Raytheon and Lockheed, both in a nearly $100 million USD contract to help maintain Taiwan’s missile defense system, is now facing Chinese sanctions.
This is despite both the Taiwan Relations Act in which the US is legally bound to make provisions to maintain Taiwan’s independence from PRC annexation, as well as Chinese threats to unilaterally end the status quo through the illegal use of force.
Ma Xue of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, which advises Xi Jinping, has suggested that the West will bear the brunt of the costs for sanctioning Russia. Russia’s economy, though, has become increasingly isolated in recent years, and Western-Russian interdependencies are few, other than in the energy sector.
Most analysts agree that the costs to Russia, including freezing its financial system out of SWIFT, will cause major disruptions to its currency and the solvency of its system, with limited costs to the Wests other than bottlenecks clearing contracts for Russian oil and gas.
Some have suggested that the PRC has watched the freezing of Russian foreign reserves in horror. Others have claimed that because of the much higher degree of interconnectedness between the West and China, that should China invade Taiwan, the West would be forced to take a different approach to prevent a massive economic blowback.
Still, the relatively higher strategic value of Taiwan, and the clear legal responsibility of the US to intervene mean that if an invasion were to occur, the US response would likely be focused on direct military intervention with economic sanctions secondary, and likely proportional to the American aim to promptly paralyze its combat adversary.