Prof. ST Hsieh
Director, US-China Energy Industry Forum
626-376-7460
September 26, 2023
It is true that the US isn’t doing enough supporting Taiwan to stop the war. But first, is war inevitable? Cross strait trade amount is huge and in favor Taiwan. Has the US asked the people in Taiwan for war vs peace? Secondly, has China announced that the war over Taiwan is imminent? Most importantly, what the US has done to promote peace across the Taiwan strait, other than arming Taiwan with military equipment? Should the US encourage a peaceful reproachment between Beijing and Taipei?
Deterrence may work to a certain degree, but it will not eliminate the risk of war. Deterrence could cause a vicious and mutually destructive war. Have the lessons of the bloody proxy war in Ukraine taught the world anything? Once a war is ignited, it is very hard to distinguish. War damages the global economy, and it is very difficult to reach a cease fire.
On the other hand, a peace accord will ensure there is no war. It is disheartening, in the face of the endless proxy war in Ukraine, to read argument for preparing another war!
Deterrence in Taiwan Is Failing
The United States has committed to keeping the peace but isn’t doing enough to stop the war.
SEPTEMBER 8, 2023, 3:52 PM
By Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
“My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan wrote in a January memo to officers in the Air Mobility Command. The memo, which promptly leaked to reporters, warned that the United States and China were barreling toward a conflict over Taiwan. The U.S. Defense Department quickly distanced itself from Minihan’s blunt assessment. Yet the general wasn’t saying anything in private that military and civilian officials weren’t already saying in public.
In August 2022, a visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had set off the worst cross-strait crisis in a quarter century. China’s aircraft barreled across the center line of the Taiwan Strait; its ships prowled the waters around the island; its ballistic missiles splashed down in vital shipping lanes. Months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had reminded everyone that major war is not an anachronism, the Taiwan crisis made visceral the prospect that a Chinese attack on that island could trigger conflict between the world’s two top powers.
The cover of Foreign Policy’s fall 2023 print magazine shows a jack made up of joined hands lifting up the world. Cover text reads: The Alliances That Matter Now: Multilateralism is at a dead end, but powerful blocs are getting things done.”
Washington certainly took note. A year earlier, the outgoing chief of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip Davidson, had predicted that a war in the Taiwan Strait could come by 2027. After the August crisis, this “Davidson window” became something like conventional wisdom, with Minihan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other U.S. officials predicting that trouble might start even sooner. If the United States and China do clash over Taiwan, it will be the war everyone saw coming—which would make the failure to deter it all the more painful.
To be sure, U.S. President Joe Biden has made deterring that conflict a priority. Despite the long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity,” Biden has publicly affirmed, four times, that the United States would come to Taiwan’s aid if it were attacked. Yet deterrence is about more than declaratory policy: It requires assembling a larger structure of constraints that preserve the peace by instilling fear of the outcome and consequences of war. More than a year after the August crisis and nearly three years into the Davidson window, the United States and its friends are struggling to build that structure in the limited time they may have left.
Taiwan is important in many ways—as a critical node in technology supply chains, as a democracy menaced by an aggressive autocracy, as an unresolved legacy of China’s civil war. Yet Taiwan has become the world’s most perilous flash point mostly for strategic reasons.
Taiwan is a “lock around the neck of a great dragon,” as Chinese military analyst Zhu Tingchang has written. It anchors the first island chain, the string of U.S. allies and partners that block China from the open Pacific. If China were to take Taiwan, it would rupture this defense perimeter, opening the way to greater influence—and coercion—throughout the region and beyond.
In 1972, Chinese leader Mao Zedong told U.S. President Richard Nixon that Beijing could wait 100 years to reclaim Taiwan. China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, is not so patient. He has said the island’s awkward status cannot be passed from generation to generation; he has reportedly ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for action by 2027. Militaries constantly prepare for missions they never execute, of course. But the risk of war is rising as China’s capabilities—and urgency—grow.
A great-power war over Taiwan would be cataclysmic. It would feature combat more vicious than anything the United States has experienced in generations.
Beijing is reaping the rewards of a multidecade buildup focused on the ships, planes, and other platforms needed to project power into the Western Pacific; the “counter-intervention” capabilities, such as anti-ship missiles and sophisticated air defenses, needed to keep U.S. forces at bay; and now the nuclear capabilities needed to enhance China’s options for deterrence and coercion alike. The scale and scope of these programs are remarkable. Adm. John Aquilino, Davidson’s successor at Indo-Pacific Command, said in April that China has embarked on “the largest, fastest, most comprehensive military buildup since World War II.” As a result, the balance is changing fast. By the late 2020s, several recent assessments indicate, Washington might find it extremely hard to save Taiwan from a determined assault.
