‘We have no choice’: Trump ally Bannon says US must defend Taiwan

A prominent political ally of Donald Trump says that the US must defend Taiwan if Chinese President Xi Jinping attempts to seize it.

Amid much doubt over whether a re-elected Trump would be prepared to wage war to defend Taiwan, Steve Bannon said in an interview that “we have no choice”.

Trump ally Steve Bannon says the US must defend Taiwan if Xi Jinping attempts to seize it.Credit: AP

The former chief strategist in the Trump White House and architect of the MAGA movement said that if Trump were restored to power, he would quickly settle the Russian war with Ukraine so the US could deal with China.

Bannon is not a spokesperson for Trump, nor a part of his formal campaign, but has described himself as a “general” in the “information war” for the re-election of Trump. He hosts a daily pro-Trump podcast called War Room.

President Joe Biden has said publicly four times that the US would defend Taiwan militarily, despite a formal policy of ambiguity.

But Trump has never made such a commitment and has implied that the US could not protect Taiwan from a military operation.

“Taiwan is 9500 miles away,” Trump said in July. “It’s 68 miles away from China.”

This provoked his former vice president, Mike Pence, into denouncing Trump’s “dangerously narrow understanding of America’s role in the world and ignorance of the far-reaching consequences of American disengagement. What is distance to a global superpower?”

Bannon, released from prison last week after serving four months for contempt of Congress, said in an interview with this masthead that the US would have to defend Taiwan for reasons of geopolitics and economics.

“The Chinese Communist Party is the central enemy of the West, of that there can be no doubt,” he said.

“Australia understands that, so does Japan, so does South Korea, and that’s got to be our focus.”

If Beijing attempted to annex Taiwan, as Xi Jinping has pledged to do, “we don’t have a choice” but to defend it, said Bannon.

“First up, we have alliance obligations to Japan, South Korea, Australia and India, four of our most important allies.”

He said those four countries would have to bear a much greater burden in defence of Taiwan unless the US joined the effort.

“Taiwan must be defended, and even if he [Trump] didn’t support the freedom and democracy of the Taiwanese people against this murderous dictatorship, there is the practicality that they make the large majority of advanced chips in the world, and these plants can’t be moved quickly.”

Trump has said that Taiwan “stole” the advanced microchip industry from the US.

Under Biden, the US has paid billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for the building of new factories – or fabs – now under construction in the US to reduce American reliance on Taiwan.

Bannon said that a mainland Chinese takeover of Taiwan, by cutting off the supply of semiconductors, would cut US GDP by 25 per cent.

“Not 1 per cent, not 2 per cent – 25 per cent. Our pivot to Asia has to be total. Quite frankly, I think it’s an open question militarily whether the [US] Seventh Fleet could pull it off right now or not,” said Bannon, who served as an officer in the US Navy for seven years.

In that capacity he visited Australia: “I have a deep love for your country,” he said. “You guys don’t realise how special you are.“

After the interview, Bannon sent an SMS message with a suggested a headline for the interview: “Trump return saves Australia.”

Steve Bannon worked as chief strategist to President Donald Trump before falling out of favour. Credit: AP

Bannon said that a re-elected Trump would “quickly negotiate a peace treaty with Russia and Ukraine” to end the war so that Washington could concentrate on the threat from China.

However, Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, wrote in his new book that it wasn’t so straightforward.

Writing in a scholarly capacity rather than an official one, Rudd said in On Xi Jinping that a US pullback from Ukraine could invite a Beijing assault on Taiwan.

“Xi will be electric to possible opportunities in relation to Taiwan, if, for example, a future US president were to withdraw military support for Ukraine’s defence against his ally, Vladimir Putin of Russia, thereby signalling a new and more isolationist American worldview.”

H.R. McMaster, a retired US army general who served as Trump’s national security adviser, accused Bannon to his face of being a “Russian agent”, a charge Bannon denied, while the pair were serving in the Trump White House.

McMaster wrote in his 2024 memoir that he insisted Bannon be excluded from meetings of the White House National Security Council.

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