Going forward, one of the central problems for U.S. foreign policy in Asia is that Taiwan, a democracy located in a crucial geostrategic location, could be invaded. The question every political leader and military officer from Washington to Honolulu, and Tokyo to Canberra should be asking themselves is, “What would we do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?” An even more important question might be, “Are we on a path that makes this high-end conflict more or less appealing to China? Can we prevent Beijing from breaking the peace?”
It is not enough for American strategists to think about whether or not they could fight and win a war. They must also think about how their adversary thinks about war so they can effectively induce him or coerce him away from it, to do things to make it less tempting. Because this problem is unlikely to go away and will only get more acute over time, it is essential to think in terms of a competitive strategy. American foreign policy works best when it is goal-oriented and sustainable for the long run. At the current time, it is neither. Insufficient effort has been put into creating a strategic vision for the future of Asia that benefits America’s national interests.
The United States has been slow to acknowledge and accept that the PRC is its main strategic rival and the most dangerous source of instability in the world today. It is essential that the approach to Asia begins to reflect the fundamentally competitive nature of U.S.-China relations, including in the spheres of politics, economics, and defense.[555] An improved policy toward China in the future might consist of three primary pillars: external resistance to Chinese expansionism, especially as it relates to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines; internal pressure to weaken the CCP and peacefully nudge China toward democracy; and purposeful negotiations on the basis of reciprocity.
Washington should seek to deter Chinese expansionism by competing effectively in a sustained manner with Beijing in all international arenas, but particularly in the overall balance in the Asia-Pacific. This geographical region is a priority for the American national interest. Maintaining a favorable balance of power should be the main focus of American policy toward China. However, nothing would benefit Beijing more than to get Americans to forbid their allies and partners from reaping the benefits of trade with China in exchange for security guarantees. It would be a mistake to turn the entire situation into a black and white choice between rivals. Demanding that everyone take sides in a polarized region would place great strain on America’s diplomatic relationships. Rather, Washington’s strategy should be to use political, economic, and military instruments of power to help free peoples pursue their destinies and dreams however they see fit and to support them as they resist Chinese pressure.
American policy should aim to support the process of political change in China, moving Beijing toward a more pluralistic political system. The power of the CCP must be steadily constrained by institutional checks and balances if China is to peacefully evolve to become a responsible democracy that plays a positive role in the world. China’s intransigence has resulted from nothing America has done or failed to do. Rather, it is rooted in the nature of the regime. In the foreseeable future, there is nothing America could compromise on that might change the fact that China’s leaders have to approach Washington as an enemy. Only their narrative of victimization and struggle gives them the basis for concentrating all authority into their own hands, denying self-determination to the Chinese people, and maintaining an oppressive system in the absence of an appealing ideology. By treating the United States as a rapacious, hostile force bent on undermining China’s rightful rise, they can justify the infliction of suffering on ordinary people and demand unreasonable sacrifices from them. This, in turn, advances their goals of achieving security for themselves, their families, and their regime, in precisely that order. American leaders should consider whether or not they are inadvertently helping to support this rival system and strengthening its ability to engage in aggression.
An improved policy could be to engage China in negotiations to attempt to reach agreements only when they protect and enhance well-defined American interests. Pursuing open-ended dialogues, summits, and state visits for the sake of unclear objectives like “trust-building” unnecessarily gives the Chinese political leverage and wastes finite government resources and energies that would be better spent elsewhere. When exchanges and negotiations do occur, it is important that they are purposeful and consistent with the principle of strict reciprocity. To expect that concessions might be reciprocated and agreements honored is to be naive and to ignore decades of foreign policy history.
