Fighting China Over Taiwan Could Cripple U.S. Military

Why a War with China over Taiwan is Not Worth the Cost

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party recently conducted a wargame examining a potential U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan. However, the most important question about such a conflict is the one none of these organizations ever ask: What is the vital national interest of America that would justify fighting such a war?

Answering that question is of paramount importance. The cost to our country of fighting a war with China, regardless of the reasons, will range somewhere between extraordinarily harmful and catastrophic. The American people and the U.S. Congress must be clear-eyed about this fact: There is no scenario in which the U.S. goes to war with China over Taiwan that does not bring severe military and financial harm with it.

A Taiwan War Would Be Historically Bad

What is at stake in Taiwan for America that is worth paying such a high cost? And after paying it, would our country be stronger or weaker?

Most of American punditry is focused on the genuinely serious harm that would be done to the people and government of Taiwan were the Chinese to invade. It is also entirely reasonable and appropriate for the United States to help Taiwan defend itself.

As virtually every wargame has conclusively shown, however, directly fighting a war with China on Taiwan’s side would mean death of American service members in great numbers, and widespread destruction of our ships, planes, and other weapons of war. The cost would be astonishing.

• In 18 of the CSIS scenarios, the United States lost an average of a staggering 484 warplanes – one game resulted in 774 lost American aircraft.
• All 24 scenarios resulted in the loss of two U.S. aircraft carriers and thousands of American service personnel.

The losses across all categories would leave America’s entire Pacific air and sea fleets catastrophically weakened, but they would also dramatically reduce our ability to defend our interests worldwide. We should not even contemplate taking such risks with the security of the United States unless our country is threatened by or under direct attack from an adversarial power. The United States has no vital national interest in Taiwan that is worth risking our ability to defend our own country.

Choosing not to fight a war with China on behalf of a non-treaty ally would be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow, but that would still be immeasurably better than seeing our military crippled in the Pacific and our ability to defend our country compromised. Nothing in Taiwan is worth that.

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Author Expertise

A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.” Follow him @DanielLDavis1.