Xi would surely prefer to take Taiwan without a fight. He currently aims to coerce unification through military, economic, and psychological pressure short of war. Yet this strategy isn’t working. Having witnessed Xi’s brutal crackdown in Hong Kong, the Taiwanese populace has little interest in unification. Since 2016, the more hawkish, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has thumped the more Beijing-friendly Kuomintang in presidential elections. If the DPP wins the next presidential race in January 2024—its candidate, Lai Ching-te, currently leads the polls—Xi might conclude that coercion has failed and consider more violent options.
Biden knows the threat is rising—he recently called China a “ticking time bomb”—which is why he has repeatedly said Washington won’t stand aside if Beijing strikes. But make no mistake: A great-power war over Taiwan would be cataclysmic. It would feature combat more vicious than anything the United States has experienced in generations. It would fragment the global economy and pose real risks of nuclear escalation. So the crucial question is whether Washington can deter a conflict it hopes never to fight.
Not everyone believes it can. “Taiwan is like 2 feet from China,” U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly remarked in 2019. “We are 8,000 miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.” But protecting Taiwan isn’t as hopeless as the map makes it seem.
China’s fundamental advantages are proximity and the mass of forces it can muster in a war off its coast. The U.S. advantage is that control is harder than denial, especially when control requires crossing large contested bodies of water. An invasion of Taiwan, with its oceanic moat and rugged terrain, would be one of history’s most daunting military operations, comparable to the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Options short of invasion, such as blockade or bombardment, offer no guarantee of forcing Taiwan to submit. Given the risk that a failed war could pose to Xi’s regime and perhaps his life, the Chinese leader will probably want a high chance of success if he attacks. So the United States and other countries should be able to inject enough doubt into this calculus that even a more risk-acceptant Xi decides rolling the iron dice is a bad idea.
This will require two mutually reinforcing types of deterrence. “Deterrence by denial” convinces an enemy not to attack by persuading him that the effort will fail. The ability to deter invasion, in this sense, is synonymous with the ability to defeat it. “Deterrence by punishment” convinces an enemy not to attack by persuading him that the effort—even if successful—will incur an exorbitant price. The strongest deterrents blend denial and punishment. They confront an aggressor with sky-high costs and a low likelihood of success. The U.S. task in the Western Pacific, then, is to show that Taiwan can survive a Chinese attack—and that any such war will leave China far poorer, weaker, and less politically stable than before.
In practice, this approach would rest on five pillars: first, a Taiwan that can deny China a quick or easy victory because it is bristling with arms and ready to resist to the end; second, a U.S. military that can sink a Chinese invasion fleet, decimate a blockade squadron, and otherwise turn back hostile forces trying to take Taiwan; third, a coalition of allies that can bolster this denial defense while raising the strategic price China pays by forcing it to fight a sprawling, regionwide war; fourth, a global punishment campaign that batters China’s economy—and perhaps its political system—regardless of whether Beijing wins or loses in the Taiwan Strait; and fifth, a credible ability to fight a nuclear war in the Western Pacific—if only to convince China that it cannot use its own growing arsenal to deter the United States from defending Taiwan.
If this sounds like a tall order, it is. Deterring determined revisionists is never easy. If these steps sound awful to contemplate, they are. Deterrence involves preparing for the unthinkable to lessen the likelihood it occurs. The United States and its friends are making real, even historic progress in all these areas. Alas, they are still struggling to get ahead of the threat.
Consider Taiwan itself. That country is the first line of defense in the Western Pacific. It may also be the weakest.
In fairness, Taiwan faces an epic task in hardening itself against its hulking neighbor. To do so, it has adopted a smart, asymmetric defense concept that emphasizes using “large numbers of small things,” as former U.S. defense official David Helvey termed it—sea mines, anti-ship missiles, mobile air defenses—to slow and attrite Chinese forces; it is building an army that can surge troops to invasion beaches; and it is raising a reserve force that can fight guerrilla-style in Taiwan’s complex terrain. The United States is selling—and, now, simply giving—Taiwan missiles, drones, and other weapons to hasten this transformation. It is quietly increasing its training and advisory presence on the island. Given time, Taiwan can make itself a prickly porcupine. The question is how much time that will take.
