Taiwan Learned From Ukraine. Has Washington?

They Came With Receipts

Taiwan's representatives showed up to the Heritage Foundation conference in February with charts, numbers, defense spending data, and a detailed breakdown of Chinese military exercises in the Taiwan Strait over the last 36 months. They came prepared. They came serious. They came with the energy of people who understand that if they don't make their case compellingly, they might not get another chance to make it at all.

I've worked border security for most of my adult life. I understand what it means to defend a line when the other side is larger, better funded, and more patient than you. Taiwan's situation makes our southern border look like a minor inconvenience. They're 110 miles from a nation with the largest standing military on earth and a leader who has publicly said — repeatedly, in state documents — that reunification is not optional.

And they're trying to get MAGA world to care. In 2026. While Iran is on fire and the southern border is still a running wound.

The China Problem Doesn't Go Away Because We're Tired

Here's what doesn't get said enough: China's military buildup around Taiwan isn't theoretical. Between 2021 and 2024, the People's Liberation Army conducted at least nine major exercises simulating a blockade or invasion of Taiwan. Nine. They're not hiding it. They're practicing in public, deliberately, because the message is the point.

The message is: we're coming, and you should ask yourself whether you're serious about stopping us before we get there.

Taiwan's defense budget has increased significantly — they're now at 2.45% of GDP, higher than most NATO members. They've extended mandatory military service. They've purchased American weapons systems. They are doing, with genuine urgency, what we spent years begging European allies to do.

And yet: a faction within the America First movement has decided that Taiwan is a neocon distraction, that the real threat is domestic, that we've spent too much blood and treasure on foreign entanglements to care about an island most Americans couldn't locate on a map.

I understand that impulse. I do. I've buried friends who died in wars their government didn't win. The fatigue is real and it's earned.

But China is not Iraq. And Taiwan is not Afghanistan.

What Losing Taiwan Actually Costs

Walk through the supply chain realities. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — TSMC — produces approximately 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors. The chips in your F-35, your missile guidance systems, your carrier battle group's targeting computers. Taiwan makes them. China knows this. It's not incidental to their strategy — it's central to it.

A Chinese-controlled Taiwan doesn't just mean a geopolitical loss. It means the United States military becomes dependent on Beijing for its own weapons systems within a decade. That's not a hypothetical from a think tank. That's the logical endpoint of the current trajectory.

I talked to a retired Army colonel at a veterans event in Texas last month. He's been out for eight years. Runs a small trucking company now. And even he said — unprompted — that the Taiwan semiconductor question keeps him up at night in a way that no other foreign policy issue does.

Taiwan's diplomats are in Washington working every room they can get into. They're not asking for American boys to die on their beaches. They're asking for weapons, support, deterrence — the signal that America is serious enough to make invasion too costly to attempt.

That's a reasonable ask. The question is whether Washington is capable of a reasonable answer right now.