I
The South China Sea, fabled and contested, stretches from the Taiwan Strait south to the Java Sea and the Singapore Strait, where the Horsburgh lighthouse, an active relic of Asia’s violent encounter with Europe, now keeps watch over the world’s most crucial chokepoint. North of Singapore, the sea is bounded to the east by the island of Borneo, to the west by the Malay peninsula. As each of these land formations slopes away, the sea opens to a wide expanse. Wide, but frequently shallow, and dotted with cays, atolls, reefs, sand bars, and small island formations. For the vast commercial ships that transit this shipping lane, they must hew closely to well-charted but narrow routes where the sea lane is deep enough to accommodate their giant hulls.
If you viewed the South China Sea simultaneously through satellite, radar, and sonar images, you would see a sea clogged with obstacles. There are the myriad islands and formations and shallows that constrain commercial passage. Across the remaining surface, every major shipping company in the world transits these waters, sailing mega-container ships, oil and natural gas tankers, grain ships and bulk carriers hauling copper, steel, and other industrial materials, and the “roll-on, roll-off” (or “ro-ro”) ships that move the world’s supply of cars and trucks from manufacturer to market. Several nations sail fishing fleets here, including two of the world’s largest, from China and Taiwan; according to the Ocean Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, fully half of the world’s fishing fleet spends some of the year trailing in these waters. Six countries have made sovereign claims here and are seeking to profit from the economic rights that follow (under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), namely China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia. In the shallow waters of the eastern and western reaches of the sea, dozens of nationally and internationally owned companies are part of their projects to drill into the huge estimated reserves of oil and gas captured beneath the sands. Along this sea floor lies the world’s largest concentration of undersea cables, which carry more than ninety percent of all the data that powers the contemporary technological world. This is the busiest shipping lane in the world, the jugular of the world economy.
You would be blithely unaware of any of this, though, while sailing the main shipping lane, for that route runs far afield of most of these dangers. You can sometimes sail for hours without catching sight of another ship, even at the height of day. Perhaps you see the distant silhouette of a container vessel far ahead, or the outline of an oil tanker just at the horizon. Your radar shows you the position of these and other vessels too far away to be seen even with the binoculars that are still a standard part of sea-farers kit. On most modern vessels the Automated Information System (AIS) allows you, with a tap of the cursor, to glean the name, the speed, and the direction of these vessels, though you still need the binoculars because many small or mid-size Chinese fishing vessels do not carry AIS beacons or turn them off. But to the naked eye the sea is calm and can be all but empty.
That is, until you approach the Taiwan Strait. Here the sea narrows sharply, and the seabed rises dramatically, reaching no more than three hundred feet at its deepest. Shipping is squeezed into a narrow channel. And around you the world’s most dangerous arms race comes into plain view.
To the west lies China, to the east the island of Taiwan. For a long period, it was known as Formosa—after ilha formosa, or “beautiful island,” per a Portuguese account in 1542 — less fabled than the surrounding sea, but even more contested through contemporary history. Populated for the better part of six thousand years, it became a Dutch colony in the mid-1600s, then an independent kingdom. It was annexed to the Qing dynasty in 1683, then ceded to Japan in 1895, under the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ended the first Sino-Japan war. The short-lived Republic of China (which overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1912) took over Taiwan in 1945, at the request of its World War II allies. When the Chinese civil war turned against them, in 1949, the Republic of China’s government, having already been forced to move from Nanjing, relocated from Chengdu to Taipai. Thus was modern Taiwan born. It has been subject to threat and claim from China ever since.
It occupies a critical geography. It forms an essential part of what John Foster Dulles conceived of as “the first island chain” — an arc of islands from which the United States could project power in Asia by which to contain Soviet and Chinese military action in the Pacific. In our day, the greater focus is on Chinese naval expansion, for the arc collectively encloses the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea — what China calls its “Near Seas,” each of them bordering one of China’s major economic hubs. North of this arc is the Japanese main island, where an American naval base homeports the USS Ronald Reagan and its supporting destroyer squadron, and the Korean peninsula, where the United States maintains a large concentration of armed forces. The island chain formation itself runs from the Japanese island of Kyushu, where the United States operates the diplomatically named Fleet Activities Sasebo, a naval base home to the Japan Maritime Self Defense Forces and to several American ships, including amphibious assault vessels (like a small aircraft carrier) and America’s only forward-deployed expeditionary strike group. Southwest from Kyushu lies the Ryuku island arc, which encompasses Okinawa, home to not one but twenty-five American military installations, encompassing Marine and Air force capacities, along with smaller Army and Navy units. The lower arc of the Ryukus wraps around the Senkaku Island group (described by Taiwan as the Tiaoyutai Islands and by China as the Diaoyu Islands), where China and Japan came nearly to blows in 2012-2013. The southernmost of the Ryuku islands is a mere twenty nautical miles from Taiwan’s northeastern shore. Taiwan itself is the largest formation in the chain, spanning 245 miles from north to south, and pushing the waters of the East and South China Seas into a narrow strait, 97 nautical miles wide at its widest, separating Taiwan from the People’s Republic of China.
Continuing down from Taiwan’s southern tip, the 160 nautical miles of the Luzon Strait that separates Taiwan from the northern reaches of the Philippine archipelago constitute the largest gap in the chain — and the deepest channel. Then comes the Philippine archipelago, once home to the massive American base at Subic Bay, our largest overseas naval installation throughout the Cold War, rashly given away during the naïve and heady days of the early post-Cold War order. Now the United States maintains only basing rights, and collaborates with the modest Philippine navy and larger Coast Guard. Further south, the sea is enclosed by the island of Palawan, then Borneo, before abutting Sumatra; there is no exit to the wider oceans here. For that, you have to sail further south past Singapore and out through the Lombok or Malacca Strait, into the Indian Ocean. Oddly, Singapore is never counted among the first island chain though it abuts Malacca, through which flows almost eighty percent of the oil that fuels China’s industry. American naval ships routinely dock at Singapore’s Changi Naval Base, and there the United States also maintains the carefully named Logistics Group Western Pacific — actually a sub-unit of the Seventh Fleet, and the direct naval descendant of the powerful Asiatic Station fleet that operated out of Hong Kong and patrolled China’s Yangtze river for nearly a century prior to World War II. (The Republic of Singapore Air Force, which maintains part of its fleet at bases in the United States, has also trained at launching its F-16 from both American and British aircraft carriers, adding to the potency of this ring of forces.)
These waters are home to the largest concentration of naval forces in the world. In the Yellow Sea, a coalition of western navies patrol to enforce UN-mandated sanctions against North Korea, also keeping a careful eye on Chinese and Russian ships operating nearby. China has the bulk of its fleet deployed in these seas, along with its growing submarine fleet; in terms of combat ready surface ships, it now deploys more seacraft than the United States Navy (though many of them are smaller and less powerful than their American equivalents.) The US Navy has two hundred ships — including five aircraft carrier strike groups, and the majority of its submarines — allocated to the Indo-Pacific Command, some forward deployed in Japan, others in nearby Guam, and still others in Hawaii, San Diego, and in bases surrounding Seattle, but all transiting frequently through these waters. (Indo-Pacific Command also patrols the Persian Gulf, but many of the ships that deploy there from Hawaii or the West Coast transit through the South China Sea on their route to and fro, thus doing double duty.)
Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Forces sails upwards of 150 surface combat ships and 19 submarines, concentrating this substantial firepower along the Ryuku arc. At the northern end of this arc, North Korean surface ships and submarines are a major feature — Pyongyang has the world’s largest naval fleet by sheer number of ships (though hardly that at all if measured in terms of fighting power.) Australia has a modest navy but an energetic one and frequently sails these waters, sometimes accompanying American exercises. The Russian Navy — either the second or third most powerful navy in the world, depending on how you measure — is a frequent visitor, and increasingly exercises with China’s PLA Navy (PLAN). India, too, has begun to mount more frequent sorties off China’s eastern coast, to Beijing’s great irritation. And these waters are heavily trafficked by submarines — as many as two hundred at any given time, according to the US Navy. Even Germany has sailed a frigate into these waters, in a rather tepid effort to show that it, too, matters in geopolitical Asia. More important, France maintains several thousand troops in the wider region, and regularly patrols its mid-size navy, including from its overseas possessions in French Polynesia (roughly the same distance from the Taiwan Strait as Hawaii). Britain has recently rejoined this new maritime version of the old imperial “Great Game,” after launching two new aircraft carriers sailing them and their supporting destroyer squadrons through the Luzon Strait.
The Luzon Strait: if a great power war breaks out in Asia’s waters, this will be a decisive battle zone. As the Fulda Gap in Germany was to the Cold War, so the Luzon Strait will be to the world order unfolding now. It is the principal waterway through which the United States and allied navies flow their ships and submarines when seeking to reinforce their presence inside the South China Sea, or the Taiwan Strait itself. American submariners are familiar with it, at least from their studies, from frequent submarine hunting raids against Japan in World War II: Formosa and the Luzon islands were a key staging ground for the Imperial Japanese Navy’s campaign in southeast Asia. If a major power war breaks out, keeping the Luzon Strait open will be a critical objective for Western forces. It is also a key objective of China’s “counter-insurgency” doctrine — its focus on stopping the allies from reinforcing their position inside the “Near Seas.”
It was not for nothing that the Royal Navy, which long dominated these waters (for purposes at once imperial, liberal, and brutal) chose this strait through which to sail the HMS Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales on their maiden voyages to Asia, in October 2021. Indeed, for the several weeks surrounding that voyage, it seemed that the Luzon and Taiwan flashpoints might be triggered sooner rather than later.
II
In truth, tensions had been mounting for years prior. In the early 2000s, China began its rapid expansion of its navy and missile force, and, in repudiation of a promise to the United States, began to militarize some of the land features that it had claimed in the South China Seas (illegally, according to a 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, ruling under Article VII of UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.) Moreover, Xi Jinping began something of a drumbeat of statements that indicated that he viewed the incorporation of Taiwan into the sovereign fold of China as a personal and national priority. In November 2013, China’s Ministry of Defense announced that it had established an “air defense interdiction zone,” or ADIZ, over the East China Sea, north of Taiwan. The move generated a striking response from President Obama, who ordered two nuclear-capable B-52s flown through that airspace; but China’s naval build up on both ends of the Strait continued, as did sustained political and disinformation campaigns in Taiwan. President Trump then dialed up the American response, first by the symbolic (or in the Chinese rendering, provocative) act of taking a phone call from the Taiwanese leader during his transition to the presidency. More determined action followed, especially in the passage of the Taiwan Travel Act of 2018, which encouraged the United States government to elevate its engagement with Taiwan authorities, and a marked uptick in the rhetoric accompanying the transit of US Seventh Fleet destroyers and aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Strait. These sorties occurred both under the framework of Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs), by which the US Navy enforces the terms of open commerce and the Law of the Sea (somewhat ironically, as the United States is still a non-signatory to that Convention) — and as a show of deterrent strength. China continued and intensified its political and informational campaign in Taiwan, which, like Russia’s disinformation tactics in Europe, was designed to stoke resistance to pro-western or pro-independence candidates in Taiwan’s closely contested parliamentary and in Presidential elections. What’s more, in a major speech in 2019, Xi Jinping, rather than simply repeating the long-standing formula of emphasizing “peaceful reunification,” explicitly invoked the option of military force: “We make no promise to abandon the use of force, and retain the option of taking all necessary measures…” What’s more, he said that the Taiwan problem should not be passed down to future generations — the first Chinese leader to say this.
And then things escalated further.
Sometimes assessments matter as much as events. They certainly did on March 9, 2021, when Admiral Philip Davidson, the four-star in charge of the Indo-Pacific Command, gave testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during which he warned that China could move to try to take control of Taiwan: “…they’ve long said that they want to do that by 2050. I’m worried about them moving that target closer. Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before then. And I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact in the next six years.” Several China scholars reinforced Davidson’s argument, noting that a crucial factor in determining whether Xi Jinping ultimately decides to use force to compel Taiwan is whether he would be confident of victory, and highlighting with concern mounting evidence that the PLA leadership itself is confident of the results of a potential action. Whether or not the PLA’s confidence is warranted matters less for the onset of a crisis than the confidence itself.
Other China and Taiwan specialists pushed back, criticizing Davidson for scaremongering, and underestimating both the political and military costs to China of using force. The critics argued — with some merit — that excess alarmism has the pernicious effect of undermining Taiwanese confidence, thus actually making it more likely that the Taiwanese leadership would ultimately cede political ground to Beijing. Then history intervened in the discussion, and events appeared to reinforce Davidson’s alarm.
On June 15, the United States sent its Tokyo-based aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, and the guided-missile destroyers USS Shiloh and USS Halsey, into the South China Sea, transiting the Luzon Strait. This was neither unprecedented nor unwarranted, but it was muscular. Then, on July 27, a British warship entered the South China Sea and docked in Singapore, to Beijing’s fury; the first of several British transits that year. The next day, the guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold made a foray through the Strait, the seventh of the year — a record pace. In previous iterations, the Chinese response to such transits has been primarily rhetorical. But now, China sent twenty-eight military aircraft into Taiwanese airspace, a sharp break from previous pattern.
The debate among Washington’s deep bench of Taiwan experts continued. Several argued that the risk of war with China, specifically over Taiwan, was growing, and laid out strategies for response. Others continued to argue that Beijing preferred political strategies to military ones for dealing with Taiwan, and could not be confident of victory in a cross-Straits attack. Foreign Affairs published a collection of expert commentary on the “Strait of Emergency,” but the bulk of analysis suggested that the alarm about imminent invasion was exaggerated. And yet the tension in the Strait continued to mount.
What we know now, though it was not leaked to the Financial Times until October, was that in late July China test-fired a long-range missile that entered space, circled the globe, and then released a hypersonic glide missile — a nuclear-capable one. According to a detailed report by International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the missile incorporated high-speed glide technology into what is known as a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System. This combination of technologies would allow China to place a missile into low-earth orbit, then fire a warhead into the atmosphere, and additionally to maneuver the warhead as it approaches its target. Leave aside the engineering: it is a missile system that would allow China to evade most of America’s existing missile defense systems; and it is a suite of technologies that the United States has not yet mastered.
China also made a major “lawfare” move, announcing that it had passed a new maritime law that would come into effect on September 1. The law as passed would require a wide range of vessels to declare their presence to Chinese authorities upon entry into Chinese territorial waters. Now, every state has the right to require ships to provide a range of types of information as they enter territorial waters. The problem here is that China’s claim of territorial waters are vast, contested, and illegal (in the view of the UN tribunal.) So China was in effect claiming a right of information (and ultimately inspection) on shipping passing through what the rest of the world treats as international waters.
