupies a diminished position in the geopolitical pecking order more like that of Great Britain or France:—significant, consequential, but not dominating, and ultimately buffeted by winds of its own making. The US would chafe under the geopolitical constraints of being a former superpower, so it must take its credibility seriously now.

Sovereignty in Practice

China claims the Taiwanese government is illegitimate, but Taiwan’s sovereign legitimacy based on historical control is clear. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) seeks to inherit the historical Qing dynasty’s own weak claim on Taiwan, but CCP-ruled China is a fundamentally different entity from the last Chinese ruler of half of Taiwan. And the PRC’s ideological rejection of continuity with the past should negate historical claims before 1949. The PRC has never held any part of Taiwan.

All beneficiaries of the US-led international order, including the US itself, have an interest in maintaining norms of nonaggression and the principle of state sovereignty. International law reflects this, with Article 51 of the UN Charter limiting international use of force to self-defense and setting a high bar to justify upending a stable status quo.

All beneficiaries of the US-led international order, including the US itself, have an interest in maintaining norms of nonaggression and the principle of state sovereignty.

Taiwan is already de facto independent. Only a fool or a propagandist would say otherwise in the face of Taiwan’s decades of successful self-governance. Even as China pressures countries to look the other way, Taiwan is clearly an independent, self-governing nation.

In Defense of Liberal Democracy

A meaningful norm of sovereignty—as opposed to a thin conception that might makes right—requires defending the idea of legitimate governance. Many states (including China) doth protest too much about the sanctity of their sovereignty as a cover to justify abusing their own people. This thin conception of sovereignty ignores the critical criterion of legitimacy in German sociologist Max Weber’s formative formulation: “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

Societies with essential and legitimating components of liberal democracy—broad representation of their citizens in government, basic human rights, the rule of law, and an independent judiciary—are rare in human history and need to be defended because they practice a rightful form of rule. “Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity,” Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset declares, and these systems are “so paradoxical, so refined, so anti-natural [that] humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it.”

In light of what Taiwan was in 1950, and in stark contrast to the PRC’s entire history, present-day Taiwan is a miracle, and it is no wonder that China is eager to rid humanity of it. Not only has Taiwan operated independently for over 70 years, but its material and historical differences from China only strengthen its claims to sovereignty. Since 1996, Taiwan has had eight free and fair presidential elections and peaceful transfers of power, and it possesses the essential components of liberal democracy, including independent judicial review.

Even as Chinese threats constrain Taiwan’s choices, few Taiwanese want to be governed by China. Less than 10 percent of Taiwan’s population is descended from the KMT’s mid-20th century retreat to Taiwan, with over 90 percent coming from earlier migration. In 2021, a record 64 percent of the population identified solely as Taiwanese and not as Chinese, and in 2025, 87 percent want to maintain de facto sovereignty or declare independence.

Taiwan’s preferences for self-governance should matter intrinsically to the US. Its peaceful transformation from one-party dictatorship to stable liberal democracy—something China has never been—merely amplifies the spuriousness of the CCP’s claim to be a “people’s republic.” Scholars search Chinese history, society, and culture for traditions that could be cultivated into a contemporary liberal democratic Chinese society, but what they are looking for is right across the strait. Contemporary Taiwan’s existence puts lie to the CCP’s claim that Chinese society cannot be governed by liberal democracy.

Scholars search Chinese history, society, and culture for traditions that could be cultivated into a contemporary liberal democratic Chinese society, but what they are looking for is right across the strait.

But why should the US care about tiny lands faraway and obscure, much less abstract concepts like legitimacy of governance? Even if amoral realpolitik abides a Chinese takeover of Taiwan and does not immediately harm America’s national interests, our country’s domestic principles would be called into question when they are blatantly disregarded in dealings abroad. Liberal democracy is a universalistic value system, and it is the burden of such ideologies to be held to a higher standard. Like it or not, all liberal democratic societies, especially the US—whose national identity is closely tied to its civic ideals—bear this extra burden.

American Exceptionalism

While US foreign policy is composed of multiple strands—isolationism, prudentialism, nationalism, values-based idealism—they converge on a vision of American exceptionalism, even if they disagree on what that entails.

Today, the dominant vision of American exceptionalism is that of a country that shapes the global environment and is unconstrained by the rules that bind others. For example, the US jealously protects its national sovereignty by not ratifying some significant international treaties.

Why is this exceptionalism acceptable, but Chinese exceptionalism is not? Every country thinks it is special, and others also have free commercial enterprise, significant scientific and cultural contributions, and constitutions enshrining liberal democratic rights, separation of powers, and rule of law. What makes the US more special politically than the UK, France, or Japan, for example?

Contemporary American exceptionalism stems from the Cold War era and is not just about rejecting external constraints on a superpower’s actions. It also stands for the championship of liberal democracy, rule of law, and humanitarianism, however imperfectly.

American exceptionalism was made possible in part by its history and geography, but what makes the US exceptional now is its historical role in the world. America has wielded its global influence not through empire for the most part, but with the (sometimes coercive) spread of liberal ideology and governance. The American Revolution was not merely a parochial revolt but a comprehensive sociopolitical revolution imbued with universal values, and it ushered in a political experiment that has endured longer than other liberal and universalistic rebellions, such as the roughly contemporaneous French Revolution.

The cost of contemporary American exceptionalism is sometimes sacrificing our own resources, time, and people for others. Everything that is special about the United States flows from this. American exceptionalism—in the sense that it need not be constrained by the rules that bind others—can be justified only if the country takes seriously its greatness, which entails a robust role in protecting liberal democracy globally.

The cost of contemporary American exceptionalism is sometimes sacrificing our own resources, time, and people for others.

The US could not fail to defend Taiwan without destabilizing the international order and jeopardizing its golden age with dire consequences for its credibility, economy, and security in the long run. America’s values are its interests, and it has an interest in its values.

Americans also believe that their country is exceptional in another way: that the US will always overcome its domestic challenges and that it alone will avoid the fate of all other historical great powers.

Whatever its military capabilities and economic capacity, a transactional strategy for global affairs will render the US yet another once-great power, of which there are many littered on the sidelines of world history. If the US is content with that, then it can ignore the fate of a tiny, distant island and its implications for the global order. This would leave the US geographically intact and formally the same country, but it would be diminished—and thus transformed. American greatness is continually tested and defined in the global arena by its willingness to act and sacrifice in the service of its self-proclaimed universal ideology.

Yvonne Chiu is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of strategy and policy at the US Naval War College. She is the author of Conspiring with the Enemy: The Ethic of Cooperation in Warfare. The views in this article are her own and do not represent anyone else’s.