Taiwan’s promising defense reforms have been dogged by political and bureaucratic opposition, just as U.S. arms sales have lagged for years due to backlogs in the military supply pipeline. Yet the underlying problem is more fundamental. It is hard to claim that a country that spends just 2.4 percent of its GDP on defense, that is only slowly preparing the sort of all-of-society resistance that has sustained Ukraine, and whose military spends precious dollars on expensive, easy-to-kill capabilities that could be useless in the event of war is entirely serious about its own defense. According to the Rand Corp., Taiwan’s ability to hold out until help arrives is becoming more tenuous—which will make it a more tempting target for Beijing.
The United States reportedly lacks enough anti-ship missiles and other munitions to blunt the first Chinese attack, let alone keep fighting after a few days or weeks.
For the U.S. military, the story is also one of smart reforms and glaring weaknesses. The Pentagon is doing many of the right things to turn geography against Beijing by transforming the Western Pacific into a killing zone for attacking forces: buying more missiles and munitions, hardening its bases and learning to disperse its forces, investing in loitering shooters and sensors, exploring creative ways of delivering firepower from longer ranges, and even making the Marine Corps into a ship-killing force that operates from tiny islands. As new capabilities, such as a next-generation stealth bomber, and new basing opportunities come online in the late 2020s and 2030s, the United States may stand a good chance of stymying a Chinese attack. Yet these changes are still years or more from fruition, and striking deficiencies remain.
Modern combat remains a matter of mass. Recent investments aside, the United States reportedly lacks enough anti-ship missiles and other munitions to blunt the first Chinese attack, let alone keep fighting after a few days or weeks of high-intensity combat. Amphibious ships, attack submarines, and other critical platforms are all too scarce. Rapidly surging production of any of these capabilities is difficult, thanks to decades of disinvestment in the defense industrial base—and because even now, defense spending is roughly as low, relative to GDP, as at any time since World War II. As aging ships, planes, and submarines are retired in the late 2020s, in fact, U.S. firepower in the Western Pacific will decline, just as China’s current military reforms reach fruition. The Pentagon is working hard to address the China challenge, but it is still a long way from closing the window of vulnerability that is opening up.
What about the multilateral aspects of deterrence? The best news, ironically, involves addressing the long-standing U.S. weakness in the Indo-Pacific: the lack of a regional alliance that makes an attack on one an attack on all. History and geography still conspire against such an arrangement. In recent years, though, Washington has made great strides in strengthening and stringing together relationships that could make up a winning coalition.
The U.S.-Japanese alliance is becoming a real warfighting partnership, as Tokyo embarks on its greatest defense buildup in generations and works with Washington to turn its Ryukyu Islands into maritime strong points. Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have formed a partnership focused on shoring up the military balance—especially undersea—in the region. Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines are giving Washington expanded basing access in the first and second island chains; the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue is holding more ambitious exercises; and numerous European countries are expanding deployments to the region. South Korea and Japan are enhancing their security cooperation. Officials in Washington, Tokyo, and Canberra are even whispering about fighting together in a three-way coalition to defend Taiwan.
That coalition could be a game-changer. Japan in particular would bring vital air and sea assets to a scrap. Even short of that, additional basing options can make a big difference, by making it harder for Chinese missiles to crush U.S. power without starting a huge regional war. Then there is the psychological contribution to deterrence. A Chinese regime that obsessively monitors the “correlation of forces” can hardly be encouraged as an Indo-Pacific balancing coalition coheres.
Officials in Washington, Tokyo, and Canberra are even whispering about fighting together in a three-way coalition to defend Taiwan.
Yet, if that coalition is a tribute to Beijing’s self-defeating bellicosity, the process is hardly complete. There remain uncertainties about which foreign facilities the United States will actually be able to use in wartime. Even the most enthusiastic allies, Australia and Japan, haven’t explicitly declared that they would fight for Taiwan. In 1914, another loose coalition—the Triple Entente—failed to prevent World War I because the lack of a firm British commitment caused German leaders to hope, wrongly, that the pact might crack under stress. Coalitions that fully coalesce only after a war has started coalesce too late to prevent the war from breaking out.
The same dynamic challenges the formation of a global punishment campaign. Russia’s war in Ukraine showed that advanced democracies around the world can rally to impose costs on an aggressor. NATO and the G-7 are taking a growing interest in Taiwan and the Western Pacific; Washington has engaged allies about hitting China with technological, financial, and trade sanctions in case of war. Add in the fact that the U.S. Navy could use its control of maritime choke points to cut off Beijing’s seaborne energy imports, and Xi now has to grapple with the possibility that attacking Taiwan would lead to economic ruin.