The United States and its allies moved swiftly to clarify that they would in no way comply with the new Chinese regulations. In early September, the aircraft carrier strike group accompanying the USS Reagan entered the Taiwan Strait again, while a second aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson conducted exercises nearby in the Western Pacific, and a guided-missile destroyer separately conducted “freedom of navigation operations” within the twelve-mile nautical zone surrounding the aptly named Mischief Reef (one of China’s claimed “territories” in the South China Sea and site of one of its largest military installations in the waters.) On September 17 the US Navy conducted its ninth passage of the Strait. In late September the USS Reagan strike group returned to the South China Sea, accompanied by Destroyer Squadron 15. On September 28 the British sent a warship, the HMS Richmond, into the Taiwan Strait, the first time in a decade that it had done so.
And then things really began to heat up. In early October, British and Vietnamese warships conducted joint exercises, their first ever. A second UK carrier group conducted training operations in the nearby Philippine Sea. Then the British carrier group led by the HMS Queen Elizabeth transited the Luzon Strait and entered the South China Sea. It was joined by Dutch and Singaporean frigates, with whom it conducted joint exercises. On October 3, the USS Ronald Reagan, the USS Carl Vinson (and each of their supporting strike groups) joined the HMS Queen Elizabeth strike group and the Japanese helicopter carrier Ise and its strike group, as well as frigates from Canada and New Zealand. Together they conducted the largest multinational naval exercise since the end of the Cold War.
China did not sit calmly by. On October 4, it began a series of air sorties into Taiwanese airspace, and over the course of three days flew at least 150 aircrafts through that area — by far and away the largest Chinese show of force in four decades. Beijing also issued a public and inflammatory warning to close American allies, notably Australia, that they would become “cannon fodder” if they chose to join Taiwan in defense against a Chinese incursion.
At which point both the Taiwanese and American government ratcheted up the diplomatic pressure. Taipei’s leadership issued a stark warning that China would be able to successfully invade Taiwan by 2025. And Washington took the dramatic step of leaking to the press a reasonably well-kept secret: the United States already had special forces deployed in Taiwan, as part of a training operation. China had surely been aware of that, but the broad American public was not, and the decision to publicize the fact of the American military presence on the ground was designed to signal to China that we would treat those forces as a tripwire for a wider American response, should China choose to attack.
The commentators noticed the changing weather. Writing in the Washington Post in the same week, Ishaan Tharoor captured the gloomier end of the spectrum of analysis, arguing that while some had reasoned that an invasion of Taiwan was both unneeded and too costly from Beijing’s perspective, the dynamic was shifting in the wrong direction. The deterioration of the US-China relationship, begun before Trump and accelerated by him, state-stoked nationalism, PLA confidence, and political-legacy dynamics all created incentives for Xi Jinping, Tharoor argued. What’s more, “the Chinese military’s capabilities are inexorably expanding and may have already reached a stage where America’s long-standing presence in the Asia-Pacific is an insufficient deterrent. Military planners in both countries treat a potential showdown over Taiwan as only a matter of time.”
China has indeed been engaging in an intensive military build-up. It is now easily the number two defense spender in the world. It is rapidly expanding its nuclear stockpile, and it is building its navy at a fast pace. In the last fifteen years, the PLA Navy has gone from a fleet of 216 combat-capable ships to one with 348, many of them technologically sophisticated, including three aircraft carriers. (By contrast: in the last fifteen years, the US Navy went from 318 — down from a Reagan-era high of 590 — down to 275 combat ships, before ticking back up to around 290 recently.) Moreover, Chinese innovations in anti-ship missile technology are outpacing the United States. Anti-ship missiles have been a factor in war-planning since the Falklands War, when Argentina used a single air-fired Exocet missile to cripple a British destroyer (which later sank as it was being towed away). But China has greatly expanded the range of such missiles, and it has developed anti-ship missiles mounted both in land silos deep inside Chinese territory and on mobile units. Some of these have a range of up to 3000 miles, thus capable of targeting American ships at great distance — so-called “aircraft carrier killers.”
It is true that these Chinese missiles have never been tested in combat conditions, and some forward installations of these missile batteries — especially those on reclaimed land formations in the South China Sea — could fairly readily be demolished by American airpower in a war scenario. Moreover, hitting an aircraft carrier at long range is harder than it sounds — the United States has substantial cyber counter measures, electronic warfare tools, and sophisticated missile defenses. But still — and this should really make us sit up and take notice — most military planners estimate that in a determined campaign China would ultimately succeed in using its large quiver of missiles to damage, cripple, or even sink American aircraft carriers and other surface ships. That is, unless the United States responded by launching large scale air, naval, and space-based attacks on those missile facilities, and on China’s “eyes and ears” — that is, what the Pentagon calls C4ISR, for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. That would involve not only multi-faceted cyber operations, but also — under a range of highly plausible circumstances — American airstrikes on facilities on the Chinese mainland. What might start as a limited naval engagement could quickly escalate to large-scale “system war” between the world’s two largest and most powerful militaries, both nuclear powers.
A series of articles in The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist, and other leading newspapers all warned of a possible, even imminent war. David Ignatius argued that the tide was turning in Beijing’s favor, and Elbridge Colby, who oversaw Taiwan defense in Trump’s Pentagon, argued that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could come within two years. Oriana Skylar Mastro, a close observer of the PLA, warned that even moderate voices in Beijing were abandoning a prior focus on ‘peaceful reunification’: “I think the military option is the option now.” Taiwan’s President Tsai said publicly that the threat from China was increasing “every day.” (Later its Defense Ministry would clarify that it also believed that a naval invasion of Taiwan would be very difficult for China to pull off, in part because it lacked adequate transport ships — “ro-ro” ships used to transport heavy equipment like tanks and armored personnel carriers. Commentators thus took note when China shortly thereafter released to the press images of large conventional ferries being retro-fitted to carry a high volume of military materiel.)
Yet no attack occurred. And amid the drumbeat and the escalating tensions, several of Washington’s most knowledgeable Taiwan experts argued that the crisis was not in fact imminent. Ryan Hass pointed out that, among other factors, the Beijing Olympics were scheduled for February 2022, and even though those games were overshadowed by Covid and a diplomatic boycott by the United States and a few other nations, it was highly unlikely that China would launch a military action prior to or during the games. The games would be closely followed by the 20th People’s Congress, a crucial event in the political calendar in Beijing, where Xi would have to secure a further five-year term (highly likely) and consolidate his control over the Central Committee and the Party as a whole (also likely, but not without its challenges.) Which brings the calendar to mid-2022; a mere two years away from Taiwanese elections in 2024, when, as Richard Bush has noted, Beijing would have another shot at using political, informational, and other lower-risk tactics to produce a political rather than military outcome to its favor in Taiwan.
And while PLA generals might be growing in confidence, others noted that from Xi’s vantage point confidence is not certainty, and so long as political options remained viable, the risks to Xi of an uncertain military campaign were dissuasive. The flip side of the point that the Taiwan issue is of higher priority for Beijing than Washington (arguably) is this: Xi cannot afford to lose. If the United States mounts a defense of Taiwan and fails, it would be seriously damaging to America’s role in Asia and in the world, but it would not pose a threat to the stability of the American regime. Whereas if Xi Jinping, who has made “reunification” with Taiwan a major part of his legacy, mounts an attack on Taiwan and fails, it will be not only very costly, it also potentially threatens his continued tenure as party leader.
