“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” Navy Adm. Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said at a conference last week. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.” Such analysis is not new, but for a serving admiral to voice it so openly is.
Politicians and pundits who speak of ending forever wars assume the choice of war or peace is Washington’s alone. In reality, each combatant has a vote. I have just come back from a research tour of Asia and Australia, where I was able to talk to top intelligence and military officials, as well as visit Quemoy, the epicenter of the first two Taiwan crises. Two points became clear: First, Beijing and not Washington will make the decision about whether there will be a war over Taiwan. Second, such a war will not limit itself to Taiwan.
US MILITARY ENTERING ‘WINDOW OF MAXIMUM DANGER’
While the White House, if not President Joe Biden, continues to embrace strategic ambiguity with regard to America’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense, officials in the region say such a policy is outdated given how Chinese President Xi Jinping has cast China’s strategic ambiguity aside given his promise to use military force if necessary to annex, not reunify, the island nation.
The question is not if Xi has committed to attacking Taiwan, but rather when. China has passed its peak population, and so soon will face demographic and economic decline. Some in the U.S. intelligence community raise concerns about 2027 because by that year China’s military capabilities, specifically its ability to transport and land troops across the Taiwan Strait, will enable Xi to act on his ambition more effectively.
The broader worry, however, should be the scale of the Chinese attack. True, China could test the waters with Quemoy or Matsu as it did during the Eisenhower era or, more likely, the far more isolated and less populated Dongsha (Pratas) Island. Here, Beijing may interpret omissions within the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act as a green light for aggression because Congress wrote the act only to apply to the “islands of Taiwan and the Pescadores” [Penghu], not Taiwan’s smaller and more distant islands.
Xi, however, shows no inclination to limit himself to these. Even if Washington wants to hide behind ambiguity, other regional states have no such luxury. While the U.S. Navy will seek to stay out of range of China’s carrier killer missiles, the tip of the U.S. spear will be naval aviation: F-18s, F-35s, and electronic warfare aircraft. These rely on Singapore stores of JP-5 aviation fuel, putting that island nation in China’s crosshairs.
Likewise, Japan has made little secret that it sees the defense of Taiwan as crucial to its own defense. As Beijing knows Tokyo might respond militarily to a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army is likely to seek to preempt any Japanese action with an attack on Japan itself. Xi must also worry about Vietnam, a country drawing increasingly close to the United States, Taiwan, and Japan because of its own fear of China and its ambitions. Vietnam humiliated China in 1979, an affront Xi would like to rectify.
It is unclear whether China would succeed in its fight: China has not fought a major conflict since 1979, and the fact that the People’s Liberation Army is an army of only children may make Chinese society more casualty averse than Xi wants to admit. It is clear, however, that any attack on Taiwan would not be limited to Taiwan.
Some in Washington may say Taiwan is not a core interest, but they are naive to believe that Taiwan would be Xi’s only victim. More people live inside a circle encompassing China and India than live outside it. If the economic ramifications of Russia’s Ukraine invasion were a gust of wind, China’s attack on Taiwan will unleash a hurricane. Richard is right. Wishful thinking is not a substitute for preparation.
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Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
