Trump denounces Taiwan – China Worker

Hong Liuxing

Donald Trump's statements about US military support for Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack have had a chilling effect on the island's political establishment. Many interpreted the Republican presidential candidate's statement as an attempt at blackmail for money.
In a July 16 interview with Bloomberg, Trump said Taiwan should pay for its defense, comparing the United States to an insurance company. Taiwan gives us nothing, he complained, when in fact the Taiwanese government has always paid top dollar for the military equipment the United States sells it.

The U.S. Congress approved an $8 billion arms program for Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific states in April, the first time it is being funded directly by the United States. But nearly half of that money will go toward modernizing the U.S. submarine-building industry.

Trump also appeared to question the viability of U.S. intervention in a possible future war over Taiwan. Taiwan is 9,500 miles away. [from the US]“It’s 68 miles from China,” he said. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry has been the main bone of contention in Trump’s remarks, which have sent major chip stocks tumbling, and not just in Taiwan. “Taiwan took our chip business,” he said. It’s another Trump statement that won’t pass a basic fact check.

Trump’s possible return to the US presidency this November underscores the deep crisis of American capitalism and thus of global capitalism. Not only would a new Trump administration threaten to violently attack American workers, women, migrants, and the poor, it could also reinforce the global backlash unless the labor movement fights back massively. Biden’s Democrats, the other major party of American capitalism, have created the conditions for a possible Trump return with their own brand of anti-worker policies.

The conflict between US imperialism and its main adversary, Chinese imperialism, is the most important global trend of our time. It has triggered a wave of militarization, especially in Asia, including Taiwan, and shaped the character of brutal wars such as those in Gaza and Ukraine, making them even more dangerous and complex.

For both Chinese and American capitalists, Taiwan is a crucial issue, and not only because of its dominant role in the global chip industry, although this further increases its importance for both sides. Taiwan is a strategic tool in the American strategy to contain Chinese imperialism and prevent it from dominating the Asian continent and thus the world economy. Xi Jinping’s plans for Taiwan are a reflection of this strategy.

Trump is profoundly unpredictable. But do his remarks signal a change of heart on an issue of such strategic importance to US imperialism? Rather, they are a form of rhetorical “all-out” politics.

Trump is notorious for these kinds of tactics. He has threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from Europe and Japan to pressure those governments to accelerate militarization. In the case of NATO, from which Trump has repeatedly threatened to withdraw, the outbreak of war in Ukraine led most NATO members to dramatically increase their military budgets to Trumpian levels.

Taiwanese Premier Cho Jung-tai responded to Trump’s remarks by touting the island’s increased defense spending (a 56 percent increase over the past decade) and the extension of conscription from four months to one year. In a vassal move, he further declared that Taiwan was prepared to take on more responsibility in the Indo-Pacific. Ultimately, this means exacting a higher cost from Taiwan’s working class, which only increases the threat of war.

For Beijing, there is no preferred candidate between Trump and the Democrats. A professor at Fudan University speaks of two bowls of poison for China. Biden's strategy was to systematically strengthen military containment in the region around China: the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

Trump chose an anti-China hawk, J.D. Vance, as his vice president. Vance has spoken openly about US intervention to defend Taiwan, arguing for more weapons to Taiwan rather than Ukraine. First, this shows that the anti-war sentiment in Ukraine in the populist wing of the Republican Party is about prioritizing the fight against China over peace. Second, it shows that a future Trump presidency will likely be dominated by anti-China cold warriors just as Biden has been. As a result, US policy toward Taiwan will continue to fit into this broader pattern.

During his first term, Trump strengthened military ties between the United States and Taiwan. He angered Beijing by approving more than $18 billion in arms sales and passed a law encouraging senior American officials to visit Taiwan. In 2017, before he even entered the White House, Trump called former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, something no American leader had done since 1979. The Chinese regime was furious. Military buildup is, of course, no deterrent to war. Rather, it forces both sides to compete for larger arms stockpiles while stoking nationalism and raising the political stakes for all groups in power. This is the logic of imperialism.

Trump’s remarks have exposed the superficiality of the US imperialist narrative about democracy and autocracy. Taiwan is not armed to the teeth because it is a democratic island (an exaggerated claim), but because in the eyes of the Pentagon, it is an unsinkable aircraft carrier facing China. For this reason alone, it is unlikely that a future Trump administration would sell Taiwan out for a mere economic deal with China, as that would represent a historic setback for US imperialism.

The pro-American Liberty Times newspaper reassured its readers not to take the former president too literally. It described his sensational comments as a political tactic and performance, pointing out Trump's inconsistency when, for example, he said earlier this year that if China had invaded Taiwan while he was president, he would have bombed Beijing!

Trump is also wrong about Taiwan’s dominance in the semiconductor industry. The vast majority of profits are made in chip design, by American companies like NVIDIA, rather than at chip foundries further down the supply chain like Taiwan’s TSMC. Still, Trump’s comments reveal a new consensus within the American political establishment. Democrats and Republicans alike now favor state-capitalist industrial policy to try to rebuild America’s lost manufacturing base. Taiwan’s TSMC has already invested $65 billion in three chip manufacturing plants in Arizona, the largest foreign investment in manufacturing in U.S. history.

All indications are that Trump wants to raise tariffs to protect the competitiveness of US-made chips. US imperialism does not want to be overly dependent on Taiwan for chip production, when Taiwan’s advantage in this sector cannot be replicated elsewhere. Neither Trump nor the Democrats stand for democratic rights, either abroad or in the US. Trump openly flouts his anti-democratic bias, recently praising Xi Jinping as a brilliant man who controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Meanwhile, US liberal imperialism under Biden has supported Israel’s racist democracy in its genocidal war on Gaza. US imperialism supported and armed the brutal Kuomintang white terror dictatorship in Taiwan for decades until it deemed that capitalism and US domination in Asia were no longer threatened.
Due to the aggressive and militarized nature of imperialism, the threat of war against Taiwan will exist as long as capitalism exists. A more dangerous and uncertain future awaits us, with capitalist crises deepening and producing political leaders like Trump and Xi Jinping. Only by overthrowing capitalism can the threat of war be eliminated. The common struggle of workers in Taiwan, China, and around the world against militarization, dictatorship, and imperialism is the only way forward.