In time, as the week-to-week tempo of escalation cooled, and the more sanguine specialists appeared to have called events more correctly. Notwithstanding the rhetoric, no Chinese military attack on Taiwan occurred, or from what we know now, was planned. (And for those who would say that the response forestalled the crisis: this misses the point that at no stage was there an actually observed Chinese military buildup, of the kind eminently visible in the case of Russian forces around Ukraine.) Still, even the most careful and all but the most sanguine Taiwan scholars acknowledge that while this crisis was not an emergency in the end, and that a crisis is far from guaranteed, it certainly remains possible. What’s more, the odds grow as Chinese confidence mounts, and as the military balance in Asia continues to tilt in their direction — as it will absent substantial American re-investment in its navy and missile technologies and a range of additional modernizations. The risks will grow absent effective strategy from both Taiwan and the United States. The calmer assessment should be a cause for focused preparations, not for relaxation.
The months from June to November 2021 proved to be a kind of dry run, a real-world tabletop exercise to test the free world’s readiness to respond to a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. And it exposed critical weaknesses: in Taiwan’s defense strategy; in America’s current military options; and in our allies’ and partners’ readiness to reinforce Taiwanese and American action, if need be. The rattling conclusion from the recent turbulence is this: if China does resort to military action in Taiwan, and the United States responds, there is no guarantee that we would win. We are not ready for a Taiwan emergency.
The imbroglio in East Asia was not the only challenge confronting the United States or its close partners. Simultaneous with the mounting Taiwan tensions, Russia deployed several tens of thousands of troops to scheduled maneuvers on Ukraine’s northeastern border, then ominously didn’t bring them back. Moscow began a steady buildup of troops and equipment along the northeastern, southeastern, and maritime borders of Ukraine. Against American warnings of severe economic consequences for military action, Russia published a list of demands with which the United States and NATO would have to comply to forestall Russian military action — a set of demands that amounted to a rollback of NATO’s expansion and consolidation in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. With its forces surrounding Ukraine, Putin hoped to blackmail the West into reversing the terms of its victory in 1989-1991 and repealing Russia’s defeat.
The two crises are different but they have essential similarities. Neither Taiwan nor Ukraine are American treaty allies, but they are both “alliance-adjacent”: in Taiwan’s case, by virtue of longstanding defense partnership arrangements with the United States, in Ukraine’s case, by NATO’s decision in 2008 to open a pathway for Ukrainian membership. Both immediately border a power that seeks a global rivalry with the United States, and which has putative claims on the territory in question. Both are democracies, though Taiwan’s is a fuller democracy than Ukraine’s. And both occupy geographies that crucially change the dynamics of “hard power projection” in their respective neighborhoods — a point frequently missed by American commentators who argue that America has no vital interests in either country. And so both raise delicate and significant questions about how far the United States is willing to go to defend a liberal or democratic concept of world order; about how much the United States is prepared to risk to retain primacy in the two major industrial, commercial, and technological regions outside the United States; and what strategy the United States is prepared to adopt to blunt the ambitions of two powers now seemingly bent, in some degree of coordination, on dulling American hegemony at least and supplanting it at most. Or will we in fact carry through on our present mood of withdrawalism and self-shrinkage, and proceed on the false but widespread notion that being a strong democratic power with global responsibilities is nothing other than hubris?
One critical difference between the two contexts, so far, is the nature of American policy toward our respective endangered friends. From 2008 onwards, US/NATO policy on Ukraine has been a paradigmatic case of “talk loudly and carry a small stick.” A decision to open a pathway for Ukraine to NATO membership and then not actually bring them in, or deploy some Western troops on Ukrainian soil, was surely a worst-of-all-possible-worlds move. It put a huge Russian target on Kyiv while doing little or nothing to buttress Ukraine’s defenses. The modest American and European response (and the anemic global response) when Russia moved in 2014 to reverse its loses, by invading Eastern Ukraine and then annexing Crimea, made the situation worse. Even the relatively effective train-and-equip operation that followed, improving the defensive capability of the Ukrainian armed forces, did not bring — could not have brought — those forces to a level where they could single-handedly deter further Russian aggression. Russian energy sales to Europe not only continued, they increased; and the building of the NordStream 2 pipeline — which would still further increase European dependency on Russian gas exports — continued unabated. Far from satisfying Putin and forestalling a new crisis, all our half-hearted and strategically confused actions laid the groundwork for the deeper crisis of 2022.
By contrast, at least so far, American policy on Taiwan hews more closely to a classical logic of restrained rhetoric and a muscular posture. To date, a refusal by successive American presidents (despite some pressure from within their parties) to move away from strategic ambiguity on the defense of Taiwan, and a continuing willingness to put sizeable American military assets at risk in the Taiwan Strait, has helped to keep the situation below the boiling point. Those arguing for increasingly bellicose rhetoric, just as the military balance is starting to tilt away from us, might want to pay careful attention to how effective that precise combination of tactics has been in Ukraine. They might wish to concentrate more on beefing up deterrence and resilience. The defense of Taiwan will not come from starker rhetoric or greater resolve alone.
III
Is the defense of Taiwan in America’s interest, or vital to the alliance system in Asia?
America’s closest alliances date from the Second World War. They are the countries we fought with to defeat the Nazi regime and Imperial Japan — and in one of history’s unusual twists, Japan and Germany, too. Some newer alliances have far less depth, and fewer ties of history, or commerce, or population, or experience. Taiwan is a rare country that is not an ally now but once was, and with whom the United States has the depth of ties that parallel our old wartime alliances — of which, of course, the Republic of China was one. We have long acted in its defense. In 1954, in the face of escalating tensions in the Strait, when an invasion of Taiwan seemed possible, the Eisenhower administration got from Congress the Formosa Resolution, giving it prior authority to wage war with the PRC. In the wake of this crisis, the United States and Taiwan signed the Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of China, under which both sides agreed to provide aid and military support to the other if it came under attack — as in the NATO charter, an “Article 5” provision. Four years later, in another episode of high tension, President Eisenhower deployed the Seventh Fleet to the Strait.
That alliance held until 1980, one year after the conclusion of normalization with China in 1979. But despite Kissinger’s and Nixon’s shift towards relations with the People’s Republic of China and the adoption of the “One China” policy (according to which the United States recognized Beijing as the sovereign government of China and acknowledges — but does not thereby support — its claim to sovereignty in Taiwan), Congress once again acted fulsomely to support Taiwan, through the passage of the Taiwan Trade Act — which went far beyond trade, including to cover the sale of military equipment to Taipei. Ronald Reagan also pulled back some of Nixon’s and Carter’s concessions to China over Taiwan, providing Taipei with “six assurances” that the further evolution of America-China relations would not hurt Taiwanese interests, or limit American military sales and trade with Taipei. The Taiwan Relations Act anchors the relationship, and under its provision the United States has maintained unofficial ties with the people of Taiwan; maintained the American Institute in Taiwan, which performs consular and other functions normally associated with an ambassy; and engaged in ever deeper trade, most recently in high technology. It was supplemented in 2018 by a new but non-binding Congressional act, the Taiwan Travel Act, which passed a highly divided Congress by — 414 to 0.
