Though we have a favorable impression of Vivek Ramaswamy, we hope that someone in the GOP debate tonight will draw him out in respect of Free China. For it’s hard to see what he was thinking when, the other day, he suggested that he would cut China’s only democracy loose after 2028. He couched this heresy in his vow to bring back the American computer chip industry that a generation ago departed our shores for the Republic of China on Taiwan.

“Xi Jinping should not mess with Taiwan,” Mr. Ramaswamy said, “until we have achieved semiconductor independence.” It’s his vow, as our M.J. Koch reported the other day, that bringing back home the computer chip manufacturing industry would take until 2028. “Our commitments to Taiwan,” the entrepreneur turned presidential candidate declared, “will change after that, because that’s rationally in our self-interest.”

The candidate earlier explained that he sought to “deter China from annexing Taiwan” by moving away “from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity.” He pledged to “defend” the island democracy “until 2029 but not afterward, at which point we will have full semiconductor independence.” It’s a gaffe on a par with Dean Acheson’s blunder on South Korea in a 1950 speech on America’s defense perimeter, which, critics said, emboldened the communists.

Mr. Acheson made his remarks in a famous — or infamous — speech at the National Press Club. He suggested Korea was beyond our defensive perimeter. Six months later, North Korean forces poured over the 38th Parallel, triggering a war that would claim some 37,000 American lives. No less an authority than General Dwight Eisenhower contended in his 1952 presidential campaign that Acheson’s remarks were a “mistake” that gave a green light to the invasion.

The failure to pipe up in defense of Free Korea, Eisenhower said, suggested to the communists that America lacked for resolve. The same could be said of Mr. Ramawamy’s comments regarding Free China. By “strategic clarity” he seems to mean a green light for the communist regime on the mainland to seize China’s only democracy. If — or particularly if — that’s Mr. Ramaswamy’s intention, why in the world would he broadcast it?

We’re not politically wedded to the libertarian worldview, but we don’t mind saying that we greatly admire their liberty principles, which seem more important with each passing year. Particularly so in the wake of Congress’s betrayal of Free Vietnam and the Democrats’ retreat from Free Iraq and surrender of Afghanistan. We’ve roundly supported Brexit. It’s hard to see, though, how the liberty principles counsel the abandonment of Free China.

These columns have long defended Taiwan, which has become one of the freest democracies in the world. We’ve advocated for Chinese self-determination since the first president of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen, was writing dispatches for the Sun from exile. When the Manchu dynasty fell in 1912, the Sun wrote that “the most conservative nation in existence has amazed the world by a revolution and the establishment, for a while at least, of a republic.” 

When the Chinese republic descended into chaos, Sun Yat-sen wrote a report for the Sun decrying the “despotism that has throttled the real Republic of China.” Yet he never abandoned the hope that eventually the “tyrant of Pekin will hurry from the country quite as ignominiously as ever a culprit left his former haunts.” The spirit of Chinese democracy lives on today, at Hong Kong, and even more so on Taiwan. 

Which brings us back to Mr. Ramaswamy. Not only would he like to cut loose Taiwan, but he is urging a Korean War-type armistice for Ukraine giving President Putin control of the Donbas. His theory is that it would erode Russia’s alliance with Communist China. That this would temper the ambitions of Russia or China, we doubt, but we look forward to hearing him articulate his view in the proceedings this evening. That’s what debates are for.