Last month’s first in-person summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping was a relatively successful event, even if there weren’t many specific outcomes. Both leaders came away pledging to keep up U.S.-China dialogue. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Beijing early next year.
Given the adversarial competition Washington and Beijing find themselves in, mutually acceptable solutions are hard to come by. This is especially true with respect to Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party eventually intends to reunify with the mainland. Next to sustaining China’s economic development, there is no more vital issue in the ranks of the CCP, and to Xi personally, than bringing the self-ruled island into the fold. Xi’s “national rejuvenation” campaign simply cannot be completed without it.
The United States, of course, is extremely wary of those plans.
While Washington still operates on the “One China” policy, which acknowledges but doesn’t recognize China’s claims over Taiwan and advocates a peaceful resolution of cross-strait disputes, Biden’s own rhetoric has often gotten him into trouble with the Chinese. Biden has four times pledged that Washington would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event that the People’s Liberation Army launched a military operation against the island. Most Taiwanese, meanwhile, don’t want to be reincorporated under a Chinese autocracy.
There’s an assumption within the national security apparatus that Xi will eventually use force to compel Taiwan’s subjugation. Some U.S. commanders fear that such an operation may occur by or during 2027. In turn, the Trump administration signed more than $18 billion in weapons deals with Taiwan, and the Biden administration has continued with similar sales. Preventing a forceful PLA takeover of the island is the one foreign policy area Republicans and Democrats can agree on. The draft 2023 National Defense Authorization Act includes a stipulation approving $10 billion in defense equipment for Taiwan over the next five years. Washington has been pushing the Taiwanese to prioritize weapons systems, such as mines, coastal anti-ship missiles, and missile defense systems, that would better deter a hypothetical PLA invasion and force Beijing to think twice before acting.
The question hovering over the entire debate is whether the U.S. military would go to war with China to assist Taiwan. And a growing number of analysts are calling on Washington to ditch “strategic ambiguity” on that question in favor of “strategic clarity,” which amounts to a de facto U.S. security guarantee for Taiwan.
U.S. officials ought to think long and hard about that recommendation. War with China means war against a nation with millions of troops, a vast navy and air force, and one of the world’s largest missile arsenals. Oh, and a nation with hundreds of nuclear warheads that is rapidly adding more. The CCP also has a keen historical interest in closing a file that dates back to the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s. A direct military clash between the U.S. and China, on behalf of Taiwan or anyone else, would kill a whole lot of people, with tens of thousands of American military personnel at risk of losing their lives. The U.S. may think it could impose enough pain on China during a conflict to force the CCP to come to resolve the Taiwan issue diplomatically, but U.S. policymakers and planners can’t base their assumptions on the best-case scenario.
The U.S. also has a core interest in avoiding a fight over Taiwan because Beijing holds many advantages in such a fight. U.S. supply lines would stretch thousands of kilometers, and the closer those lines came to the immediate region, the more likely they would be susceptible to PLA destruction. China, in contrast, is less than 100 miles away from the Taiwanese coast and has the benefit of boasting several large ports and bases right across from the Taiwan Strait. Just as importantly, China possesses a great will to succeed. Beijing’s pain threshold would likely surpass that of the U.S. Put another way, Beijing’s interest in reunification is higher than Washington’s interest in preventing it.
U.S.-China relations will hinge in large measure on how the Taiwan scenario plays out. But a war would be enormously costly to all sides — even the winning one.
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Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune and Newsweek. He is also a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
