Your columnist Richard Halloran ("The Rising East," July 15) wrote a fallacious article about U.S. relations with Taiwan that needs refuting.

He mentioned correctly that President Bush claimed in 2001 that the U.S. would do "whatever it takes" to protect Taiwan. This came as a surprise to most analysts of U.S.-China relations, because it went against the official U.S. position held ever since 1979, when Washington established diplomatic relations with mainland China, cut off diplomatic relations with the government on Taiwan and thereby nullified the Mutual Defense Treaty with the latter.

What Halloran did not mention about Bush's statement was that the State Department promptly took the air out of it by announcing that there was no change in U.S. policy regarding Taiwan. Bush endured this embarrassment without demurrer.

The background is that Congress in 1979, in reaction to the administration's partial abandonment of Taiwan, had passed the Taiwan Relations Act, by which it tried to preserve the earlier commitment to defend the island. But the furthest that Congress managed to go was to declare that the U.S. would consider any use of force by Beijing against Taiwan to be "of grave concern to the United States" and would "provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character." This of course fell far short of committing America to defend Taiwan.

Halloran laments that today "American support for far-away Taiwan is dwindling, making it possible that the U.S. might not help defend it against China." He outrageously likens this "possibility" to Britain's appeasement of Hitler in 1938 by failing to aid Czechoslovakia in the face of German invasion.

This Munich analogy ignores the fundamental difference between Czechoslovakia's legal claim to international military support and Taiwan's alleged legal claim to such. The difference is that Czechoslovakia was an internationally recognized independent country, which was victimized by Nazi aggression, whereas Taiwan today is recognized by only a small fraction of the nations of the world as an independent country. Nor would it be legitimate to classify Chinese action againt Taiwan as aggression.

Accordingly, Beijing has steadfastly refused, despite perennial pressures from Washington, to give up the right to use force against Taiwan in case of such proclamation. In American history, President Lincoln, when faced with secession by the Southern Confederacy, similarly asserted the right to use force to prevent it and of course exercised that right.

China's claim to ownership of Taiwan goes back at least 350 years, when the Chinese military defeated the rebel Kozzinga in his last stronghold on Taiwan. China at the same time ousted Portuguese and Dutch colonial outposts on what the Portuguese called Formosa. China thus took possession of the island, which had been settled by mainland Chinese fishermen and farmers for centuries.

It is true that China lost control of Taiwan in 1895 when Japan defeated China and annexed the island. This lasted until the end of World War II, at which time Japan was required by the Allied powers to give back to China all territories it had "stolen from China," including Taiwan. These blunt words were spoken not by Chinese Communists but by Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek at the Cairo Conference.

Taiwan was thus returned to China in 1945, governed at the time by the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. When the Nationalists lost the civil war on the mainland, they retreated to Taiwan, where they enjoyed protection by the U.S. Seventh Fleet until 1972, when President Nixon began the process of re-establishing relations with Beijing. Had it not been for this protection, plus U.S. militay sales all the way to the present, Taiwan would long since have been reunited with the mainland.

As things now stand, the president of the island government is edging toward proclamation of Taiwanese independence.

China has been building up air and naval forces and cruise missile capability sufficient to defeat Taiwan if and when such proclamation is made. The U.S. military, being overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and likely more generally for years to come, would not be able to help defend Taiwan.

If, despite its long-standing refusal to make formal commitment to such defense, the U.S. would be foolhardy enough to intervene, the U.S. Navy would be faced with the calamity of having some of its ships sunk by massive barrages of Chinese supersonic cruise missiles. The White House, to avoid courting yet another foreign policy nightmare and facing massive disaffection by the American people, will most likely soon make clear that, as the U.S. has long acknowledged that Taiwan is part of China, this country has no right to defend Taiwan by force, and no intention of doing so.

Oliver Lee is a retired professor, University of Hawai'i Department of Political Science. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.