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Can you elaborate on this a bit? From my perspective, Taiwan is a real, independent country and the United States has continued to tread carefully when we really should have made that incredibly clear back in the Reagan era when China didn't have the ability to do anything other squawk with embarrassed rage in response.
Why? What would the Americans and even the Taiwanese ever gain from this? Taiwan got very very wealthy from acting as the competent capitalist step-brother to China trying to explore capitalism. All this rhetoric about liberal democratic Taiwan against big bad oppressive China is quite new. Taiwan was also an oppressive military dictatorship for most of its history.
The main advantage of recognizing Taiwan as independent is it would make much harder for the PRoC to make kissy faces and get Taiwan to rejoin the mainland without a fight. That looked vaguely possible for a while, but I think at this point it's off the table.
So no advantage at all as you admit this was a “vague possibility” for a while and nothing more. And Taiwan was supposed to make a mortal enemy of their only geographic neighbour and the source of a great deal of its wealth, for this? That they would possibly voluntarily join PRC?
I am sorry but what you are saying doesn’t make any sense at all.
Taiwan IS a mortal enemy of their only geographic neighbor; nothing is likely to change that except the fall of one government or another. So considering that a consequence is not sensible.
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What do we get from reneging on the One China Policy?
In my view we got the best side of that deal, by far. We get to treat Taiwan as its own country in everything but name and state visits. We even get to have visa-free travel agreements, and embassies, though they're not called embassies. China gets to save face with Taiwan being "part of China" in name only.
Had we gone another way and ended up with hostilities the RoC would have certainly lost its "outlying islands" which are accessible by bridge from the mainland.
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Of course if PRC actually invades Taiwan it's a bad thing. It would destabilize the entire region, throw the economy into a tailspin, bring superpowers to conflict etc. EU's proper role would be mediation and conflict avoidance.
Still, formally, as far as I know, the Taiwan/China situation continues to be the same as before - the two countries agree that they're a part of "China", even though they - again, formally - disagree on whether the PRC or the ROC is the valid government. The same arrangement is confirmed by external parties, including the US, and even if the current Taiwan govt is led by the pro-independence side, they still haven't declared independence. As such, the situation is different from Ukraine. Again, while the US maintains One China policy, stuff like Pelosi making a very state-visit-like visit to Taiwan is a destabilizing factor in itself.
Of course, it must be admitted that I don't live in a vacuum myself, and for me, personally, well, Russia is right over the border and Taiwan is on the other side of the world. I just can't bring myself to care about these two situations to the same degree.
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