Incredible lack of self awareness there to talk about bullies doing whatever they want. And yeah, as I recall, KMT was in the process of talks with the mainland regarding peaceful reunification in 2014 when US ran the sunflower revolution. The deal was that Taiwan would remain autonomous and have a representative in the mainland government. Basically, it would've been effectively maintaining the status quo, but Taiwan would officially renounce any talks of separatism and join the official government.

Given how things are going for US in Ukraine, I think it's pretty clear that US is in no position to take on China. US can't even keep up with Russia in terms of industrial production, and China absolutely dwarfs Russia in that regard. The main thing Ukraine showed is that it's industry and logistics that matter the most in a peer conflict. US would quickly run through its existing stocks trying to take on China, and then it would be completely fucked. Not only that, but as this article shows, a lot of supply chains Pentagon uses are ultimately dependent on China. In case of an open war, US would be cut off from many critical things it needs which would be catastrophic.

It looks like this is all finally starting to sink in for the people in the military and why we're starting to see articles like this popping up. This article is basically an open admission that if push comes to shove then US will not gamble its military position defending Taiwan. Everybody in Taiwan needs to take note of this, because if they have any delusions that US would provide them with any meaningful aid then they're absolutely delusional.

I imagine that the Ukraine experience will only harden this position within US military and the MIC. It's already becoming clear that US military power is much more limited than people thought, and that will affect US weapons sales. Gonna be hard to peddle stuff like Patriot when it's been shown to be completely ineffectual. US can still say that they haven't used their most advanced weapons in Ukraine, so those are still viable. However, if they went up against China and got their asses handed to them that would definitively expose that the emperor has no clothes to the whole world. Hence, direct war with China or Russia has to be avoided at all costs.

Finally, it's not possible to do what they're doing in Ukraine in Taiwan because it's an island. The west can pump weapons and supplies into Ukraine via the borders, but China will blockade the ports in Taiwan, and the only option to counter that is direct engagement. So, there's no possibility to turn that into a proxy war.