So the Formosan sparrows are chirping again. This time, they have decided that a vacuous warning from a disgraced American reality television star is their ticket to international legitimacy. Taiwan’s latest insistence on independence, following Donald Trump’s feckless grumbling about the island’s defence, is a farce of historical proportions. It is a moment that would make a Victorian colonial administrator weep into his gin and tonic, not for the tragedy of it all, but for the sheer absurdity.
Let us be clear: the United Kingdom’s reaffirmation of the One China policy is not a diplomatic gesture. It is a survival instinct. We have spent centuries learning the bitter lesson that empires collapse when they overreach their metaphysical grasp. The British Empire, like Rome before it, crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions and the illusion that distant provinces could be held by force of will alone. The current government, however venal and short-sighted it may be, understands that Taiwan is not a cause worth a single British rifle. The Chinese government, for all its authoritarian brutishness, has a unity of purpose that our squabbling parliamentarians could never muster.
And yet, the Taiwanese leadership persists in this adolescent fantasy. They imagine that a few American missile systems and a half-hearted speech from a man who cannot accept electoral defeat will shield them from the inevitable. This is the intellectual decadence I have warned about for years. A culture that mistakes bravado for courage, that believes historical inevitability can be defied by a referendum, is a culture already in decline. The Taiwanese remind me of the late Roman aristocrats who built villas in the path of barbarian hordes, convinced their gold and Latin poetry would save them.
Trump’s intervention is particularly galling. The man, a grotesque caricature of American exceptionalism, treats international relations as a real-estate negotiation. He demands payment for protection, as if sovereignty were a commodity to be auctioned. This is the moral bankruptcy of the modern West: we have forgotten that nations are built on blood, soil, and shared sacrifice, not on quarterly earnings reports. The American Empire, much like the British before it, is hollowing out from within, distracted by its own celebrity culture and tribal divisions. To entrust the security of a fragile island to such a chaotic power is not strategy. It is suicide.
Our own government’s stance is correct, but for all the wrong reasons. The Foreign Office mumbles about ‘stability’ and ‘international law,’ when what it really means is: ‘We cannot afford another imperial overstretch.’ The Suez Crisis taught us that. The Falklands taught us that. We are a diminished power pretending to be a global arbiter, and we know that any flirtation with Taiwanese independence would be a declaration of war we are not equipped to win. So we cling to the One China policy like a lifebuoy, pretending it is a moral stance rather than a pragmatic surrender.
What the Taiwanese nationalists refuse to accept is that history does not care for their feelings. China will reunify, as it has always reunified after periods of fracture, because the Chinese state is defined by its territorial integrity in a way that the West can scarcely comprehend. Our nations are contractual; theirs is familial. You do not secede from a family. You are either embraced or expelled. The Taiwanese, in their delusion, have chosen expulsion.
I predict, with grim certainty, that the current bluster will fade into quieter accommodations. The Americans will extract their tribute, the British will issue more anodyne statements, and the Chinese will continue their patient economic and military encirclement. The real tragedy is not the loss of Taiwanese independence, which was always a fiction, but the loss of British intellectual honesty. We used to understand power. We used to understand the follies of hubris. Now we are merely commentators on our own irrelevance, watching the next act of imperial decay from the comfort of our armchairs.
So, by all means, insist on independence. Declare it on Twitter. Stage a referendum. But remember the lesson of every fallen empire from Rome to Vienna: they who ignore the rhythms of history find themselves crushed by its wheel. Taiwan will not be the exception. It will be just another footnote in the long, grim story of nationalist folly.
