American fantasies about China helped create the biggest strategic adversary the US has ever faced. For over 45 years, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, successive American presidents aided China’s economic rise as a matter of policy. Even as Beijing cheated on trade rules, stole technology, and flexed its military muscle, including against Taiwan, the US looked the other way, in the naive hope that a more prosperous China would liberalize economically and politically.
Despite the fundamental shift in America’s China policy introduced by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, US fantasies, to some extent, still persist, complicating the pursuit of a cleareyed strategy to deter Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) from moving against Taiwan.
Consider, for example, President Joe Biden’s greater emphasis on placating Beijing than on strengthening deterrence, including by taking the possibility of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan seriously. The US needs to urgently help bolster Taiwan’s defenses by stepping up arms sales and military training. But with Biden continuing to prioritize weapons deliveries to Ukraine despite its failed counteroffensive against Russian forces, US arms transfers to Taipei are lagging years behind orders.
This year has stood out for Biden’s conciliatory moves toward China — from sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing and holding a summit meeting with Xi in California to emphasizing that the US-led effort is to “de-risk” the relationship with China but not to “decouple” from it.
While keeping the door to diplomacy with Russia shut, Biden has beseeched China to stabilize bilateral ties. By presenting the US, the stronger power, as more zealous than China to improve relations, Biden could embolden Xi’s risk-taking.
In dealing with China, Biden has a weaker hand that he would like. The deepening US involvement in the Ukraine and Israel wars is sapping America’s diplomatic and military resources. This could tempt Xi to move on Taiwan, especially because he knows the US would struggle to deal with a third war simultaneously. In fact, the longer the Ukraine and Gaza wars rage, the greater would be the likelihood of Beijing launching aggression against Taiwan.
Yet, while letting hope drive his overtures to China, Biden has not only doubled down on his Ukraine strategy but also is raising the specter of “American troops fighting Russian troops” if the US Congress does not approve US$61 billion in additional assistance for Kyiv. A US mired in a protracted Ukraine war would open greater opportunity for Beijing to move on Taiwan.
Despite the China-policy debate in the US reflecting more realism in recent years, illusions continue to guide Biden’s approach. One illusion is to believe, as Biden apparently does, that China would cooperate with the US on major global issues. Another illusion is that risks of aggression against Taiwan or miscommunication can be mitigated through regular dialogue, including military-to-military contact.
Such thinking misses the fact that China’s strategy centers on stealth, deception and surprise. These three elements have characterized China’s expansionism from the South China Sea to the Himalayas. Xi’s unpredictability demands greater US attention to shoring up deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Unfortunately, the China fantasies extend to some American scholars. For example, three China specialists argued in a recent essay that averting Chinese aggression against Taiwan demands that the US “reassure, not just threaten, China.” Their thesis effectively calls for rewarding China for steadily regularizing its coercion of Taiwan.
This is redolent of how the US looked the other way as China created and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea. Indeed, at the height of Xi’s island-building drive, Obama argued in his final year in the White House that “we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.” Such appeasement helped turn China’s contrived historical claims to the South China Sea into reality without Beijing incurring any international costs.
Success in the South China Sea has made Xi more determined to annex Taiwan on his watch, especially as China erodes America’s military’s edge in the Indo-Pacific. Worse still, America’s entanglement in the Ukraine war has made Taiwan more vulnerable to Chinese aggression. Ukraine has secured key war materiel that could have gone to Taipei.
Yet, some Americans still argue that the US must first defeat Russia in Ukraine before pivoting to deter China. It is as if Xi would wait on Taiwan until the US has humiliated Russia on the battlefield and turned its attention to containing China!
Taiwan’s continued autonomous status is central to America’s safeguarding of its global preeminence. Yet, at a time when more than two-thirds of American voters worry about the 81-year-old Biden’s mental and physical health, the lack of US strategic clarity on how to deter or respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan is striking.
If Xi perceives that China has a window of opportunity to act during the Biden presidency, he will likely move on Taiwan. If that were to happen, China would likely emerge as a pressing military threat to the US itself.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
In the event of a war with China, Taiwan has some surprisingly tough defenses that could make it as difficult to tackle as a porcupine: A shoreline dotted with swamps, rocks and concrete barriers; conscription for all adult men; highways and airports that are built to double as hardened combat facilities. This porcupine has a soft underbelly, though, and the war in Iran is exposing it: energy. About 39,000 ships dock at Taiwan’s ports each year, more than the 30,000 that transit the Strait of Hormuz. About one-fifth of their inbound tonnage is coal, oil, refined fuels and liquefied natural gas (LNG),
To counter the CCP’s escalating threats, Taiwan must build a national consensus and demonstrate the capability and the will to fight. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) often leans on a seductive mantra to soften its threats, such as “Chinese do not kill Chinese.” The slogan is designed to frame territorial conquest (annexation) as a domestic family matter. A look at the historical ledger reveals a different truth. For the CCP, being labeled “family” has never been a guarantee of safety; it has been the primary prerequisite for state-sanctioned slaughter. From the forced starvation of 150,000 civilians at the Siege of Changchun
The two major opposition parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), jointly announced on Tuesday last week that former TPP lawmaker Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) would be their joint candidate for Chiayi mayor, following polling conducted earlier this month. It is the first case of blue-white (KMT-TPP) cooperation in selecting a joint candidate under an agreement signed by their chairpersons last month. KMT and TPP supporters have blamed their 2024 presidential election loss on failing to decide on a joint candidate, which ended in a dramatic breakdown with participants pointing fingers, calling polls unfair, sobbing and walking
In the opening remarks of her meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) framed her visit as a historic occasion. In his own remarks, Xi had also emphasized the history of the relationship between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Where they differed was that Cheng’s account, while flawed by its omissions, at least partially corresponded to reality. The meeting was certainly historic, albeit not in the way that Cheng and Xi were signaling, and not from the perspective
RSS