There is a low IQ meme going around amateur geopolitical circles that the US wants to turn Taiwan into “China’s Ukraine”. This is the typical kind of simplistic analysis you get when people fixate on whatever the current Broadway show is. It’s rather obviously wrong if you spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it.

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For starters, Taiwan is far, far more important to American hegemony than Ukraine will ever be. If the US were to lose Ukraine, that’s really not a big deal, there’s still Poland, the Baltics and half a dozen other cannon fodder countries to throw at Russia before American hegemony in Europe is under any serious threat.

There’s no Poland behind Taiwan. Guam is not a serious roadblock to China, and neither are any of the other small island outposts between Taiwan and Hawaii. If Beijing takes Taiwan then the entire American strategy to contain China would fail, and that is not something that Washington can just shrug off like it can with a defeat in Ukraine.

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Taiwan stands no chance without direct American intervention. Not a single serious military analyst believes that Taiwan can stand alone against China for longer than a few weeks tops. In other words, the US must confront China directly, it has no option to fight a proxy war and hope to win. American servicemen would have to die for Taiwan, unlike in Ukraine where it’s just faceless Ukrainians dying in a war that mostly benefits Washington.

The Df-7 is one of the only operational hypersonic weapons in the world. The US Navy has no weapon to reliably intercept these missiles, and it only takes one good hit to sink an American capital ship.

The American public is happy to support a war where no Americans die, they’re much less happy to support one where entire American carrier task forces can be sunk with all hands lost. In the CSIS wargames conducted in May 2023, even the best case scenarios saw the US losing 2 aircraft carriers and most of its ground based air assets in the Pacific within days of engaging the PLA.

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The US trade with Russia prior to the war was negligible, so losing that trade means little. The war has been enormously profitable not only for American defense contractors, but also for energy companies who have taken over from Russia in providing natural gas and petroleum to Europe. That’s a lot of very happy lobbyists in Washington.

The early months of the Pandemic led to shortage of everything in the US because China wasn’t exporting it. The Americans were literally pooping themselves without paper to wipe it. This is nothing compared to what would happen in the case of an actual war with China, even a victorious one.

The US trade with China is the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world, and arguably the most important for global supply chains. A complete break in this because of war would mean the collapse of the global supply web, and empty shelves in every American store and warehouse. Americans might not care that poor boys from Kentucky are getting torn apart by PLA missile strikes, but they will definitely care that they can’t shop for Xmas because Walmart has literally nothing left to sell them.

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The US set a trap for Russia in Ukraine. It created a condition where the Russians would have to act decisively, and the US spent the 8 years between 2014 to 2022 building up the Ukrainian army into the second largest and strongest army in Europe. It was a bear trap, and the Americans have happily trapped their bear, at least for the time being.

The proxy war in Ukraine has been a wet dream come true for the Washington elite. They get to make money hand over fist while risking nothing and sacrificing nothing. A war in Taiwan is the exact opposite: no money to be made, and everything is put at risk.

By contrast, the US has no interest in provoking China to invade Taiwan, and it has done little to beef up the Taiwanese military for such an engagement. The US donated hundreds of billions in weapons to Ukraine. It hasn’t given Taiwan a single bullet for free, in fact, it overcharges Taiwan for all the second rate hardware it sells to the island. Taiwan is a business opportunity for the US, not a beartrap.

ADDENDUM

A few brilliant American commentors are insisting that the DF-17 is a totally manageable threat and hypersonic weapons are no biggie.

To address this, I will speak to them in the one language they can’t comprehend: math.

The probability of successfully intercepting a single hypersonic weapon with a SM-2 (which is the only thing in the US Navy that has a chance in hell of intercepting a hypersonic weapon) is already very low. But let’s be generous and assume it’s 30% per missile.

If just 3 hypersonic missiles are fired at the same target then the chance for all 3 to be intercepted is 0.3^3 = 0.027, or 2.7% chance, and thus a 96.3% chance that at least one missile hits.

And what happens if a single DF-17 hits?

To put this into context, let’s compare the DF-17’s terminal kinetic energy to that of the most capable American anti-ship missile, the Harpoon II.

The kinetic energy is calculated 0.5 m * v ^2. You see that v (velocity) is squared, thus speed is what makes this equation go boom.

The Harpoon II, and has a speed of Mach 0.71 (240 m/s).

 If we assume 1000 kg warhead, that’s 29 megajoules of energy on target.

The slowest hypersonic weapon has a speed of Mach 5 (the bare minimum to be considered hypersonic) the same 1000 kg warhead would hit with 1,470 megajoules, or 51 times harder than the best American missile.

The DF-17 has an estimated terminal velocity of up to Mach 10

 so it hits with the force of 5,882 megajoules, or 203 Harpoon IIs.

I’m sure your carriers can survive a few hits from a 29 megajoule weapon, but 5,882 megajoules would be like getting hit by a Volkswagen-sized meteor.