The government of Taiwan does not report into the Chinese Central Government like in Hong Kong. It's controlled by an independent government on disputed land.
What matters is CCP wants it. The disputed land status will be used as a pretense. The US won't dare to start a war and will write off the loss. Other countries won't even dare to comment on the situation.
"The US won't dare to start a war and will write off the loss."
This kind of thinking gave us the First World War.
If the US stops protecting Taiwan and allows China to take it by force, it can kiss their credibility worldwide goodbye, dismantling its entire network of allies built over decades in one fell swoop.
Not impossible, but world empires do not generally do such things unless they are very, very weakened.
The US can't do much about this today and in ten years it will be too busy with internal squabbles about which admiral is more politically correct. CCP has personal reasons to axe Taiwan. When the CCP fought the original "feudal" government, leaders of the latter fled to Taiwan. The island reminds CCP about its past. The capitalist nature of Taiwan is another reason: it's undermining the CCP ideology. TSMC is a distant third economic reason.
The US starts wars all the time. The CCP would have made a grave error in judgement if it thought this would be any different. If the US walked away from Taiwan that puts South Korea, Japan and other allies in SE Asia at risk. Not going to happen.
The US rarely starts wars with anyone who can hurt it. Even a conventional war with China would be extremely different than anything the US has seen since WW2 and in some ways this would be worse. Do you think the modern US has the stomach for multiple sunken aircraft carriers, WW2 or Korean war style casualties, etc. all the while with the US home front without products it cannot live without? It would completely destroy the US as we know it, with a ruined economy and a many decades setback. Not much of a victory compared to the loss of Taiwan.
You say this like China wouldn’t suffer. Their economy will come to a screeching halt when they have no one to export their goods to. The CCP would lose whatever faith their citizens have left in them.
That is you reading something in it I didn't write. The point is that a won war will utterly destroy the winner too. Sure, the looser wil loose. That isn't surprising and I didn't think it needed saying.
They said the same thing about HK: "If the US walked away from HK that puts Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and other allies in SE Asia at risk. Not going to happen"
That's a bit different. While China did for all intents and purposes violate the agreement it had signed in the 90s nobody would question the legitimacy of the handover itself. Hong Kong of course doesn't have the American military machine deployed within its borders either. Having driven by some of those bases I'm kind of in awe - and that's just the stuff on public roads.
It doesn't really matter in the big picture. How would the US look in a month or six if we by war stopped all products from China today? The US would become unrecognisable. The economy would be so destroyed it would hardly be a victory no matter what casualties says on the two sides. Even if we nuked some of our own cities we would be better off than after winning a conventional war against China. No, a war against China is unwinnable if the US of today needs to be there post-war.
How would china look with no money coming in for six months? China is incapable of standing on their own. Propped up by IT theft and copycat companies funded by the CCP. Dry up the money and it’ll be the USSR pt 2 in China.
"If the US gets involved, it needs to pass Congress"
Theoretically, yes. Practically, the last war formally declared by Congress was in June 1942 against Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania. Since then, all the military conflicts that the US took part in were driven by the executive.
