Americans Warm to U.S. Defense of Taiwan if China Invades

More than half of Americans said they would support the United States and its allies coming to Taiwan's defense in the event of a Chinese invasion, according to a recent survey commissioned by Newsweek.

Fifty-six percent of respondents, including nearly six in 10 of those who voted either Republican or Democratic in the last presidential election, said they would approve (31 percent) or strongly approve (25 percent) of U.S. intervention in a crisis across the Taiwan Strait, while 12 percent were against it.

U.S. public backing for direct involvement in a Taiwan contingency was up nine points from 47 percent in mid-August 2022, while opposition remained the same, according to an April 4 Redfield and Wilton Strategies survey of 1,500 eligible voting adults.

The fieldwork was done one day before House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen for talks on U.S. soil. China, which claims Taiwan as its own and calls Tsai a separatist, responded to the meeting by launching three days of military drills around the island from April 8 to 10.

Taiwan's security has long been a concern for the U.S. and its allies but the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine and increasingly resolute rhetoric from Beijing have made the possibility of a conflict all the more palpable.

Alongside rising support for Taiwan's defense, the poll revealed a plurality who viewed China (41 percent) as "the greatest threat" to American interests, followed by Russia (35 percent), North Korea (7 percent) and Iran (3 percent). More GOP-leaning voters picked China over Russia (52 vs. 28 percent) than did Democratic-leaning voters (34 vs. 45 percent).

The yearslong downturn in U.S.-China political ties has trickled down to both societies. In America, unfavorable views of China's government are high, while trust in its leader, Xi Jinping, is low. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday that the responsibility "does not lie with China."

"For some time, lies, rumors and disinformation from anti-China forces have seriously misled public opinion and clouded people's judgment in relevant countries," he said on Thursday. "We hope people will keep their eyes open, see through such disinformation, and make an independent judgment based on reality and facts."

Political scientist Raymond Kuo, director of the Taiwan Policy Initiative at the RAND Corporation, said the poll reflected the fact that Taiwan was more frequently on the lips of America's political leaders.

"Taiwan is one of those few issues that cuts across the political aisle in the United States. There's always been a latent amount of public support for Taiwan. You're seeing a shift in American public opinion from the 'don't know' and 'no' sections to the 'yes' side," he told Newsweek.

The Trump administration flipped the U.S. government's three-decade policy of engagement with China to embark on a rivalry that now spans the geoeconomic spectrum. Both major parties, and most Americans, have converged on this new outlook.

"The American public has to be behind you if you're talking about competition with China—it's a whole-of-nation effort. In a democratic society, you need public backing as a moral principle and as a practical matter in order to put out the economic outputs, the taxation policy and the industrial policy, all of which affects regular Americans," said Kuo.

Time-Tested Formula

Washington switched formal recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 during the Carter administration, after a public detente initiated seven years earlier by then President Richard Nixon. The U.S. officially takes no position on Taiwan's postwar status, and it acknowledges, rather than endorses, China's claim to the now democratically governed island.

For four decades, the delicate relationship has been managed by the U.S.'s "one China" policy, which includes the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), the only element of the U.S. approach to be enshrined in American law. This 1979 instrument requires that the U.S. provide the island with defensive arms. Beijing views it as a unilateral addition and has never accepted it.

Under the TRA, the U.S. has sold $21 billion of defensive articles and services to Taiwan since 2019, according to the State Department. U.S. lawmakers who approved the deals said there's also a production and delivery backlog approaching $19 billion, including $8 billion worth of F-16 fighter aircraft not due for delivery for another three years.

Cross-strait peace and stability "are in the political, security and economic interests of the United States, and are matters of international concern," the law states. It declares "any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States."

The text requires that the U.S. maintain its own capacity in the region "to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan," while any threat to the island would trigger discussions between the White House and Congress.

The language is strong, but it's not a concrete defense guarantee of the type America offers to its European and Asian allies, despite President Joe Biden's suggestions to the contrary. While China doubtless already factors in a U.S. role in any future war, it remains long-standing U.S. policy not to say whether American forces would intervene in a conflict.

But Biden's repeated personal pledges haven't been lost on Americans. Fifty percent of respondents in April's Newsweek survey believed the U.S. was "committed by treaty" to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, including 48 percent of Republican and 58 percent of Democratic voters.

Around a third of those polled said they didn't know whether Taiwan was a military ally, suggesting the semantic subtleties of U.S. policy towards Taiwan are often lost, perhaps even to the sitting American president, who voted for the TRA some 44 years ago.

When Biden became the junior senator for Delaware in 1973, Washington and Taipei were still formal treaty allies. He's the only senator from the 96th Congress of 1979 still holding public office. Among those in the House that year were Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as well as NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

"Our government would benefit from articulating the U.S.'s actual position on Taiwan, reiterating that the U.S. views Taiwan's international status as undecided, and that a final determination requires a peaceful and voluntary agreement from both sides of the strait," said Kharis Templeman, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and program manager of the Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region.

"While we do not have a formal commitment to defend Taiwan, it needs to be emphasized that we do have a long-standing interest in seeing a peaceful resolution of differences across the strait. We do have our own national interest at stake in a contingency over Taiwan, and it goes back a long time," Templeman told Newsweek.