It’s only a possibility, though. There is no agreed, let alone announced, Western position on sanctioning China. Some European countries—most notably France—are publicly cool to the idea. Others are probably reluctant to commit, and thereby earn Beijing’s wrath, until the shooting starts. Xi, for his part, has surely noticed that sanctions have harmed but not destroyed Russia’s economy. He is sprinting to reduce China’s exposure by stockpiling food and gas, cultivating technological self-sufficiency, and investing in overland pipelines and supply routes that are safer from the threat of interdiction. Deterrence is thus a moving target. As Washington tries to prepare a punishment campaign, China tries to mitigate its potential effects.
Finally, there is the nuclear pillar. It seems unlikely that the United States would use nuclear weapons first in a war over Taiwan—an important but not existential interest—given that Beijing could respond in kind. A better objective is to dissuade China from thinking it can use the threat of limited nuclear escalation, likely against U.S. forces or bases in the region, to prevent Washington from intervening in the first place.
Through the end of this decade, the U.S. nuclear arsenal will remain larger and far more lethal than China’s, which gives Washington dominance at the top of the escalation ladder. The Pentagon is also developing and fielding limited nuclear capabilities—such as lower-yield warheads delivered via submarine-launched ballistic missiles—that will make it harder for Beijing to exploit an escalatory gap on the rungs below. Even so, deterring China from using nuclear threats to win a conventional war may not be as simple as it seems.
Chinese leaders may believe they possess greater resolve in a Taiwan conflict because that island—thanks to geography and history—is less important to Washington than to Beijing. As China’s arsenal expands rapidly from the late 2020s onward, Beijing may also be more inclined to use nuclear weapons for coercive leverage, as Moscow did when Soviet intercontinental capabilities matured in the Khrushchev years.
Not least, it is possible that recent events have convinced Beijing that the United States just won’t fight a conventional war against a nuclear-armed rival. Biden’s stated reason for not intervening directly in Ukraine is that doing so would cause “World War III.” If Xi doubted that the United States was any more eager for a contest in nuclear risk-taking in Asia, he might well be wrong—but he wouldn’t be crazy. Plenty of wars have begun due to miscalculations more egregious than this.
Deterrence is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. Short of climbing inside Xi’s head, we can’t know precisely what will or won’t stay his hand. The best Washington can do is try to reduce any optimism Xi could plausibly have about where a war might lead while recognizing that this will always be an imprecise art. It’s reassuring, in this context, that the United States and its friends are doing so much to address the growing danger—and deeply worrying that they sometimes seem to be moving in slow motion as China races to get ready for a fight. On issues from coalition-building to hardening Taiwan to strengthening U.S. capabilities, the direction of travel is excellent. The speed of travel is not.
Some analysts believe the only way to increase that speed is to downshift elsewhere—that the United States can only save Taiwan by sacrificing Ukraine. Things aren’t quite that simple. Deterrence, after all, is a product of will and capabilities. Many Indo-Pacific democracies, including Taiwan, have so strongly backed Ukraine because they know that the free world’s response to aggression in one place must figure into Xi’s assessment of the likely consequences of aggression in another. Materially speaking, the war in Ukraine has also impelled many of the positive moves—defense spending hikes, closer cooperation among partners and allies, investments in the U.S. defense industrial base—occurring in the Indo-Pacific. The right approach is to find, in one shocking war, the sense of urgency needed to ramp up efforts to prevent another. In the early 1950s, for example, the Truman administration used the alarm stoked by the Korean War to mount the U.S. military buildup and diplomatic offensive that bolstered free-world positions around the globe.
As U.S. President Harry Truman once put it, countries that don’t pay the price of peace will eventually pay the price of war.
Many obstacles—spending constraints, bureaucratic logjams, collective action problems—make an emergency program of this type difficult. But given that failure to deter Chinese aggression would confront Washington with a choice between fighting an earth-shaking conflict and letting Beijing reorder maritime Asia, those challenges should be kept in perspective. As President Harry Truman once put it, countries that don’t pay the price of peace will eventually pay the price of war.
To some degree, all the discussion of timelines and prospective D-Days is artificial. There presumably isn’t a giant clock ticking down to zero in Beijing. But it’s not a bad idea to pretend that there is. Deterring an awful war in the Western Pacific won’t require some magic formula. It will require greater urgency, resources, and unity than those committed to defending the existing order have exhibited so far. Washington and its allies must start acting as though they believe what U.S. officials have been saying—that time may be the free world’s most finite asset of all.