Preserving its global dominance appears to have driven the West’s expanding involvement in the Ukraine conflict, with former British prime minister Boris Johnson recently arguing in a column that a Russian victory would be “a turning point in history, the moment when the West finally loses its post-war hegemony.” Such a decisive outcome, however, seems doubtful, given the attritional character of the Ukraine war and the progressively escalating Western involvement in the conflict.
The defining moment that formally brings the era of Western preeminence to an end is more likely to be a surprise Chinese aggression aimed at subjugating Taiwan.
With the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East testing US-led alliances and with America already looking overextended, Chinese aggression against Taiwan could come sooner than many in US policy circles expect.
There are ominous signs that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is preparing his country for a war over Taiwan. But whether the US is prepared to respond to such a contingency is becoming a vexed question, especially as international concerns grow that Xi might view America’s preoccupation with extended conflicts in Europe and the Middle East as a window of opportunity to act without triggering a full-fledged war with the US.
The defense of Taiwan is assuming greater significance for international security for two other reasons. The first is the possibility that Xi might seek to replicate in the Taiwan Strait the techniques of incremental expansionism that his regime has successfully honed in the South China Sea without drawing a concerted US response.
Tellingly, three successive US administrations have failed to credibly push back against China’s intensifying expansionism in the South China Sea, relying instead on rhetoric or symbolic actions. As a result, the American debate now largely centers on how the South China Sea was effectively lost and what can be done now to respond to China’s increasingly aggressive sea tactics aimed at tightening its grip on this strategic corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
These tactics are triggering a number of incidents with other claimant states, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam, even as China seeks to interfere with US and allied air and maritime transits.
China’s recent menacing military drills that encircled Taiwan seemed to be a rehearsal for implementing at least a blockade with the aim of slowly throttling the island democracy. In fact, this was the third Chinese dress rehearsal in less than two years for an assault on Taiwan.
Compared to the first large-scale Chinese military exercise in August 2022, when then-US house speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei, the latest drills were more sophisticated, elaborate and geographically expansive.
The second reason is the US failure to genuinely pivot to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific, despite US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin claiming that this region is “our priority theater of operations” and “the heart of American grand strategy.”
A just-released book, Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power, by two former American policymakers, Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine, bemoans that America’s “pivot to Asia” strategy (first unveiled in 2011) has failed thus far because a coherent approach to the Indo-Pacific remains largely absent. Consequently, the US has been unable to respond adequately to China’s aggressive rise, in what the authors call one of the greatest mistakes in American foreign policy in the post-World War II period.
The plain fact is that, as long as conflicts elsewhere distract the US from the pressing Asian security challenges, the Indo-Pacific is unlikely to become the hub of its grand strategy.
The latest American foreign assistance package that provides US$60.8 billion for Ukraine and a meager US$8.1 billion for Indo-Pacific security, including Taiwan, has dimmed the prospects of a correction in skewed strategic priorities. In fact, US President Joe Biden recently plunged the US deeper into the Ukraine war by permitting Kyiv to use American-donated weapons to strike inside Russia.
More fundamentally, the drawn-out Ukraine war is crimping America’s China policy and weakening its deterrent posture in the Indo-Pacific, thereby making a Taiwan Strait crisis more likely.
In an effort to forestall the US from realizing its worst geopolitical nightmare, a formal Sino-Russian alliance, and to dissuade China from directly aiding the Kremlin’s war machine, Biden has been compelled to adopt a more conciliatory approach to Beijing.
This approach, in turn, is emboldening China vis-a-vis Taiwan. While stepping up coercive pressures on Taiwan, Beijing is making its ultimate goal clearer. Xi recently declared that the “essence” of his national rejuvenation drive is “the unification of the motherland.” And his new defense minister, Dong Jun (董軍), while accusing the US of “malign intentions [that] are drawing Taiwan to the dangers of war,” told the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that, “Anyone who dares split Taiwan from China will be smashed to pieces and court their own destruction.”
Yet some in the West insist that the US must first rout Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield before turning to deter China. As if Xi would wait to move against Taiwan until the US has humiliated Russia in Ukraine in a long war and then turned its attention to containing China. Indeed, the last thing Xi wants is an end to the Ukraine war because that would leave the US free to pivot to Asia.
Make no mistake: With China’s lengthening shadow belligerently darkening Taiwan’s doorstep, the risks of failing to deter Chinese aggression against the self-governing island are increasing. Consequently, calls are growing in the US that Washington must embrace strategic clarity in relation to Taiwan’s defense by abandoning its outdated strategic ambiguity policy, which was formulated when China was still backward and in no position to annex Taiwan.
America’s deepening involvement in the Ukraine war at a time it seems ill-prepared for armed conflict over Taiwan is a strategic mistake that could eventually come to haunt its long-term security.
Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
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