Vitally, over the course of the ensuing decades, the United States has used substantial arms sales to Taiwan to help ensure that it can maintain a defense against China — since 2010, roughly $23 billion worth. Those sales have been wide ranging and have included frigates, advanced aircraft (most recently the F-16), surface to air missile systems, anti-tank missiles, transport aircraft, mobile radar, shipborne guided missiles, Patriot missiles, torpedoes, minesweepers, surveillance aircraft, and diesel submarines, along with an array of information and radar technologies. To date, though, America has not sold to Taiwan either of its two most advanced technologies: nuclear submarines and the Aegis radar system. The United States has also persistently (if not entirely consistently) sought to increase space for Taiwanese participation in international bodies such as the WHO, where China persistently and consistently blocks official Taiwanese membership.
The relationship is now governed by a series of diplomatic formula — the Taiwan Relations, the U.S.-China Communiques (which still provide a diplomatic baseline for US-China diplomatic relations), and America’s Six Assurances to Taiwan. (All of which sound like they are ripped from the history of nineteenth-century British diplomacy in Asia.) These arcane but highly sensitive formulas have so far allowed for the United States to build and to maintain extensive ties with Taiwan without strictly speaking breaking the One China policy — and to continue to provide for its defense.
American policy toward Taiwan has long been shaped by a doctrine of so-called “strategic ambiguity” — whereby the United States has not declared explicitly its intention to defend Taiwan in case of a Chinese attack, but merely retained its right to do so if it chooses. This formulation has come under pressure of late, both from scholars who have argued that it does too little to deter China from attack, and arguably from President Biden, who seemed to abandon the formula in a press conference where he stated that the United States would defend Taiwan in case of Chinese aggression — though his team quickly rolled that back and argued that Biden was merely expressing his presidential intention, not a change in American policy.
It is important to recognize that throughout this period Taiwan has continuously deepened its democracy — holding repeated elections, freely and fairly; observing the peaceful transfer of power; sustaining a free press and a free opposition; and routinely scoring highly on the various rankings of democratic standards. President Biden effectively acknowledged this when he invited Taiwan to participate in his Summit for Democracy in November 2021. Does Taiwan’s status as a democracy effect the extent of American obligation or interests to defend it? Narrowly, no. But here, of course, we collide with one of the great debates in American foreign policy. In America’s grand strategy, its forward presence in Europe and Asia, tied to close allies in both theatres, has been the essential pillar of maintaining American primacy and an order that can deter great power war. In the American-led order from World War II onwards, alliances and democracy are Venn-diagramed concepts: there are several democracies that are not allies, and there are allies that are not democracies, but there is a heavy overlap, and our most robust allies are indeed democracies.
Elsewhere I have argued against democracy promotion as a way to shape or to understand American foreign policy, in particular during an era when our own democracy is challenged. But the defense of democracy is a very different business. The defense of democracy within the United States is vital, and the defense of democracy abroad is also essential if the United States wants to retain an order wherein its interests and its political system are secured. If the United States is not willing to extend its power to defend established democracies, then the underlying purpose of much of American forward power and of the alliance system is called into doubt.
Of course, the United States cannot credibly defend democracy everywhere over time, notwithstanding some of the grandiose claims of recent presidents. Would that we lived in a world, as we so briefly did, where American power was so untrammeled as to be able to act to defend any democracy it wished; would that we lived in a world, which we rarely have, where such power was matched by a keen awareness of history, and a solid grounding in the political and cultural realities of other regions, sufficient to allow us to devise wise policy towards that goal. Usually blind to history, and often ignorant of other cultures, American policymakers have repeatedly crafted poor policy to advance democracy (with notable and admirable exceptions), and in so doing they have cast a deep pall over the notion of the use of American hard power in service of democracy. But failures of democracy promotion, especially in the excesses and missteps of America’s long “war on terror,” do not abnegate the value of defending established democracies. We do, after all, have universal values, and we should not wish to be played for fools by the authoritarians of the world, many of whom are simply exploiting our confusion and our weakness.
There is no danger — anti-interventionists all across America should sleep well — that we are about to become “the cops of the world.” Given the reality of the limits on American power, there must of course be choices as to where to defend democracy. It seems obvious, at least to me, that that choice should give preference to democracies with whom we have deep ties, with whom we trade substantially, and with whom we have shared or overlapping strategic interests, especially if they are allies. All of which but the last are features that characterize the situation with Taiwan.
Taiwan is our eighth largest trading partner — only a fraction smaller than the United Kingdom (in American trade), and larger than France, Italy, the Netherlands, and India. Our trade ties with Taiwan are especially important in the area of technology, and specifically in Taiwan’s massive role in the manufacture of semiconductors — fully fifty percent of the world’s supply of which comes from Taiwanese suppliers. Even more important, Taiwanese manufacturers supply about ninety percent of the bespoke, advanced semiconductors that power the highest end of the technological sector, including most of our advanced military communications and sensor equipment. Would we go to war to defend our economic interests? We certainly have in the past. On its own, though, it is not an adequate reason; leaving aside for the moment any ethical considerations, the fact is that a crisis over Taiwan would also likely rupture our far larger trading relationship with China (now our third largest trading partner, recently down from first.) But the trade ties do add weight and depth to the long-standing political relations, its past as an ally, its present fact as a key defense and security partner.
And then there is this: Taiwan is the literal — and littoral — front line in constraining Chinese hard power projection. If China were able to subjugate Taiwan, either politically or militarily, to the point where China’s navy could establish bases on its eastern shore, it would tilt the equation in the Pacific. China has launched a bid for extensive global naval power; a long-term but active ambition. It is an understandable ambition: China’s economy is vastly dependent on the flow of commercial, industrial, and energy goods in and out of its “Near Seas,” and sustained American naval dominance of those waters is understandably an uncomfortable reality for Beijing. A desire to advance its own naval capacity to protect its commercial interests at sea is natural, and on its own terms it is potentially uncomplicated for the United States. Indeed, for a brief period in the early 2000s, it seemed like China’s return to the seas for the first time in five hundred years could add to the net global capacity to protect globalization. But, to misuse a metaphor, that ship has long since sailed. In the Xi Jinping era, China has more fully revealed (and arguably more fully developed) its global ambitions, its desire for a blue water navy, and its intent to use this and other features of its growing power to confront and constrain American hegemony, and eventually displace it. As Rush Doshi in his book on China’s “long game” documents, this is an ambition both stated and revealed. Yet it is also an ambition constrained by multiple layers of geography and alliances. And those constraints start in the first island chain, of which Taiwan is an essential anchor.
Does China’s bid for global naval capacity matter? Throughout the modern period, global naval power has been the handmaiden of hegemony. Portugal, the Ottomans, the Dutch, Spain, France: all once competed for global naval dominance. The British, securing it in the late 1600s, used it to create its empire and thereby to reshape the modern world, laying the foundation for modern globalization. (They did this with great brutality, with vast slaveholdings, and by becoming history’s largest drug cartel.) In the post-colonial world, the United States has been the world’s dominant naval power, and found a formula to support an international (now global) trade and financial regime without relying on a colonial infrastructure. Dominance of the high seas has allowed us to foster and to protect the liberal trading system on which so much American and global growth is now predicated (fully eighty-five percent of world trade by value moves by sea); and to protect the flow of oil (and increasingly) gas out of the Strait of Hormuz, on which so much American and global growth is still predicated (and will be for another decade or two); and to wield American power in defense of our interests in literally every corner of the globe; and to help us defeat the Soviet Union. Together with American financial, energy and technological power, our power on the seas has been an essential feature of American dominance. We give it up at great, great cost. Erosion of the first island chain would not collapse American naval dominance or guarantee China’s — they still have a long distance to travel to mount a genuinely global navy; but it would certainly be an important shift in the wrong direction.
