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Underpinning this discussion is an unexamined premise: that western foreign policy ought to be predicated upon managing the territorial loci of other States, in this case a formally democratic State and a formally communist State. The dispute on how to manage this conflict is a cynical betrayal of what the West is supposed to stand for.
In stipulation to the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence - and elsewhere - what ought to be considered as the object of western foreign policy is how best to serve the principles of individualism and social freedom, but that points in the opposite direction: that western foreign policy ought to be predicated upon dissassembling and/or limiting the power which other States exercise over their territorial loci.
Currently popular views on the security of Taiwanese people from PRC annexation focus on military and diplomatic means of dissuasion, yet all the while domestic political power remains centralized in Taiwan itself. Were PRC annexation to eventually occur, the task of imposing PRC rule over Taiwan would be made so much easier by the simple fact that the ROC government already exerts so much control over so many aspects of Taiwanese society (not least of which is the education system), and against which members of the current opposition party do not fight, but rather, await their turn in charge of the cane.
A radical program of depoliticization might do much more to dissuade PRC annexation than all the F-16s in the world. The most significant obstacle to this, as I see it, is neither the management of U.S., Australian or Chinese (Statist) interests, but the ideological vectors along which the now obese opposition party and their cling-ons slouch forward, rough, rich and obscenely self-satisfied.
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