In 2011, Kurt Campbell, who is Biden's top adviser for Asia, called the TRA "one of the most important acts of legislative leadership in foreign policy in our history." A decade later, Nicholas Burns, at his confirmation to become U.S. ambassador to China, said it remained "remarkably modern for the strategic questions" America would face in the years ahead.

The TRA, Burns said, allows the White House and Congress "to do more if you choose to do more." In Taipei last week, Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, promised more weapons and training for Taiwan's armed forces.

"If China wants us to stop our defense assistance to Taiwan, it can reduce the number of missiles pointed at Taipei and stop the military modernization campaign that is explicitly targeted at an invasion of Taiwan across the strait. But until and unless they do that, we are perfectly within our rights, and it's in our national interest, to ensure that Taiwan maintains an ability to defend itself," said Templeman.

Hub and Spokes

In Asia, unlike in Europe, there exists no multilateral bloc akin to NATO. Instead, bilateral defense treaties with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines—and with Australia and New Zealand south of the equator—comprise what is known as the "hub-and-spokes" alliance network with the U.S. at its center.

Japan hosts around 54,000 American service members, the most anywhere outside of U.S. territory, while 28,500 U.S. military personnel are stationed in South Korea. Nearly six in 10 Americans in the Newsweek poll said they supported maintaining U.S. forces in South Korea to defend the country from an invasion by Pyongyang.

Policymakers have long understood Taiwan's geostrategic importance in the middle of the first island chain running from Northeast to Southeast Asia. Now, America wants its allies and partners to share the responsibility for preserving the island's value to the global economy as China begins to articulate far-reaching ambitions beyond its borders.

"China made a decision that it was no longer comfortable with the status quo," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in January in an appearance at the University of Chicago. "They say this is a sovereign issue for us; our response is this is an interest to the United States and to countries around the world."

"Fifty percent of every container ship that is moving around the world every day goes through the Taiwan Strait; 70 percent or more of the computer chips manufactured in the world at the higher ends are manufactured on Taiwan. If that gets disrupted, the entire world economy will suffer," Blinken said.

"Every country in the world has an interest in making sure that peace and stability remains in the strait and that differences are resolved peacefully, not through pressure, not through coercion, and certainly not through the use of force," he said.

Taiwan was the U.S.'s ninth largest goods trading partner in 2022, worth nearly $136 billion, according to the Census Bureau. The two capitals are likely to deepen the commercial relationship with an expected trade deal later this year.

"Listen, I believe in a one China policy, but I would be willing to fight for Taiwan, because Taiwan is a democracy; we've stood with them for decades," South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News on Sunday. "I'd be very much open to using U.S. forces to defend Taiwan because it's in our national security interest to do so."

In countless joint statements since April 2021, U.S. officials and their foreign counterparts have underscored "the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait." China, which prefers to keep disputes at the bilateral level, has yet to find an effective response to the Biden administration's internationalization of what Beijing considers an internal affair.

Despite not extending a defense guarantee to Taiwan, Washington's decisions in a future crisis, and the depth of its support for the island's defenders, would nonetheless be carefully scrutinized by U.S. allies in Asia and elsewhere, according to analysts.

"If you lose Taiwan, you're going to have a ripple effect in your alliance network. Any country that feels less valued than Taiwan would be concerned because they implicitly put themselves on a rank. The Philippines would be really concerned," said Kuo of RAND.

"For Japan and South Korea, the Taiwan Strait lies right on their major supply lines, their logistics chains. If you don't have that, it would really complicate U.S. support for those treaty allies," Kuo said.

The Hoover Institution's Templeman said: "One of the big reasons why the U.S. would have to intervene in a Taiwan conflict is our commitment to other countries in the region. A defense partnership or alliance to protect other countries from Chinese aggression becomes much shakier if we do not intervene to prevent an invasion of Taiwan, so it has symbolic power far beyond just Taiwan."

"I think having an obligation spelled out very clearly in a treaty is actually less important than you might expect. What we do matters a lot more than what we write down," he said.

Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine has been something of a wake-up call for Taiwan, which describes itself as standing on the front line against an expanding authoritarian power. The Taiwanese public's own will to resist is being closely watched by those inclined to help.

Tsai, who has no more campaigns to run, has used the war in Europe to cash in her political capital, by pushing through a rare double-digit increase in Taiwan's defense budget and extending military service from four months to one year. Opinion leaders on the island argue her successor must embrace civil defense.

"I wouldn't count on the partners in this area to defend Taiwan," Joseph Wu, Taiwan's foreign minister, told Bloomberg on Monday. "I need to make it very clear that defending Taiwan is our own responsibility. And we have the will to defend ourselves."

"In the face of China's increasing military coercion, we will continue to strengthen our self-defense and asymmetric warfare capabilities, and maintain close contact with friends in the U.S. Congress and the executive branch to ensure steady progress in security cooperation," Jeff Liu, a spokesperson for Taiwan's Foreign Ministry, told Newsweek.

"At the same time, we will communicate and coordinate closely with like-minded countries to jointly uphold the rules-based international order and support a free and open Indo-Pacific region," he said.

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