There is in the United States these days a burgeoning movement, both left and right, that would eschew American dominance or primacy, or at least argue that it is not worth the costs and the risks of maintaining it. This is not the place for a full critical engagement with that argument, but suffice it here to note two essential things. First, that what follows American primacy is not necessarily a period of peaceful multilateralism, as some of the advocates of this argument advance; far more likely is militarized crises in Europe and Asia as the two powers most wrong-footed by the American-led order, Russia and China, push back, and push back hard. As America relinquishes its salience around the world, the world grows more Hobbesian and more cruel and dangerous. And second, for all the ills recently associated with the forward projection of American power, it is easy to forget the roles that American power has played in deterring and defeating illiberal forces, in protecting the global commons, and in generating global public goods. All while the United States profits extensively from the role of the dollar as the world’s dominant currency — a different plank of power than our military dominance, but far from unconnected to it. It is hard to imagine any sphere of public life where increased Chinese influence in globalization and global order would not come at a meaningful cost to American interests, and those of close allies. We would cede this territory at great cost and great risk.
The fact that Taiwan is the front line of constraining Chinese global ambition is an argument that cuts both ways: it also makes it much, much more costly to defend. To take a contrasting example: if Tanzania’s maturing democracy were threatened by Uganda, the systemic or ordering risks of not responding would be minor; Uganda poses no threat to any other region or to global systems. We could defend Tanzania at very low risk and very low costs. The case with Taiwan is exactly the opposite: the costs to the international order of failing to come to Taiwan’s defense are potentially substantial, precisely because it is China that is threatening, but by the same token the costs associated with Taiwan’s defense are very large indeed. This will be America’s dilemma. It is hard to construct a meaningful and viable concept of the American-led alliance system, the American-led order, or American values that does not incorporate a vital response to Taiwan; but any serious response in Taiwan must reflect the reality that it takes only one or two modest turns of the escalatory dial for us to be engaged in full blown war with China—and perhaps a wider conflagration.
China’s reasons to prevent the independence of Taiwan, and/or to incorporate it fully into Chinese sovereignty, are the precise obverse of America’s interests. There are reasons of history and reasons of commerce, and there are reasons of legacy. Certainly Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed the importance of accomplishing this goal, although he has been careful to leave open the option of political outcomes and has set no firm timetable for it. There are issues of ideology, and arguably of the threat posed by the vibrancy of Taiwanese democracy among a nation of Han Chinese — though the virulence of that threat is easily exaggerated, given how tightly the Communist Party is able to control the media narrative and news consumption among its population. But above all there are reasons of strategy.
The most sanguine observers argue that Xi can be satisfied simply by preventing Taiwanese independence. It is possible that that is true, and it certainly seems wise to maintain an American policy aimed at dissuading Taiwan from seeking independence; after all, a Taiwanese bid for independence would most certainly trigger a crisis. But it is hard to rest comfortably on that position. For a start, the underlying logic about China’s calculation of its own interests, of the possibility of Chinese forbearance, does not adequately explain its recent behavior in a parallel case: Hong Kong. The status quo ante in Hong Kong allowed China to maintain its deep commercial and financial interests in Hong Kong’s success, and to prevent any kind of serious move towards more democratic governance, and to control information about what was happening on the island (when the “umbrella protests” took hold, information about it was sparsely available to the population in mainland China). And yet, despite what seemed to most outside observers to be an eminently sustainable situation, Beijing chose to pass a deeply intrusive bill in 2019 designed to improve its ability to arrest Hong Kong citizens and move them to Macau or China. This triggered protests in Hong Kong, and rather than weather the protests as it had successfully done in the past, Beijing passed an even harsher “National Security Law” and moved to implement it through a combination of intense surveillance, intimidation, coercion, arrests, and an unexplainable coincidence of traffic accidents, balcony falls, and other deaths among leading activists. And this, despite the fact that in doing so, it paid two important prices: a measurable flight of citizens from Hong Kong to other major Asian cities, including from the vital financial industry, and an erosion of the “one country, two systems” posture which to date has been an important part of its political strategy for Taiwan. It chose the radical action anyway.
Moreover, the sanguine view of Chinese self-restraint does not adequately contend with the strategic naval role that Taiwan plays in helping to enclose the Chinese PLAN from its wider “far seas” ambitions. China has few options here. Theoretically, it could escape the constrictions of the first island chain if it could convince the Philippines to provide it with basing rights on the Philippine Sea. But despite repeated efforts to woo the authoritarian President Duterte towards Beijing, China has made little or no progress, owing to stubborn resistance from the Philippine armed forces, who are still deeply enmeshed in the long-standing alliance and defense partnership with the United States. (And yes, there is an irony in China’s options being limited by virtue of a questionably democratic posture of the Philippine military.) Taiwan is China’s only credible option for improving its strategic position in the Pacific.
Given this, and given uncertainty about Xi’s intentions, and given the very real possibility that the PLA’s assessment of American capacity and American intent could lead it to overestimate its confidence in victory, it seems wise to assume that, under a range of readily imaginable circumstances, China’s temptation to absorb Taiwan will outweigh its calculation of potential costs and risks. So Taiwan and the West have no real choice but to work seriously at deterring war, and at preparing for its possible eventuality.
What would a Chinese effort to take Taiwan look like, and who would win?
In the myriad writings on this, inside and outside the American government, a wide range of strategies are depicted. They start with those sometimes described as gray, namely the use of political and informational tactics, economic inducements, and perhaps private and quiet coercion, to change the political equation in Taiwan without the application of the direct use of military force. This, of course, is China’s least costly and least risky tactic. The use of informational warfare, smear campaigns, disinformation campaigns, and possibly more nefarious Russian-style tactics can be combined (more accurately, are being combined) with China’s naval buildup to create a perception in Taiwan of inevitability: an image of a PLAN with dominance of the bordering seas, doubt about American resolve and response, dissension among those who would pursue independence or deepen the alliance, and ultimately a Taipei capitulation to deeper Chinese political and even military participation in the island’s affairs. But Taiwan has been successful so far in rebuffing such tactics, and anyway such tactics do not always succeed — far from it. Russia tried these tactics in Ukraine, for example, and they failed to produce a political outcome favorable to Moscow — at which point Moscow escalated to military options. Beijing might do the same if it sees that political strategies are failing (and if it is confident that it will win.)
