At this point I'd be much happier subsidizing chip manufacturing than most of the other ways this country spends money overseas.
What else does Taiwan offer to the US?
We have "strategic bases" everywhere. One being 100 miles from mainland china versus 200 miles makes no difference to US in the 21st century.
A shipping lane maybe? Also not US problem really, got plenty of those too.
We also don't want China able to just take over land and territory at will, which they've threatened to do all over the region. That destabilizes the region and once again is bad for US interests. This also emboldens other nations with expansion desires which threatens stability across the world... No US ally would trust us again if we just let Taiwan be taken over... again, bad for US interests...
I don't share the ego for the US' hegemony or I also don't place importance on the US' soft power. I do care about semiconductors though.
Is there a stronger argument, because I'm still stuck on what specific strategic advantage that Taiwan has to the US, after we duplicate their one interesting company's infrastructure.
We uniquely have the resources to be the most developed nation, domestically, but subsidize other countries’ defense instead and they subsidize other advances in their own country that we domestically deem too expensive.
So how about we get this semiconductor geopolitical nightmare out of the way and use our massive domestic resources the way we can. There are consequences, not the US’ problem.
There are a lot of people thinking like me, so hawkish people will need more articulate arguments for specific US foreign policy with specific countries.
...and in return, the rest of the world plays ball when we want to advance our interests. The basis of foreign policy is I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine. Our protection of Taiwan shows other countries that we will put ourselves on the line for our allies. It practically forces us to go to war if China invades because we'll lose access to our all-important semiconductors.
Key word forces. If we lose our dependency on the semiconductors we're no longer forced to go to war. Which means China can try to invade and might succeed if we deem it unnecessary to protect Taiwan because "fuck you, we got ours." By keeping ourselves in this vulnerable position there's an implicit trust and understanding that we will be there for them.
> There are consequences, not the US’ problem.
Funnily enough this is the attitude of many citizens under protection of US hegemony. I think you will receive more varied responses from the Ukrainians and Taiwanese.
This was a mistake with 5G, where each country guarded their patent pool, R&D and failed to collaborate with strategic partners.
The Manhattan Project would have failed, as the German project in fact did, if Oppenheimer hadn't been a physicist, and if the US weren't full of Jewish refugees from Germany who just happened to be physicists. Its immense budget was necessary to its success, but not sufficient.