Following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s (D-CA) visit to Taiwan last week, the die is cast. Enraged by the visit of America’s second-most powerful politician to what it regards as a breakaway province, Communist China has shown its hand.
It’s holding a sharp knife.
Concluding four days of military drills surrounding Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army immediately launched new exercises on Monday. Whereas last week’s drills were focused on encircling Taiwan and preventing U.S. military relief to the island, the new exercises are focused on anti-submarine warfare. This training program is designed to exhaust Taiwan’s defense forces and improve the PLA’s ability to locate and destroy U.S., Australian, and Japanese submarines. Beijing isn’t playing games.
Indeed, Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to have decided that as the West moves to restrain his imperial impulses, he must move faster and bolder to secure his destiny, one inextricably linked to China’s conquest of Taiwan. Most U.S. military and intelligence analysts now tell us that an assault on Taiwan will likely occur within the 2025-2030 period. This poses a major threat to U.S. interests and international stability.
Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty is seen by U.S. allies and partners the world over as a benchmark for the broader credibility of the U.S.-led democratic world. If China conquers Taiwan, it will greatly undermine America’s ability to withstand Beijing’s other assaults on the post-1945 international order. Always tempted by China’s dangling of expansive trade deals in return for political acquiescence, European powers will ask themselves whether America is worth their alliance. Other hostile states such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea will move to consolidate their relationships with Beijing. So also will America’s Middle Eastern allies double down on their tentative China engagements. Poorer nations from Asia to Africa to Latin America will certainly pay less heed to American efforts to develop their economies alongside the democratic rule of law. They will choose the new winner on the bloc.
In turn, Beijing will seize the initiative in reshaping the world under a China-centric feudal authoritarianism. All of us would be less free and less prosperous under such a regime. The question, then, is how the United States can strengthen Taiwan’s defense. We suggest three actions.
First, the U.S. must demand Taiwan wake up to the threat.
While President Tsai Ing-wen has taken some action to raise defense spending and improve military readiness, Taiwan remains far too vulnerable. Taiwan’s defense spending is barely above 2% of its gross domestic product, at least three times lower than where it should be. Taiwan also continues to rely on conventional aircraft and warships for its defense. These platforms look good, and their sales make major U.S. defense exporters happy. Unfortunately, they would quickly be overwhelmed by the PLA. What Taiwan needs are legions of mobile anti-ship and anti-air missile systems, vast and widely spread out ammunition stocks, and well-trained reserves who live in the areas they are assigned to defend and could surround and annihilate PLA spearhead amphibious or airborne forces.
Washington must deliver Taipei a hard message — namely, that unless it dramatically increases defense spending, buys what might actually defeat the PLA, and trains its reserves for war rather than dress-up military games, it should not expect to receive U.S. military support in any war. Whatever the other strategic considerations, it would be unconscionable to send young Americans to fight and die in defense of a faraway land that is ultimately unwilling to defend itself.
Second, assuming Taiwan agrees to U.S. prerequisites for its support, President Joe Biden should immediately convene leaders from Congress, the military, and the defense industry to rearm the U.S. military for war. The primary objective of this armament campaign would be to deter China from ever starting a war with Taiwan.
It cannot be stated frequently enough that the only thing that will prevent Xi from his war of destiny is his countermanding belief that his destiny will sink with the PLA at the bottom of the Taiwan Strait. The PLA of 2022 is not the PLA of 1996, when just two U.S. aircraft carriers were all it took to deter China’s aggression. Today, two U.S. aircraft carriers off Taiwan’s coast would be saturated with volleys of highly accurate PLA ballistic missiles and swarms of jets, drones, warships, and submarines.
To defend Taiwan today, the U.S. needs far more destroyers and submarines in the Pacific. That necessarily means moving some forces out of Europe. The U.S. also needs far greater stocks of missiles, torpedoes, other weapons, and spare parts. And it needs more original thinking of the kind offered by Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger, who, resisting critics intellectually imprisoned by their nostalgia for the past, has moved to abandon tanks and helicopters to prepare the Marines to wage hardened defensive battles against numerically superior forces — to prepare for the China fight.
Still, U.S. supplies to Ukraine have laid bare the pathetic inadequacy of the U.S. defense armament base in weapons stockpiles. Fixated on selling the government platforms, such as the F-35, that are overpriced while also being outranged and outgunned by the PLA, the military-industrial complex has forgotten how to build a lot of weapons quickly. Today, the U.S. isn’t so much the arsenal of democracy as it is the arsenal of materiel mediocrity. Fixing this problem will require major investments. But those investments should be fixed on what’s actually needed, such as long-range anti-ship missiles. New investments should also come with price guarantees and time frames that are tied to executive service and compensation.
Finally, the U.S. must rally the world against what China is doing.
The moral and political stakes involved in the Taiwan crisis are defining, cutting to the most sacred of concerns: the right of a free people to stay free. The democratic world has recognized that those stakes matter in Ukraine. It should recognize the same concerning Taiwan. The Biden administration deserves credit for securing a G-7 statement in condemnation of China’s exercises off Taiwan, but far more must be done. Quietly pushing allies to commit military forces in the event of a war, Washington should attempt to negotiate a series of snap sanctions to be imposed on Beijing if it ever attacks its neighbor. Considering his significant demographic, energy, and economic challenges, Xi cannot afford to ignore the threat of global isolation.
The U.S. must urgently prepare Taiwan and itself for the war to come. The first objective should be to deter that war from ever starting. The backup objective should be to give Taiwan and the U.S. military the best chance of victory if the worst occurs.
