ORLANDO, Florida—Influential conservative thinkers were in stiff disagreement over whether the United States should defend Taiwan in the event of an attack by China, at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando on Oct. 31. Michael Anton, a former Trump national security communications official and Hillsdale College lecturer, argued that China would seek to conquer Taiwan regardless of whether or not the country was ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He likened the fate of Taiwan during the late 1940s, when the Republic of China (ROC) was forced to retreat to the island during the Chinese Civil War, to China’s loss of Hong Kong in 1842 to the British Empire. Taiwan, controlled by the ROC since Japan’s 1945 surrender during WWII, had been under Japanese control after 1895, when China’s Qing empire lost the Sino-Japanese War. It had previously been controlled by the Qing since 1683. The British signed a lease for …