The ledger Washington won’t read

Kua Kia Soong

The tired debate over the US’s military commitment to Taiwan asks the wrong question.

The obsessive focus on whether American carriers will steam into the Taiwan Strait ignores a far more urgent one: would any rational society willingly chain its survival to the most reckless empire of the modern age?

Inviting US defence is not a security guarantee. Rather, it is a suicide pact dressed in the stars and stripes.

Recent actions by the Donald Trump administration have finally demolished the fiction of Washington as self-appointed guardian of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”.

America’s global record tells a different story: one of shattered nations and countless graves. This is not a partisan critique but a factual ledger of destruction, live-streamed to a worldwide 21st-Century audience.

A toll of violence

The US record of violating international law and sovereign borders is unparalleled in the 21st Century. This is not mere rhetoric but a chronicle of interventions that have destabilised regions and cost millions of lives.

The “global war on terror”: Following the 9/11 attacks, the US launched invasions and interventions under a banner of “anticipatory self-defence”. This is a doctrine it deployed to bypass the UN Charter.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, based on fabricated intelligence, constitutes a textbook war of aggression. The costs remain staggering: estimates of violent deaths directly attributable to the war range from around 150,000 to well over 600,000. Some estimates of excess deaths, including indirect causes, run into the millions.

Rabid regime change: The US has a long, documented history of orchestrating or supporting the overthrow of governments, from the 1953 coup in Iran to the 2014 coup in Ukraine.

More recently, efforts to force regime change in Venezuela and Iran through crippling sanctions and support for opposition figures have been widely described as collective punishment, devastating both countries’ economies and societies.

Laboratories of modern warfare: Washington has also turned numerous countries into testing grounds for remote-control warfare.

For years, drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have killed thousands, with civilian deaths frequently rivalling or outnumbering their intended targets.

These operations violate national sovereignty and often constitute extrajudicial killings, the most recent cases being supposed “drug runners” in the Caribbean.

Complicity in Gaza: While the US is not the direct perpetrator in Gaza, its role is clear and indispensable.

By providing bombs, diplomatic cover and billions in annual military aid to Israel, Washington has been a direct enabler of a campaign that the International Court of Justice found plausibly genocidal.

The death toll in Gaza has surpassed many of the 21st Century’s most brutal conflicts: over 75,000 killed, the majority of them women and children.

This is a humanitarian catastrophe carried out with American weapons and shielded by an American veto at the UN Security Council.

Provoking wider war: The assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on Iraqi soil in 2020 was an act of war that flouted international law. Recent escalations, including US-Israeli attacks on Iran, continue this pattern of reckless provocation, risking a regional conflagration for geopolitical advantage.

This is the “rules-based order” the US claims to defend – a system where it alone writes and breaks the rules.

Taiwan – from ‘porcupine’ to powder keg

The recent multi-billion-dollar US arms package for Taiwan – featuring long-range missiles and thousands of kamikaze drones – is not about defence but about transformation.

The strategy, openly discussed in US defence circles, is to turn Taiwan into a “porcupine” or a “hellscape”, a fortified island meant to bleed China dry in any conflict.

This is a predator’s bargain. The US gains a strategically located “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to contain its primary rival, while Taiwan is groomed for sacrifice, just like so many other US client states. Every weapons shipment tightens the noose, increasing the likelihood of a catastrophic miscalculation.

Taiwan’s current administration, by committing to a $40bn arms procurement plan, is gambling with the island’s future under the delusion that American missiles equal security. In reality, it is building a powder keg on a fault line.

Beijing’s response has been predictable and severe: sanctions on US defence firms and a state of heightened military readiness.

Each US provocation shrinks Taiwan’s strategic space, proving that American “support” does not deter conflict but accelerates it.

The right side of history

The real question for the people of Taiwan is not about military capability, but about destiny. Do they wish to become the next chapter in the US empire’s playbook, following the paths of Iraq, Libya and Gaza?

True security cannot be purchased from Lockheed Martin. It can only be built on stable regional relations and a rejection of the siren song of foreign intervention. The most dangerous threat to Taiwan’s peace may not be across the strait, but the one offering a helping hand from across the Pacific.

More pointedly, as descendants of a 5,000-year-old Chinese civilisation that endured a century of humiliation, do the people of Taiwan truly want to stand on the right side of history, having witnessed America’s record as the world’s rogue imperial power and its grisly consequences?

Dr Kua Kia Soong, a former MP, is the director of human rights group Suaram.

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