Taiwan Is the Crisis America Cannot Afford to Miss

Taiwan is the crisis America cannot afford to miss.

Commentary

On March 3 and March 5, under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby appeared before the Senate and House

Armed Services committees. In both sessions, lawmakers asked the same question,

what is the current state of America's ability to defend Taiwan?

In the Senate, Colby said he would follow up with the committee with specific details.

48 hours later, in the House, members pointedly noted that this was the same answer given

two days earlier, and that nothing concrete had followed. The Pentagon's new national defense

strategy does not specifically mention Taiwan. Congress had already shown its concern by

tying 25 percent of Pentagon travel funding to the delivery of a credible five-year Taiwan

defense roadmap. That plan has not been delivered. The war has.

Why Taiwan and why Arizona is not the answer? For decades, U.S. strategists have described Taiwan as

an unsinkable aircraft carrier dominating the Western Pacific. The island anchor sea lanes,

intelligence networks, and regional deterrence. It is also a democracy of 23 million people

and the world's primary source of the most advanced semiconductors on which the American economy

and military increasingly depend. The most common rejoinder that TSMC's Arizona facility has

already secured America's semiconductor future does not survive contact with production data.

Arizona currently manufactures on a foreign-enometer process.

Taiwan's Kaosheng facility began mass producing the much more advanced two-nanometer chips in

January 2026 using an architecture no other foundry can match at volume. The U.S. Commerce

Secretary acknowledged in January that 95 percent of the chips America depends on are still made

there. Advanced packaging, the critical final assembly step for weapons guidance systems and AI

accelerators, remains almost entirely in Taiwan, a five-to-seven-year capability gap that no

Arizona investment has yet begun to close. The loss of Taiwan would not be a regional setback.

It would be a civilizational one, disrupting the technology supply chain on which modern

economies and militaries depend, shifting the Indo-Pacific balance of power for decades,

and extinguishing a democracy that chose its own future. A crisis would not wait for any transition

to finish, it would end it on day one. Strategic trade-offs, high-end weapons, finite stockpiles.

While Washington focuses on the current campaign, it is expending the very capabilities

a Taiwan defense would require. Precision weapons, Tomahawks, Patriot Interceptors,

Thad Systems, long-range air-launched missiles are being consumed at rates that strain

inventories built over decades. The production response cannot match the consumption rate on any

near-term timeline. The Trump administration announced framework agreements with major defense

contractors to quadruple the output of key interceptor systems, a genuine signal of intent.

But framework agreements are not contracts, contracts are not components, and components are not

interceptors. Independent analysts place the full production quadrupling at seven years,

at a minimum. The United States currently produces approximately 11 bad interceptors per month,

closing that gap requires sustained investment across the defense industrial base,

which cannot be ordered to scale overnight. Iran's operational pattern compounds the challenge.

Sheeper systems appear to have been deployed first, forcing high-value interceptors

against low-cost targets at exchange ratios that favor the attacker.

Iran's more advanced solid-fuel missiles are now appearing in greater numbers as the initial wave

subsides. Underground facilities hardened into mountain geology have proved resilient to past

campaigns. The attrition of Iranian capability is real. What remains is also real.

Pentagon supply chain reviews have flagged critical single-source dependencies in the

production of solid rocket fuels and guidance systems. China produces approximately 75 percent

of the world's neodymium iron boron magnets, the materials on which missile guidance systems,

fin actuators, and weapons control surfaces fundamentally depend. These are not abstractions.

They are choke points. There is a further circularity worth noting

many of the weapons being fired depend on ships made in Taiwan. The very place these weapons

would be needed most in a future conflict. The unintended winners. If these costs were decisively

weakening America's primary adversaries, the calculation would look different. The early scorecard

points in a different direction. The Russian regime benefits directly. Its 2026 budget was built

on an assumed oil price of $59 per barrel, a level it was struggling to maintain before February 28th.

Russian crude now trades well above that, generating tens of billions in additional annual revenue

that funds military operations in Ukraine that the Western Alliance has spent three years trying

to constrain. The Trump administration has considered easing sanctions on Russian oil to bring down

global prices, which would enrich Russia while weakening the sanctions' architecture design to

isolate it. The Chinese regime maintains a position of strategic comfort. Roughly 40 to 45 percent

of China's oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormas, a meaningful dependency offset by a

strategic petroleum reserve providing 140 to 180 days of import cover, Iranian oil continuing to

flow to China, and Russian pipelines running east uninterrupted. Iran is reportedly now considering

allowing passage through the Strait only for vessels trading in Chinese Yuan. China gains leverage

it did not previously hold, without firing a shot, without spending a dollar, and without losing

a single soldier. Strategic costs at home and among allies. The costs of the Iran war are falling

unevenly, and the distribution does not favor the commitments that matter most.

Higher energy prices ripple through transportation, manufacturing, and household budgets.

The United States is the world's largest oil producer, yet American consumers pay above $5 per

gallon in many markets because oil is a global commodity. Domestic production does not

insulate households from global supply disruptions. Allies are absorbing compounding pressure.

Taiwan, the subject of those unanswered congressional questions, faces a direct energy squeeze,

with 21 percent of its total energy supply from LNG and 26 percent of that sourced from the

Middle East, the Strait of Hormas closure compresses Taiwan's power generation and industrial

base in real time. South Korea accepted that on its soil in 2017 under

extraordinary duress, China imposed billions in economic sanctions in retaliation, only to see

interceptors redeployed to the Middle East now. Japan, Australia, and others are drawing their

own conclusions. Alliances endure. But when the moment came to assemble a coalition to reopen

the Strait, no country publicly committed forces. China is counting every missile.

In planning centers far from public view, people's Liberation Army analysts are doing arithmetic.

They are tracking, intercept by intercept, how many FAD missiles the United States has fired.

They are modeling burn rates against known production figures and calculating how long American

stockpiles can sustain current operations. PLA analysts are mapping redeployments from the

Indo-Pacific and watching the USS Tripoli, a big deck amphibious assault ship normally based in

Japan, sail south past Taiwan through the Luzon Strait toward a different war. Chinese military

publications have already issued five formal assessments of the campaign within its first week.

Beijing has been collecting combat data indirectly since 2022 through Russia's

operations in Ukraine, where Chinese components flow into the Russian war machine, providing empirical

performance data on Chinese hardware against Western systems. Ukraine was one laboratory. Iran is

another. Washington has now provided two consecutive real-world demonstrations of how American

precision warfare performs under sustained pressure and where it reaches its limits. China is not

simply another regional competitor. It is the only power with the economic scale, industrial

capacity, technological ambition, and military modernization program capable of challenging the

United States across multiple domains simultaneously. It is a communist regime that holds power

through coercion, imprisoning millions for their faith, persecuting fallen-gone practitioners,

wegoors, Christians, and Tibetans, and silencing every voice that challenges its authority.

The Chinese regime is America's primary adversary. And while Washington's attention is elsewhere,

those watching eyes are not idle. The current conflict is an extraordinary gift to Beijing,

a comprehensive demonstration of American capabilities and constraints delivered in real time,

at no cost, no risk, and no sacrifice on its part, while its own strategic reserves remain

intact and its leverage over critical supply chains quietly grows. Declare victory, the next

mission cannot wait. If the Trump administration's stated objectives have been achieved, nuclear

facilities disrupted, missile production capacity degraded, deterrence against Iranian

adventurism restored, then the case for consolidating those gains and pivoting attention is not a

council of weakness. It is strategic clarity. Declaring victory is not retreat. It is the

recognition that the next mission is the one that matters most. The conditions for an exit exist.

If Washington chooses to consolidate its gains and stand down, the street of Hormuz does not

stay closed indefinitely, commerce has its own gravity. In economics as in warfare, the most

expensive error is not the initial miscalculation. It is the decision to deepen commitment in order

to justify it. The sooner gains are consolidated and attention redirected, the more capacity remains

for the commitment that cannot be deferred. Every additional week is not a step toward recovering

what was spent. It is a new expenditure against a diminishing return paid ultimately by the strategic

priority that has gone unanswered in two hearing rooms. Don't hand-baging the golden window.

The Chinese Communist Party is not an invincible adversary. It is a system accumulating the

contradictions that have brought authoritarian regimes to ruin, demographic collapse, a property

crisis destroying household wealth, and institutions hallowed by systemic corruption.

The United States does not need to defeat the CCP. It needs only to remain strategically

coherent long enough for China to collapse under its own contradictions. That means keeping alliances

intact, arsenals capable, and commitments credible, above all, the commitment to Taiwan.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that US involvement allows him to do what he hope to do

for 40 years. The CCP has waited 77 years since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.

Taiwan has been the unfinished revolution, the open wound, the promise deferred.

Washington is not obligated to accelerate Beijing's timeline. It is obligated not to hand-baging

the golden window. The hearing room sounded the alarm. Twice. The question is whether the cost

of ignoring it in missiles, in alliances, in Taiwan's narrowing window, and in the strategic

advantage accumulating in Beijing is visible enough yet to change the calculation. For Taiwan's sake

and for America's, it needs to be.