The United States must develop ways to communicate clearly that unacceptable Chinese behavior will incur costs that would significantly outweigh any of Beijing’s hoped-for benefits. This is foundational to the implementation of American strategy in Asia, and continued peace and stability. China’s leaders must clearly recognize that only genuine restraint in their behavior will bring the possibility of achieving future peace and prosperity. Washington would be well advised to continue to modernize its military, both nuclear and conventional, to show both the Chinese and regional allies and partners that America is resolved to stand firmly in its commitments to the causes of peace, prosperity, and self-determination, and never accept a continued erosion of its military power. Calculations of possible war outcomes in all possible scenarios must always be so unfavorable to Chinese leaders that they do not perceive any incentive to initiate an attack. Elevating the role of Taiwan in U.S. strategy would likely prove to be the single most effective means of signaling resolve and purpose, diminishing the likelihood of a potentially cataclysmic regional conflict.
What would robust support for Taiwan look like? Setting aside the issues of “one China” or de jure Taiwan independence, Washington could assert that its official position is that: “The status of Taiwan remains to be determined, by peaceful means. The objective reality is that Taiwan’s democratic government exists, and our policy is to treat Taiwan with respect and dignity, and provide it more international space.” Under such a framework, the U.S. government could continue to maintain unofficial relations with Taiwan, and gradually normalize diplomatic contacts over time. Incrementally improving bilateral relations between Washington and Taipei is the best available way to avoid military confrontation with China while advancing the American interest in securing Taiwan from hostile takeover.
In the Taiwan Strait context, political and military issues are woven together so tightly that it is nearly impossible, and rarely advisable, to separate them. Washington’s failure to think critically about its Taiwan policy over the past two decades has created a situation where American defense professionals are poorly equipped to make recommendations to their Taiwanese friends regarding what they ought to do to defend their homeland. ROC military officers dedicate their entire careers to the study and improvement of Taiwan’s defense. In contrast, even those officials at the Pentagon, the American Institute in Taiwan, and the Pacific Command, who well understand the military situation at the tactical level of warfare, cannot coherently articulate thoughts regarding the strategic dimensions of the conflict.[556] Making any political-military analysis significantly more difficult, the Chinese have large forces of capable officers conducting bilingual propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, truth denial, and history manipulation operations.[557] Media reports on Taiwan defense issues, as a result, are notoriously misleading for American readers unable to assess motives or even the original sources.
Chinese propaganda, like a Potemkin village, is only effective when its target audience is either unaware of the farce or plays along and forgoes peeking behind the facade. To induce fear and obedience, the Chinese will often threaten to do things to their adversaries that are not politically or militarily feasible. They will intimidate with capabilities they do not have and feign self-confidence when little actually exists. As such, it is exceedingly difficult to truly understand the strategic balance in cross-Strait relations.
The most outstanding weaknesses of the PLA are often overlooked by American strategists, who tend to focus heavily on defense budgets, weapons ranges, equipment numbers, and other factors that can be easily quantified and compared. The annual Pentagon report to Congress on Chinese military power is a good example of this tendency. In recent years, it has painted a picture of a situation dire for the defense of Taiwan.[558] This picture is misleading because it focuses on the quantifiable at the expense of qualitative factors. Moreover, it only offers a detailed examination of the PLA’s capabilities and not those of the ROC military, whose capabilities would be the ones to beat. If you build up the reputation of one fighter, but say little to nothing of the capabilities of their opponent, then you are painting a distorted picture that makes the described fighter more impressive since he is not being compared to anyone else in any meaningful way.[559] A better starting point when assessing the cross-Strait balance would be to take an unvarnished look at the two main actors involved.
The PLA is the armed wing of a political organization, the CCP, and not a normal professional military. It has no meaningful allies or partners. North Korea is unlikely to assist the Chinese to invade Taiwan. Pyongyang, with its own destabilizing behavior, is far more likely to continue serving as a mere distraction. The Chinese army must help defend land borders with fourteen sovereign states, few of which are closely aligned with Beijing, and many of which are unstable. Perhaps more importantly, militaries do not exist independent of their home nations. China’s authoritarian system distorts reason, undermines bonds of trust, and relies on fear to sustain itself. The entire political structure is ridden with corruption, and the economic model is unsustainable. The PLA has made remarkable strides over the past two decades in the face of enormous challenges. But its foundation, human capital, is still weak.
