Taiwan Is the Crisis America Cannot Afford to Miss

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On March 3 and March 5, Undersecretary of War Elbridge Colby appeared before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. In both sessions, lawmakers asked the same question: What is the current state of America’s ability to defend Taiwan?

In the Senate, Colby said he would follow up with the committee with specific details. Forty-eight hours later, in the House, members pointedly noted that this was the same answer given two days earlier—and that nothing concrete had followed.

The most common rejoinder—that TSMC’s Arizona facility has already secured America’s semiconductor future—does not survive contact with production data. Arizona currently manufactures on a 4-nanometer process.

Taiwan’s Kaohsiung facility began mass-producing the much more advanced 2-nanometer chips in January 2026 using an architecture no other foundry can match at volume. The U.S. Commerce secretary acknowledged in January that 95 percent of the chips America depends on are still made there.

Advanced packaging—the critical final assembly step for weapons guidance systems and AI accelerators—remains almost entirely in Taiwan, a five-to-seven-year capability gap that no Arizona investment has yet begun to close.

The production response cannot match the consumption rate on any near-term timeline. The Trump administration announced framework agreements with major defense contractors to quadruple the output of key interceptor systems—a genuine signal of intent.

But framework agreements are not contracts, contracts are not components, and components are not interceptors. Independent analysts place the full production quadrupling at seven years, at a minimum. The United States currently produces approximately 11 THAAD interceptors per month. Closing that gap requires sustained investment across the defense industrial base, which cannot be ordered to scale overnight.

Iran’s operational pattern compounds the challenge. Cheaper systems appear to have been deployed first—forcing high-value interceptors against low-cost targets at exchange ratios that favor the attacker. Iran’s more advanced solid-fuel missiles are now appearing in greater numbers as the initial wave subsides. Underground facilities hardened into mountain geology have proved resilient to past campaigns. The attrition of Iranian capability is real. What remains is also real.

Pentagon supply chain reviews have flagged critical single-source dependencies in the production of solid rocket fuels and guidance systems. China produces approximately 75 percent of the world’s neodymium-iron-boron magnets—the materials on which missile guidance systems, fin actuators, and weapons control surfaces fundamentally depend. These are not abstractions. They are chokepoints.

The Russian regime benefits directly. Its 2026 budget was built on an assumed oil price of $59 per barrel—a level it was struggling to maintain before Feb. 28. Russian crude now trades well above that, generating tens of billions in additional annual revenue that funds military operations in Ukraine that the Western alliance has spent three years trying to constrain.

The Trump administration has considered easing sanctions on Russian oil to bring down global prices—which would enrich Russia while weakening the sanctions architecture designed to isolate it.

The Chinese regime maintains a position of strategic comfort. Roughly 40 to 45 percent of China’s oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz—a meaningful dependency offset by a strategic petroleum reserve providing 140 to 180 days of import cover, Iranian oil continuing to flow to China, and Russian pipelines running east uninterrupted.

The United States is the world’s largest oil producer, yet American consumers pay above $5 per gallon in many markets because oil is a global commodity—domestic production does not insulate households from global supply disruptions.

Allies are absorbing compounding pressure. Taiwan—the subject of those unanswered congressional questions—faces a direct energy squeeze: With 21 percent of its total energy supply from LNG and 26 percent of that sourced from the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz closure compresses Taiwan’s power generation and industrial base in real time.

South Korea accepted THAAD on its soil in 2017 under extraordinary duress—China imposed billions in economic sanctions in retaliation—only to see interceptors redeployed to the Middle East now.

Japan, Australia, and others are drawing their own conclusions.

PLA analysts are mapping redeployments from the Indo-Pacific and watching the USS Tripoli—a big-deck amphibious assault ship normally based in Japan—sail south past Taiwan through the Luzon Strait toward a different war.

Chinese military publications have already issued five formal assessments of the campaign within its first week. Beijing has been collecting combat data indirectly since 2022 through Russia’s operations in Ukraine, where Chinese components flow into the Russian war machine, providing empirical performance data on Chinese hardware against Western systems. Ukraine was one laboratory. Iran is another.

Washington has now provided two consecutive real-world demonstrations of how American precision warfare performs under sustained pressure—and where it reaches its limits.

China is not simply another regional competitor. It is the only power with the economic scale, industrial capacity, technological ambition, and military modernization program capable of challenging the United States across multiple domains simultaneously.

It is a communist regime that holds power through coercion—imprisoning millions for their faith, persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Christians, and Tibetans, and silencing every voice that challenges its authority.

The conditions for an exit exist. If Washington chooses to consolidate its gains and stand down, the Strait of Hormuz does not stay closed indefinitely—commerce has its own gravity. In economics as in warfare, the most expensive error is not the initial miscalculation. It is the decision to deepen commitment in order to justify it. The sooner gains are consolidated and attention redirected, the more capacity remains for the commitment that cannot be deferred.

The United States does not need to defeat the CCP. It needs only to remain strategically coherent long enough for China to collapse under its own contradictions. That means keeping alliances intact, arsenals capable, and commitments credible—above all, the commitment to Taiwan.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that U.S. involvement allows him to do what he hoped to do for 40 years. The CCP has waited 77 years since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949; Taiwan has been the unfinished revolution, the open wound, the promise deferred.

Washington is not obligated to accelerate Beijing’s timeline. It is obligated not to hand Beijing the golden window.

The hearing rooms sounded the alarm. Twice. The question is whether the cost of ignoring it—in missiles, in alliances, in Taiwan’s narrowing window, and in the strategic advantage accumulating in Beijing—is visible enough yet to change the calculation. For Taiwan’s sake, and for America’s, it needs to be.