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