Visiting Tokyo on Monday, President Joe Biden was asked whether he would order the U.S. military to defend Taiwan were China to invade the island democracy.
Biden responded unequivocally: “Yes.”
Pushed for confirmation, Biden said, “That’s the commitment we made.” This follows Biden’s similar pledge at a CNN event last October. Asked the same question, Biden responded, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”
While the White House quickly walked back Biden’s words in both cases, the president’s comments will spark outrage and likely escalation from Beijing. For Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader in China since Mao Zedong, Taiwan’s reunification with China is a destiny-defining test. The importance with which Xi regards this issue cannot be overstated. It is even more significant to his political identity than the restoration of a greater Russian imperium is to President Vladimir Putin. And that is saying something.
But while Xi is highly ambitious, the resolution of the Taiwan question has a broader, deeply significant import for his Communist Party. After all, the party intends to assure its rise to global preeminence for this century. It wants to replace the U.S.-led democratic international order with its own autocratic mercantile feudal order. But if Beijing cannot bring nearby Taiwan under its heel and finish its own civil war, then Chinese leaders can hardly feel confident about achieving their global aims. Taiwan’s continued existence as an independent entity tests the credibility of its ambition.
Taiwan’s democracy matters to Beijing for another reason. Namely, it offers an increasingly dangerous governing counterpoint to the Communist Party’s centralized autocracy. Evinced by its acts of genocide against the Uyghur peoples, its destruction of democracy in Hong Kong, its limits on celebrity culture, and its disappearance even of satirists who dare tease Xi, the Communist Party views true freedom as an existential threat. As tensions within China grow over issues such as COVID-19 lockdowns, living standards, and demographics, the regime’s paranoid need for public dominion will only escalate. Taiwan’s challenge to China will thus be seen as increasingly intolerable.
It’s clear that the United States hopes to deter any invasion of Taiwan by threatening China with the same or worse consequences than what Russia has suffered so far for its invasion of Ukraine. Biden noted as much on Monday, stating that whether or not China invades Taiwan will depend on “how strong the world makes clear that that kind of action is going to result in long-term disapprobation.”
However, the problem for the U.S. and Taiwan is that it’s far from clear that every democracy would isolate China in the event of an invasion. Australia, Japan, the U.S., Britain, eastern European nations, and some others are likely to push for dramatic sanctions and decoupling in that circumstance. But others, such as France, Germany, African and Latin American nations, and many Asian countries, are unlikely to agree to this on a long-term basis. French President Emmanuel Macron’s “strategic autonomy” vision for Europe rests openly on balancing France’s close political relationship with the U.S. with a close trade relationship with China.
Courageous as they are, Biden’s words also pose another problem: readiness to meet the ultimate test.
Because it’s not just immense political capital that Xi invests in Taiwan’s subjugation. For more than a decade, China has invested vast sums in developing and deploying weapons systems designed to deny the U.S. military access to Taiwan and the South China Sea and to overwhelm those that can force access. With the exception of the Marine Corps, the U.S. military and its industrial base have shown almost no willingness to compensate for this People’s Liberation Army’s evolution. The Navy, for example, continues to insist that “aircraft carriers continue to be the centerpiece of the forces necessary for operating forward,” even though saturation strikes by a range of satellite-redundant PLA ballistic missiles would instantly overwhelm them.
Putting aside legal questions over Biden’s authority to support Taiwan’s defense militarily without congressional approval, it is questionable whether the U.S. military could effectively defend the island. For that matter, Taiwan’s own military expenditure and readiness remain inadequate. So, as of now, any U.S. campaign would have to focus heavily on extensive submarine warfare and more limited air operations. This concern points to the strategic iceberg that Taiwan represents for both Biden and Xi. For Xi, the only thing worse than the glory of an unconquered Taiwan would be a PLA sunk in the strait. For the U.S., the only thing worse than allowing Taiwan to fall would be a U.S. intervention that fails. Such a failure would greatly encourage the international community to recenter its foreign policies toward Chinese interests.
Biden’s rhetoric carries with it high stakes. The days of the 1990s, when the U.S. could deter China over Taiwan by sending an aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait, are long gone. Such a gambit today would almost certainly result in an undersea graveyard for 6,000 Americans. Biden’s words thus demand a commensurate strategy of credible action.