By many accounts, what comes next is a Chinese naval blockade of Taiwan, designed to inflict substantial economic costs on the island, sufficient for them to sue for “peace” — that is, to capitulate. This would be relatively straightforward for China to implement. Even though Taiwan has American-made and French-made frigates in its fleet and a wide range of missiles and minesweeping capacities, there is almost no chance that the Republic of China Navy could stand up to the PLA Navy if China determined to enforce a blockade. That is, unless the United States weighed in, and mounted a counter-blockade offensive or deployed parts of the Seventh Fleet (perhaps together with Japan and Australia, perhaps others) to provide a corridor through which ships approaching the Taiwan Strait could sail under our protection. At that stage, China would have to decide whether it was willing to attack American ships, potentially provoking a wider war. Michael O’Hanlon recently undertook a careful table-top estimate of this scenario, and concluded this: the key factor in determining whether China or the United States emerges victorious in this scenario (leaving aside for a moment the deeper question of what it means to “win” in this context) would be the rate at which Chinese submarines could successfully target American and allied naval shipping, versus the commercial shipping that our navies would be trying to protect. His second and essential point is that experience and reasonable estimates of Chinese command and targeting capabilities provide a wide range of outcomes, in some of which the United States “wins,” in others of which China “wins” — thus both sides should be in doubt of easy victory here. I am slightly more pessimistic: the narrowness of the sea lane as you approach the Strait, and the swift rise of the seabed to too-shallow levels except in the narrow sea lane, suggest to me that it would be easier than sometimes assumed for China to make well-informed projections about the position of commercial ships and distinguish them from naval ships, meaning that its successful targeting of American ships would likely be at the high end of O’Hanlon’s estimate. But even so, this scenario still leaves an option to escalate in American hands.
I am also less certain that a blockade is the low-risk option for China. Modern shipping is a complex business, and there is no such thing as a ship sailing goods only to Taiwanese ports. Ships going in and out of Taiwanese ports will be laden with goods destined for China itself as well, and potentially for several other countries. Those goods form parts of globally integrated supply chains from potentially dozens of countries; indeed, Taiwan is at the very heart of global supply chains. There are essential Taiwanese components in Chinese goods, as there are in German, American, Indian, and French goods, and so on. By squeezing the Taiwanese economy, China would also be hurting several other players, perhaps triggering a global economic slowdown. The imposition of a blockade in the Taiwan Strait would likely cause Lloyds of London and other maritime insurers to declare not just the Straits but the adjacent seas a “war risk” zone, creating endless complications for shipping firms in those waters. The disruption to sea-borne trade in the Western Pacific — and thus to the entire global economy — could be substantial. In short, in trying to squeeze Taiwan’s jugular, China risks severing one or two of its own arteries. It might still decide that the costs are worth it, but the costs would be real.
What’s more, an easier blockade to mount successfully is the one that the United States could do in response: an oil blockade at the Strait of Malacca (through which China imports roughly eighty percent of its liquid fuels, which in turn constitute about fifty percent of its overall energy supply.) At this distance from Chinese mainland ports, the US Navy still has a clear, decisive advantage over the PLA. There are some complexities to an oil blockade here (like the substantial additional costs Japan would have to pay to re-route its oil imports), but they are more manageable than a wider commercial blockade in the Taiwan Strait.
Which leaves more direct military operations. Oversimplifying, there could be two types. One would be a Chinese missile and air campaign to pummel Taiwanese defenses, and thereby to degrade their overall defenses, and to demonstrate Chinese power, and to expose American indecision (if we fail to show up in defense) or incapacity (if our defensive efforts do not substantially diminish the effect of the Chinese campaign). Taiwanese defenses against this kind of attack are not trivial: a combination of hardened bunkers on its eastern coast, anti-missile defense technology, and anti-air defenses would confront China with a number of obstacles. But not too many, alas: over a protracted campaign China would certainly overwhelm Taiwanese defense (including its cyber defenses, which at present are no match for China’s offensive capacity.) Again, unless the United States chose to respond. At which point the scenarios get very wide-ranging and very dangerous.
Most complicated and dangerous for China, of course, is the second military course of action: an actual invasion of the island. History shows, however, that maritime assaults have proved among the hardest and most costly of military options. And in this case Taiwan has substantial mining, missile, and airpower options to make this hard for China — though China in turn has more of all of those instruments and could likely ultimately overwhelm Taiwan’s defenses in the Strait itself. But Taiwan also has both 160,000 troops and 1,600,000 reservists who would, in this scenario, presumably be well motivated to fight (though they are not particularly well trained.) That could make it extremely hard for China to get ashore without very high costs, and once ashore to subdue the population. At the very least China would have to prepare for the contingency of a long and costly counter-insurgency campaign. And again, all of this assumes that the United States does not join the fight.
Yet every scenario in which the United States does join the fight comes with a crucial challenge. To increase our confidence of prevailing (in the narrow sense), we must do two very costly things: put large portions of the American fleet at risk, inside the range of Chinese missiles; and make substantial military moves against China’s missile batteries and its command and control apparatus, which likely means air or missile attacks on positions inside mainland China. We might well prevail, in the narrow sense of causing greater Chinese losses than we incur, and in causing China to abandon its military operation against Taiwan. But not before we were in every meaningful sense of the word at war with the PLA, and not before we were risking Chinese nuclear escalation. And if we are not willing to take those risks, we might well lose.
And what if we lose? Would an American loss in any one of a series of Taiwan scenarios constitute a “Suez moment,” as Hal Brands and others have argued? Would the American-led order inevitably and inexorably decline? The short answer is: possibly, partially.
In attempting to analyze this properly, we must first ignore the arguments made by many in Washington that the marred American withdrawal from Afghanistan profoundly eroded Western credibility. The evidence for this assertion is exceptionally slim. Anyone following the debate in Beijing, for example, heard the exact opposite: that the American withdrawal, a costly one at that, signaled the arrival of a much greater degree of seriousness in Washington about containing, even potentially confronting, China’s mounting power. It seemed as if our much-touted “pivot” to Asia, our promised shift of focus to a rising China, might finally be taking place. The fact that only weeks later, two of our closest allies, the United Kingdom and Australia, chose to substantially deepen their military partnership with us by means of a large nuclear submarine and technology deal shows the limited effect of the Afghan withdrawal. For Beijing our retreat from Afghanistan surely denoted a shift in the priorities of American power, though the extent of our willingness to exercise our power remains an open and vexing question.
Beyond that, credibility — a much beloved concept in American statecraft — is actually quite complicated. While much of the academic literature on international relations is abstract and obscure, one place where it has made a valuable contribution to policy is in puncturing easy claims about credibility, especially the notion that failure to stand up in one domain necessarily erodes credibility in another domain. Think of it this way: would the Poles or the Ukrainians be happy that the United States chose to pour massive quantities of its hard power into the defense of Taiwan? In principle, maybe; but in practice they would be deeply nervous that that effort substantially diminished American capability or willingness to help them defend their eastern borders. Or the reverse: if the United States chose to respond to Russian aggression in Ukraine by mounting a large-scale hard power war in that theater, would Japan and Taiwan feel reassured? Or would they worry that the United States had thereby meaningfully diminished its real material capacity to deter China? In the real world of limited power and mounting challenges, allies are more likely to weigh American actions through the prism of jealous insecurity and worry less about the consistency of our policy.
And yet what seems likely is that whereas a non-defense of Taiwan might not collapse or deeply erode the credibility of our alliance commitments in other theatres, it certainly would have such a damaging effect in Asia. Perhaps if the United States made crystal clear that a non-defense of Taiwan was driven by the fact that Taiwan is not a formal treaty ally, it might ease the sting for other allies in the region. But not by much: given how “alliance-adjacent” Taiwan has been, given how long standing a defense partner it has been, given the economic, democratic, and strategic stakes in Taiwan, it is far more likely that allies such as Korea and Japan, and close defense partners such as Singapore (and increasingly Vietnam), would see the decision in profoundly negative terms, and become far more worried about their own security. An already somewhat unsolid alliance with Korea could be shaken, perhaps irreparably. The alliance with Japan would likely continue, given how profoundly dependent Japan has long been on the American security guarantee, but the odds that Japan would move to develop its own nuclear deterrent would increase substantially and swiftly. Singapore, already divided between elites who see its interests lying in the American security relationship and those who see its commercial interests lying in China, might well feel forced to choose, and to choose China. China’s naval, strategic and political position in the Western Pacific would be substantially buttressed, and ours would be weakened. The stability of Asia would be thrown into sharp doubt. Every country in the region — and some beyond — would hedge against American uncertainty and adopt a more accommodating stance to China. China’s capacity to project power, military and political, into the wider global system would meaningfully increase, and ours would meaningfully diminish.
