Chinese military expansion means that the US would have to fight “harder, quicker, nastier, deeper and longer” to protect Taiwan, a new analysis said, raising the specter that such a conflict could quickly go nuclear.
Written by Center for a New American Security fellow Elbridge Colby — a former US government defense and intelligence official — the analysis was published in National Interest magazine.
“In the past, most defense analysts and planners envisioned a Sino-American conflict in maritime Asia starting and remaining a conventional fight,” Colby wrote.
The US was seen as able to handle any Chinese attempts at power projection solely by relying on conventional forces, he said.
“In practical terms, the US would have been able to defeat Chinese attacks on Taiwan with relatively limited means and on Washington’s terms,” Colby added.
“Nuclear weapons, if they were to become involved, were seen as most likely to be introduced in limited numbers by the Chinese in a desperate attempt to stave off defeat in a Taiwan contingency, a defeat that might jeopardize the legitimacy of the Communist regime,” he wrote.
However, if China had the upper hand in a battle over Taiwan and the US still wanted to deter or defeat an attempted invasion of the nation, the US would need to be willing to hit targets deeper in China than had been envisioned before, he added.
They would have to strike sooner and expand the war considerably beyond Taiwan’s immediate environs to compel Beijing to back away, Colby said.
Such a scenario could lead to the use of nuclear weapons at a time when China’s nuclear arsenal is becoming larger and more sophisticated, he said.
Instead of only having the option of striking at a major US or Japanese city, China would increasingly gain the ability to target military facilities or forces in the region, Colby said.
“This ability to use nuclear weapons in more limited and tailored ways will make China’s threats — explicit or implicit — to use nuclear forces more credible,” he wrote.
Beijing might gain superiority in terms of conventional arms in the region and be able to block US efforts designed to defend Taiwan, Colby said.
As China grows more assertive, Asian nations traditionally allied to Washington “may ultimately see getting their own nuclear weapons as essential to deterring China’s exploitation of its growing strength,” he said.
Colby said this would almost certainly be the case if these nations viewed a weaker US as lacking the resolve or the ability to use its nuclear weapons.
“South Korea, Japan, Australia and Taiwan have seriously contemplated pursuing their own nuclear arsenals in the past and might do so again,” Colby wrote.
The more threatening Beijing appears, the less likely it is that the nuclear order of the Asia-Pacific will endure, Colby said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift