America's Taiwan Gap Utterly Exposed At Trump-Xi Summit

That is not a moral statement. It is a statement about distance, logistics and the balance of conventional military power in the First Island Chain. The honest assessments by serious analysts, not the wargame press releases, have for some time pointed in the same direction.

That is, in any near-term Taiwan contingency, the People's Liberation Army would fight at home with mass and interior lines, while the US would fight at the end of supply chains stretching across an ocean, from bases in Japan and Guam that are themselves within range of Chinese missiles.

Trump, for all the inelegance of his vocabulary, appears to grasp this.“I don't think they'll do anything when I'm here,” he said of a Chinese move on Taiwan.“When I'm not here, I think they might, to be honest with you.”

Translated out of Trumpese, this is something close to the position long argued by foreign policy realists: deterrence by personal unpredictability for as long as possible, accommodation thereafter, and certainly no war for an island a hundred miles from China and seven thousand miles from California.

Diplomatic statements should be read for what they include, but also for what they leave out. The Chinese readout of the summit placed Taiwan at the center of the conversation. The American readout, according to multiple reports, did not mention Taiwan at all.

This is not an oversight. It is a quiet acknowledgment that the US, having just fought one war in the Persian Gulf and presiding over an open-ended security entanglement in Europe, is in no mood to advertise a third front in the Western Pacific.

The framework Xi proposed and Trump accepted in principle -“constructive strategic stability” between two great powers - is, whatever the diplomats wish to call it, the language of accommodation. The Chinese are already treating it as the operating doctrine of US-China relations for the rest of this decade.

In Washington, this will be presented by Trump's critics as weakness. In Beijing, it is being presented as historic. Both are partly right. What it actually is, however, is something more interesting: the slow, embarrassed admission that the unipolar moment is over and that the US must once again live in a world in which other great powers have spheres of vital concern.

None of this means Taiwan is doomed, and none of it means Washington should hand Beijing the keys.

The pragmatic course, the one this column has argued for some time, has always been the maintenance of the awkward but durable architecture set up in 1979: the One China policy, robust unofficial relations, arms sales sufficient for self-defense, and the deliberate ambiguity about American intervention that has helped keep the peace across the Strait for nearly half a century.

What is dangerous is neither realism nor restraint, but the in-between posture that Washington has drifted into since 2016: rhetorical commitments that grow ever more sweeping, military preparations that remain insufficient, and a bipartisan habit of treating Taiwan less as a place than as a symbol in America's larger ideological contest with China.

That is the worst of all worlds. It invites Beijing to test American resolve precisely where American resolve is weakest, while encouraging Taipei to believe in guarantees Washington has not in fact made.