We have deep interests in Taiwan’s continued autonomy. Even the most cursory glance at the strategic and commercial map of Asia suffices to dismiss the “we have no interests here” argument, even if democracy does not count (which it does.) But we cannot be certain of Taiwan’s victory, with our help, in limited engagements; and the prospects for our “victory” grow only when we escalate to the point of a wide-ranging war against the PLA, not just across the reaches of the Western Pacific but also involving attacks on China’s mainland. And this is to say nothing of the risk of nuclear escalation — which, as scholars such as Caitlin Talmadge have pointed out, is quite real. All of which combines to make a resoundingly clear point — that the only good version of a war in Taiwan is one that is never fought.
For Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership, it remains the case that a political and informational strategy to subdue Taiwan is likely preferable to a military option. But only so long as it works. And the success of any such strategy is surely in significant doubt. To move to a military option, however, Xi has to be convinced that the costs can be borne and that the war can be won. Indeed, he would need to be almost certain of victory. To continue to maintain an effective deterrence against war, then, it follows that the United States and its partners must increase the potential costs, and increase the uncertainty.
Much of what needs doing is known — but it needs the doing. Taiwan some time ago adopted an asymmetric defense strategy vis-à-vis China’s greater power — that is, a focus on low-cost, resilient defensive capacities designed to deny China a swift, low-cost entry into Taiwanese territory (as opposed, say, to the procurement of ever more expensive frigates that are acutely vulnerable to Chinese missiles). This strategy has only grown in importance. But as the analysts of a bipartisan task force led by Bonnie Glaser, Richard Bush, and Michael Green (among the deans of Taiwan studies in the capital) point out, it has not been implemented in full. Far from it. Indeed, in the vigorous debates between Taiwan hawks and Taiwan doves, one clear point of consensus was the urgency for Taiwan to shift away from a defense focus that involved the purchase and maintenance of large, high-end military assets (which China could likely rapidly defeat in war) and move towards the real implementation of its asymmetric strategy. There is somewhat less of a consensus among China-defense scholars about what the United States needs to do to buttress our deterrent posture against China as a whole — whether by bulking up defenses in fixed positions, shifting to a more distributed defensive posture, investing more in technological counter-moves — but there is wide consensus that implementation of a new posture badly lags behind the recognition of the mounting China challenge. If our objectives are to protect Taiwan and to avoid war, then right now we are asleep at the wheel. Everyone also agrees that the United States should put substantial priority on getting Japan to move beyond the modest steps it has so far taken to possibly, kind of, quasi, semi prepare for coming to Taiwan’s defense in the case of an attack.
For Taiwan itself, quite apart from asymmetric defense, there is more work to be done on the issue of political and economic resilience. Taiwan has begun to invest in a range of forms of resilience, but few observers’ question that they need to do more. On political and informational resilience: internationally, perhaps the most impressive example of a countries’ national resilience strategy is in Finland, which, faced with a range of forms of cyber, political, informational, and threatening pressures from Russia, has revitalized a strategy that engages its military, parliament, media, civil society, the business sector, and the government to share information about Russian tactics, prepare for attacks, and generally decrease the effectiveness of Russia’s efforts. Perhaps similar strategies could help buttress Taiwan against Chinese gray tactics. It should also look seriously at the option of building out a port on its eastern shore, perhaps in the estuary that is much easier to defend or resupply than any of its ports in the Taiwan Strait. On economic resilience, there are a number of preparatory steps that Taiwan can take to increase its options. That involves steps such as stockpiling reserves of war munitions, medical equipment and supplies, some essential food stocks, and essential fuels (including air fuel.)
What is often missing from discussion of Taiwan’s defense options is a wider global strategy. The defense of Taiwan is principally its own responsibility, and secondarily that of the United States. But there are stakes here, too, for all of those allies and partners whose interests are impinged upon by instability in Asia, those who would not like to see China in a position increasingly to exert its power in world affairs; those who have stakes in the free flow of energy and commerce on the high seas; those with a deep interest in resisting a world in which authoritarian powers move by coercion to establish spheres of influence in which they could be entangled. Many of these countries will face similar dilemmas to ours — many of them (ironically including Japan) have vast trade and financial relationships with China that they will be reluctant to risk. But the United States must work to convince them that the risks are much greater if war breaks out than through deliberate deterrence. If you wish peace, prepare for war: the old Latin adage certainly applies in this new era of Chinese power.
For the allies that are less likely to put military assets in play, there are still a number of steps that they can prepare themselves to take in the case of a Taiwan emergency. Just a partial list includes: votes in defense of the Republic of China in key international institutions; curtailment of visas for Chinese students and scientists, especially in key technology domains; targeted technology sanctions; targeted economic sanctions; targeted individual sanctions; energy sanctions; disinvestment from key sectors; blocking Chinese firms from acquiring nationally registered firms (or shares of firms) in the energy, technology and agricultural sectors; recognition of Taiwan; joint investment in supply chain diversification; joint investment in strategic minerals production. And crucially, this includes allies in Europe and other regions, not just in the Pacific. Making Taiwan a global — and not just a regional — problem will play to American strengths and exploit China’s continuing weaknesses. If we think about deterrence only in the seas on China’s eastern borders, we cede a massive geographical advantage to Beijing. At present China has far flung economic, energy and diplomatic interests, but its capacity to reinforce those by hard power projection lags far behind. This is China’s global dilemma, and we should do nothing to help them find a way out of it.
We are not ready for a Taiwan emergency. Despite repeated alarms, 2021 did not see such an emergency, and there are reasons for calm about the short term. But over the medium term, the possibility of a Chinese military action in the Taiwan Strait or on the island cannot be ruled out. The United States and its Asian allies have major interests in preventing that outcome. We also have a major interest in avoiding war with China.
All this being said, it seems unwise to me that the United States should move off of its declaratory policy of strategic ambiguity. Richard Hass and others have made the case for this shift, arguing that the current policy does not adequately deter China. If we were confident of victory in low-threshold crises and confident also of our ability to maintain “escalation dominance,” or to control the level of violence in the event of hostilities, perhaps this would be wise policy. But we are not. Speaking more loudly does not increase the size of our stick. We would be much wiser to increase the size — or at least the potency, the unpredictability, and the survivability — of our stick. And wiser, too, to communicate privately to China about the steps that we and other allies would be prepared to undertake in the case of a military move against Taiwan. At the same time, we can and should stipulate our continued conviction that, short of a military crisis, we oppose Taiwan’s independence, all the while retaining a freedom of tactical maneuver. We need to get this right: to keep our heads and stay calm, build our strength and rouse our allies, recognize our strategic responsibilities and be prepared to act with moral courage. Otherwise we are headed for costly abandonment or consequential failure.
