Is Free China next, now that President Trump’s rhetoric about getting Europe to pay its fair share of defense spending is starting to yield dividends? That’s one question after the Republican presidential nominee’s call for Taiwan to reimburse America for its security. “I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy,” the 45th president told Bloomberg News. “Why are we doing this?” He added: “I think Taiwan should pay us for defense.”

This is a moment to review Secretary of State Acheson’s blunder when, in January 1950, he raised doubts over America’s willingness to defend South Korea — triggering a war. Acheson’s gaffe came in a speech on America’s Pacific “defense perimeter.” He specified that it was largely focused on defending Japan, and he verbally traced a line that started with the Aleutian islands, then ran along Japan’s Ryukyu islands to the Philippines. Omitted was South Korea.

“So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned,” Acheson pontificated, “it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack.” At a time when Americans were dismayed by Chairman Mao’s victory the prior year in China, handing the mainland to the communists, Acheson observed that “it is a day in which the Asian peoples are on their own, and know it, and intend to continue on their own.”

The comrades at Moscow and Beijing were all too pleased to hear of America’s apparent strategic retreat from the region. Some six months after Acheson’s speech, the Soviet-backed North Koreans streamed south of the 38th Parallel in an attempt to conquer Free Korea. The conflict that ensued claimed the lives of some 37,000 Americans. General Eisenhower made hay of Acheson’s speech in the 1952 campaign, calling it a “mistake” that led to war.*

The communists, Eisenhower said, had seen in America’s failure to speak up in defense of Free Korea a lack of resolve. The same could be said, these columns have noted, of any ambiguity as to whether America would step in to defend Free China from attack. Not to deny that Mr. Trump has standing to press Taiwan to pay a greater share when it comes to its own defense. History, though, teaches that one has to be careful with what one says. 

After all, Taiwan is in hardly as feeble a position as South Korea was in 1950. The island democracy has grown to become one of East Asia’s largest economies. Its gross domestic product ranks, on a per capita basis, with countries like Japan and Spain, and is more than twice that of Communist China. Like Europe, which has thrived under the aegis of America’s defense commitment, Taiwan has developed its economy without undue worry about its military.

That could be changing. The Hoover Institution’s Matthew Pottinger is among those urging a Taiwanese military buildup — and to view Israel as a model. The Jewish state, with less than half of Taiwan’s population, has a standing military nearly as large. While Israel typically devotes about 5 percent of its GDP to defense spending, Taiwan, in recent years, has spent half or less than that. That serves to bolster Trump’s point.

Taiwan’s new president, for his part, is pushing to modernize the military. In this effort, Free China can look to its history of armed strength. Its late leader, Chiang Kai-shek, who took the reins from the founder of Chinese democracy, Sun Yat-sen, a New York Sun writer, called Taiwan a “citadel of freedom.” As late as 1970 Chiang kept a standing army of 600,000 — three or more times as large as today’s force. It surely gave Mao pause as to any forced unification.

In any event, it strikes us as a dangerous game to start using public jawboning, even if well-intentioned, as a means to encourage China’s only democracy to step up its self-defense. “It’s our shared responsibility and goal,” Taiwan’s premier said in response to Trump’s remarks, “to maintain the peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific region.” That rings true, and leaves ample room to strike the right balance on who foots the bill.

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* How much of a mistake it was and what our enemies perceived is a matter of dispute, animated in part by recent access to Soviet documents. Please see, for example, James Matray’s “Dean Acheson’s Press Club Speech Reexamined.”