I reflexively replied to an excerpt of this earlier, before reading it. Now that I have finished it, I am absolutely repulsed. This is the most revolting, Neville Chamberlain fanboy, anti-American dreck I’ve read in ages. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2021-04-28/washington-avoiding-tough-questions-taiwan-and-china

And if it wasn’t enough that Glaser has essentially just repackaged “Peace in our time” as if craven cowardice were a new policy platform, it’s riddled with total fabrication.

Lines like “Japan lies beyond the effective reach of China’s A2/AD capabilities and could thus be supplied from its eastern ports.” I mean, this is demonstrably false. The DF-26 can reportedly reach every single inch of the Japanese homeland, and beyond.

The author somehow also contorts abandonment of Taiwan into something that would *enhance* our credibility in Tokyo and Seoul. In what world could that be true? Abandoning a 70 year commitment to a democracy of 23 million as a positive. Sure.

Glaser then turns to Taiwan’s utility as a military base for the PRC, saying we could magically bottle up Chinese submarines in Taiwan with American ASW forces. This is so nonsensical that I have to assume the author is totally unfamiliar with not only ASW, but with maps too.

He hypothesizes about a “grand bargain” in which we sell out 23 million Taiwanese for Chinese concessions in the South China Sea, but then says that’s impossible. But the blithe willingness to place 23 million necks under a jackboot is just gobsmacking.

This one I’ll include in its entirety. Can someone explain how either of these differs from the other, and how both don’t clearly describe some 1938-level cowardice?

He goes on to couch “retrenchment” as making it really clear (I mean it guys) to China that crushing Taiwan would violate international norms, but also making it clear we won’t act to stop them if they do.

Honestly, I finished this and felt physically ill. I guess we need to determine whether we, as a nation, feel like watching the PLA stomp the life from Taiwan while we watch from Japan.

And then, when the finger isn’t enough, I guess we continue to allow an expansionist China to take the hand - dominating the region and tearing apart the Asian peace we’ve worked so hard to maintain. Because we’re too afraid to face down the CCP.

I don’t know how you could sleep at night, knowing you’d greenlit a totalitarian government’s brutal extermination of a free democracy. Truly I don’t.