Excellent comment!

When I was in China, one of the hopeful things I saw was the coverage of the Montenegro Independence referendum on CCTV9: they covered it accurately and objectively. China’s state media (at least in English, but I believe also Chinese) reported that a province of a country voted for freedom, and that such a vote will quickly result in independence, a UN seat, etc.

If this is Beijing’s new strategy, we should be happy. If the CCP places hope in a KMT pro-Beijing stance, that’s fine. If the Taiwanese people elect the such a government, fine.

The important thing is to guide China towards democratic norms, and away from dictatorial government. We do the Chinese people no favors by being ambiguous in our lessons. We should not jump ahead of Taipei, but nor should we let Taipei be militarily bullied by China.

The US should not have as policy that a smaller Democratic nation should be joined to a larger non-democratic nation.

If the PRC truly wants to connect and be part of globilzation and create a prosperous autocracy, they can mumble about Taiwan, but they won’t act.

If the PRC acts against Taiwan then the PRC leadership really just wants to be a slow-motion-growing empire.

Taiwan should have a 4GW counter-PRC deterent much like you described in a prior post that would make use of small networks of high-tech infiltrators.

I don’t see any moral reason to throw Taiwan to the PRC for appeasement purposes. Appeasement (signals of weakness or lack of will) breeds agression.

First, so as there is no musunderstanding, the US should have an overt policy of: “Let the Taiwanese determine there own fate…and they want independent democracy.”

Next, the US should lead the effort to create APSO (Asia/Pacific Security Organization) with members: US, PRC, Aussies, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and maybe India. This should worry military-wise about North Korea and Islamofascism, and be the arm of state-building / institution-building / sysadmin / etc type activities.