What happens if China moves on Taiwan?: Accommodation realists
The spreadsheet at the bottom of every scenario
The CSIS war game: two aircraft carriers sunk, nine hundred aircraft destroyed, thousands of American dead, Japan’s Okinawa bases devastated, TSMC’s fabs inoperable, global recession. We read the results the way a cost accountant reads a project that came in on time and six hundred percent over budget.
The US has not fought a peer naval engagement since 1945. The assumption that the American public sustains a war in the Western Pacific after two carriers go down — with live footage on every phone, with tariff-inflated prices doubling overnight — is an assumption dressed as a fact.
Our position is the one nobody says at a podium: explore a negotiated arrangement preserving Taiwan’s democratic governance, economic autonomy, and security partnerships while offering Beijing enough symbolic closure on sovereignty to remove the invasion rationale. The model is not surrender. It is the kind of diplomacy that produced the Hong Kong handover agreement before Beijing gutted it.
The obvious objection is that Beijing gutted it. Any arrangement needs enforcement the Joint Declaration lacked: international guarantees, economic tripwires, semiconductor leverage structured so violation costs more than compliance.
The deeper question: if defense destroys TSMC’s fabs, we are not defending the semiconductor supply. If it devastates Taiwan’s infrastructure, we are not defending prosperity. The twenty-three million people on Taiwan did not sign up to test whether American exceptionalism still functions as a load-bearing beam. Every economic system rests on physical foundations. Those foundations do not survive the war that is supposed to save them.
Where we concede ground: Every precedent where a smaller entity negotiated with Beijing ended with Beijing rewriting terms.
What would change our mind: A successful defense of Taiwan with under 500 American casualties and critical infrastructure intact.
Read the full synthesis: What happens if China moves on Taiwan?