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Underpinning this discussion is an unexamined premise: that a State's loci of control is a function with security as an output (the absence of armed conflict between States). The dispute thereupon founded is over what type of diplomatic and military inputs will compute into security, and which will not.
Yet the premise is flawed because it is one dimensional.
Viewed from another perspective, the Statist function also has insecurity as an output (institutional and organizational failure), and this is the insecurity consequent to the systemic coercion on which all States, democratic or otherwise, rely.
Thus the discussion misses an important aspect of the problem: even if a switch to "strategic clarity" regarding Taiwan would compute security, it would nonetheless also compute insecurity by leaving in place the institutional vectors by which non-democratic political control could be transmitted to Taiwan.
Moles is merely arguing that maintaining the means of maintaining the status quo is unsustainable, whilst I am arguing that maintaining the status quo (or Statist quo) is unsustainable. Rather, western foreign policy should be predicated upon dissassembling and/or limiting the power which other States exercise over their territorial loci. However, that imperative is no less applicable in the west itself.
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Is that any better I wonder? I will post it anyway.
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