The list of elevated tail-risk outcomes under a second Trump administration is quite long. Many of those disaster scenarios are versions of Donald Trump’s erratic first term, when he pushed up against democratic norms and played footsie with Vladimir Putin. But an underrated risk is that he emboldens China to invade Taiwan.
Taiwan is a democracy off the coast of China. It used to be part of China until the Chinese civil war left it de facto independent. The Chinese Communist Party has never recognized Taiwan’s independence. And the CCP has taken an increasingly belligerent posture toward its neighbors, including Taiwan.
The United States has always adopted a posture of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan — which is to say it has supported Taiwan’s defense without formally committing itself to go to war in the event of an invasion. That strategy, while far from perfect, has succeeded in maintaining Taiwan’s independence and preventing war.
Trump, however, is blowing it to smithereens. In an interview with Bloomberg, he implied the United States under his presidency would not defend the island from a Chinese attack. “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” he explained. “It’s 68 miles away from China.”
And he fleshed out his reasons for refusing to defend Taiwan using his familiar gangster logic:
“Taiwan took our chip business from us. I mean, how stupid are we? They took all of our chip business. They’re immensely wealthy … I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy. Why? Why are we doing this?”
The traditional reasons for preventing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan include supporting democracy, which is if anything a negative in Trump’s mind (he admires dictators of all stripes, very much including the Chinese Communist Party). The most important reason is to avoid bloodshed, chaos, and disruption.
The United States has maintained a global peace for decades. That era has obviously fallen far short of perfect and involved more than a few cases of military overreach. But the rules-based international order has nonetheless resulted in vastly fewer wars and deaths than the eras that preceded it.
Installing a president who neither understands nor believes in that system, and who increasingly feels emboldened to defy the traditional Republicans who surrounded him like court-appointed guardians in his first term, brings risks of terrifying breakdowns. The list has grown so long it is difficult to keep track of them all. But opening the door to a potential war between China and Taiwan alone is enough to disqualify him.
