SLEEPWALKING INTO WAR WITH CHINA- DAVID GOLDMAN
https://compactmag.com/article/sleepwalking-into-war-with-china
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan marks the beginning of a new and dire strategic crisis with China. Whether by accident or design, the Biden Administration is sleepwalking into war with China—quickly, but not quickly enough for most Republican leaders. While the United States wasted $6 trillion or more in failed nation-building campaigns during the past 20 years, China focused its military resources on surface-to-ship missiles, modern aircraft, submarines, and electronic warfare measures on its coast. If we fight China on its home seas, we probably will lose.
There is a fundamental asymmetry of strategic interest in Taiwan between China and the United States. China is not a nation-state but a polyglot empire. Only 1 in 10 Chinese converses in Mandarin, the state dialect, according to a 2014 government study. Most speak one of 200 dialects. China is held together as it has been for thousands of years by a common tax collector in Beijing and the Mandarin bureaucracy, recast as the Chinese Communist Party. One rebel province—as Beijing views Taiwan—sets a precedent for many. Countless times in its long history, China has fragmented into warring provinces, encouraged during the 19th and 20th centuries by foreign powers.
Opposition to Taiwanese sovereignty is a raison d’etre of the Chinese state, and Beijing will go to war to prevent it. Beijing will tolerate the status quo, but not if it believes the United States is promoting Taiwanese sovereignty.
What makes Pelosi’s visit so provocative is her constitutional status as second in the line of presidential succession. A visit by an American vice president would, in diplomatic protocol, verge upon diplomatic recognition and crosses a red line; a visit by the next-in-line to the vice president touches that red line.
Our diplomatic relations with China are based on the Shanghai Communique of 1972, which states:
The Chinese side reaffirmed its position: the Taiwan question is the crucial question obstructing the normalization of relations between China and the United States; the Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government of China; Taiwan is a province of China which has long been returned to the motherland; the liberation of Taiwan is China’s internal affair in which no other country has the right to interfere; and all US forces and military installations must be withdrawn from Taiwan. The Chinese Government firmly opposes any activities which aim at the creation of “one China, one Taiwan,” “one China, two governments,” “two Chinas,” an “independent Taiwan” or advocate that “the status of Taiwan remains to be determined.”
The US side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.
A member of the Nixon delegation that wrote this document in 1972 told me that the Pelosi visit “clearly violates the spirit of the Shanghai Communique” because of the Speaker’s constitutional status. A consultation with an official so close to the presidency de facto treats the Taiwanese government as if it were a sovereign, and contradicts the 1972 commitment to a “settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.” That is why China’s President Xi Jinping told Biden in their conversation last week: “If you play with fire, it will set you on fire.” China has not made threats like this since Nixon’s 1972 visit.
Infuriatingly, the Biden Administration has refused to take responsibility for the visit. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken declared that “the decision is entirely the speaker’s” to visit Taiwan. If Pelosi had taken a commercial flight, rather than an American military aircraft, Blinken’s demurral would have more credibility. President Biden told reporters in an off-hand conversation that “the military doesn’t like it,” but did nothing to dissuade Pelosi. White House press spokesman John Kirby insisted to reporters that the One China policy has not changed.
That is double-talk and it doesn’t wash in China. In an Aug. 2 interview, Prof. Wang Wen of Renmin University was asked by the Observer, “Is the US pretending to be stupid?” He replied: “This business of pretending to be stupid means they clearly understand China’s fundamental interest and red line on the Taiwan issue, but nonetheless, they have stepped on it repeatedly.”
The next move is Beijing’s. Almost surely, it will not involve any kind of detonation. A naval blockade of Taiwan is a possibility. China would take the position that because Taiwan is not a sovereign country recognized by the United States, it can place its navy wherever it wants near the island, and dare the United States to fire the first shot. But this is pure speculation.
The fact is that Beijing has the preponderance of power along its coasts. I reviewed the comparative force position in a 2020 book. As Air Force strategist and Stanford professor Oriana Skylar Mastro wrote last year, “China’s offensive weaponry, including ballistic and cruise missiles, could…destroy U.S. bases in the western Pacific in a matter of days…Recent war games conducted by the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation have shown that a military clash between the United States and China over Taiwan would likely result in a U.S. defeat, with China completing an all-out invasion in just days or weeks.”
In 1997, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was able to visit Taiwan with impunity, but the US also was able to sail a carrier group into the Taiwan Strait while China watched powerless. With an estimated 1,300 state-of-the-art ballistic missiles, China can destroy American aircraft carriers as well as air bases in Okinawa and Guam. There is some dispute as to whether China can target a maneuvering carrier at some distance from its coast, but Ukraine’s sinking of the Moskva in April with an anti-ship missile should make us cautious about counting on Chinese ineptitude. China landed a spacecraft on the dark side of the moon.
A war between China and the United States might be the worst calamity that ever befell the human race. Admiral James Stavridis in his 2022 thriller 2034 described a naval engagement that led to a nuclear exchange without a winner. Economic war between China and the United States would cause a world depression. America now imports $700 billion a year from China, including not only most of our consumer electronics but also 90 percent of our antibiotics. A freeze of trade between the world’s two largest economies would bring enormous suffering to the world, even if no shot were fired.
It is within our power to maintain the status quo in Taiwan. Beijing knows that it would pay a terrible price for invading. For the time being Taiwan is a goose that lays golden eggs for the mainland. Taiwan’s exports to the mainland comprise 45 percent of its GDP. Taiwanese chip engineers are building the mainland’s semiconductor industry. The United States can eschew actions that point toward Taiwanese sovereignty while making clear that penalties for a Chinese use of force would be prohibitive.
Restoring American technological superiority will require a trillion-dollar, multi-year effort. Any attempt at a quick fix of our military position in Taiwan—for example stocking the island with anti-ship missiles—will precipitate a crisis. As Prof. Mastro warns: “The more credible the American threat to intervene, the more likely China would be to hit U.S. forces in the region in its opening salvo. But if China thought the United States might stay out of the conflict, it would decline to attack U.S. forces in the region, since doing so would inevitably bring the United States into the war.”
But that is what the Washington Uniparty now proposes. The Wall Street Journal editorial page calls for “a far more urgent and forceful policy of bolstering and arming Taiwan,” adding that unnamed “U.S. officials say Mr. Xi has advanced his timetable for reunification from later this decade to perhaps as little as 18 months.” US officials do not know that and cannot know that, because Beijing weighs its options as it watches America’s hands. Meanwhile Thomas Friedman in The New York Times proposes to “arm Taiwan into what military analysts call a porcupine—bristling with so many missiles that China would never want to lay hands on it—while saying and doing as little as possible to provoke China into thinking that it MUST lay hands on it now.” Does he think China wouldn’t notice his proposed policy of armament? If we attempt to raise the future cost of a mainland invasion, we invite Beijing to act immediately. For that reason Taiwan might not accept such arms.
We look back on the leaders of Europe in August 1914 and wonder how they could have been stupid enough to plunge the world into war from which Western civilization has not recovered. And then we watch today’s news, and see leaders even stupider than the malefactors of 1914. We do not need to live through this nightmare again. War is avoidable. So is the decline of the United States.
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