They are. The last few years have caused a fairly major change in American's attitude towards China and Taiwan. In the past the US gave Taiwan half hearted support, some tech here, old destroyers there etc. Their military was a mix of obsolete hand me downs and domestically developed solutions. But we just sold them the latest and greatest F-16 variant. Just the other day a deal was signed to share technology to help Taiwan develop modern submarines. And there's a lot more going on behind the scenes no doubt.

Original step to help with manufacturing of the subs came when US brokered a deal with MHI 3 years ago. The somehow magically "retired" MHI engineers appeared in Taiwan to help in development

US does not have expertise to make modern non-nuclear subs. China can intimidate anyone in Europe not to sell. It was fortunate for Taiwan that Chinese pissed off Japan enough. Half a dozen of Soryu knockoffs can shut down PRC maritime trade if needed.

Trump's policies towards communist china were so bad that rex tilerson is on record as saying that at the end of his time working for trump we were farther behind with china than we were when he took office.

Biden has to repair our US hegemony. Trump sure hurt it a lot in spite of his anti-china rehtoric.

Selling weapons to taiwan doesn't contain china. We will send our own guns if a hot war is brewing there.

Taiwan recognition is not the same thing as meaningfully containing china. The TPP and asia pivot from obama was the last time that america seriously tried to restrain the rise of china.

> Selling weapons to taiwan doesn't contain china. We will send our own guns if a hot war is brewing there.

All of these states need to be strong enough to be a credible deterrent to invasion on their own.

US support is neither speedy nor certain. And a speedy capitulation by Taiwan compromises the US's ability to help even if willing.

You mean this? This is what you wanted? https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

Parent's point was the TPP was explicitly designed to economically isolate China from its neighbors.

Trade deals are ugly.

But if your geopolitical goal is to prevent Asia from moving closer to China, you can, and we have, done worse than the TPP.

Yeah, and then Trump pulled out of TPP, and last year everyone signed this deal, including China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Comprehensive_Economi...

And people still celebrate Trump for being tough on China...

I personally oppose the TPP on the intellectual property grounds et al brought up here - but its purpose to contain china is what I was highlighting.

Whoop de do. Yeah the copyright stuff sucks but a hot war sucks worse. Don't lose the forest for the trees here.

We should also be realistic about the strategic risks of having such a heavy dependency on semiconductor fabrication that's within easy reach of the PLA. Mitigating that risk is critical, and orthogonal to resisting the PRC's aggression towards the RoC.

Palestine too since we're pretending to care about the small guy.

This isn't an attempt to start a debate, just saying that the U.S. won't intervene unless there's material gain, regardless of what the voters want.

> This isn't an attempt to start a debate,

It's really more of a petrol bomb, yeah.

Realpolitik is what it is, but in this case standing up for the cause of Taiwanese freedom against (mainland) Chinese aggression aligns fairly well with the current political climate in the US. I'm willing to accidentally do the right thing if we have to.

Instead of worrying about Palestine, why not stop our own bullying in Central and South America, first?

Or both..