The ROC Armed Forces, on the other hand, are a professional military, and they are bolstered by the best fighting force on the planet, the U.S. military. Taiwan has no land borders to patrol and is surrounded by rough waters that greatly augment its defense. It enjoys low levels of corruption because of its watchdog media and dynamic parliamentary system. The armed forces draw strength from a stable society and sustainable economic system. Their homeland is a prosperous, democratic country with an innovative, hard-working populace. Taiwan’s troops are positioned on favorable terrain, both human and geographic. Taiwan’s principal danger is not from within. The same cannot be said of China, where CCP leaders appear to believe their army could at any time snap and revolt.
China’s war planning community is at a significant intellectual disadvantage. PLA officers must limit themselves to the study of past cases that are deemed politically acceptable. They learn nothing from failure, which is a far greater teacher than success. An example of this tendency can be found in their professional literature, where only wildly successful amphibious operations are examined. The World War II landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy are clear favorites, alongside more recent assaults on Grenada and the Falklands. The American experience in the Pacific theater and the Allied landings at Dieppe and Anzio are nowhere to be seen in the PLA’s writings. Costly and controversial past battles are censored even in restricted-access documents.
Censorship makes itself plain in other places inside their writings. Internal documents and technical studies fail to acknowledge the possibility of sustaining a real defeat. Everything that might happen on Taiwan is described as being inevitable. They never address the cardinal question that every good officer must face: If my Plan A fails, what is my Plan B? Heavy and costly frontal attacks with insufficient forces are what they appear to envision, but this is obscured by euphemisms and flowery rhetoric. Taiwan’s strategists, however, have the advantage of coming from an open society and professional military culture. They study history to the full and ask themselves hard questions all the time.[560]
If that were the end of the story, there would be little to fear from the Chinese military. Unfortunately, the situation is far more complex. Taiwan is a country which is not treated like a country. Its diplomatic isolation, a result of poor policy choices in both Washington and Taipei, has deepened in recent years as a result of Chinese efforts to erase the existence of the island from the international consciousness. The fundamental security threat facing Taiwan is political in nature, not military, but politics affects the military balance because strategic choices like limiting arms sales and bilateral exercises can directly and negatively impact battlefield outcomes.
The United States will find it difficult to maintain a favorable balance against the PRC over the long run unless it reevaluates its policy and begins to integrate Taiwan into its strategy. For its part, Taiwan will not be able to ensure its security unless it is able to get more support from America. Peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait turn on whether or not Washington and Taipei can improve their bilateral political, economic, and military relationships. Progress undoubtedly can be made, with a bit of diplomatic ingenuity, while maintaining a formal, but unofficial relationship. Achieving official government-to-government relations should be the long-term goal. It is strategically unsound and morally indefensible for America not to diplomatically recognize a democracy and capable partner. Ideals, of course, oftentimes must be tempered with pragmatism. It is imperative to evolve policy in a steady and incremental fashion to avoid sudden and destabilizing countermoves from China.
The United States should focus on new initiatives which reflect the objective reality that Taiwan currently exists as a free and sovereign state. Since 1979, the most tangible manifestation of Taiwan’s international political legitimacy has been American arms sales. However, since 2006, the United States has developed a pattern of freezing arms sales for long periods of time out of deference to Beijing. Multiple administrations have bought into the narrative that frequent, high-quality arms sales are too provocative to China. This policy has damaged America’s credibility as a reliable security partner. It has also undermined Taiwan’s negotiating position with China. Whether or not top-tier weapons systems like advanced fighter jets and stealthy diesel submarines could alone turn the tide at the tactical level of warfare is debatable and cannot be known until there is a war. At the strategic level, however, these systems would be valuable for bolstering Taiwan’s defense. Their positive political effects would be immediate and undeniable, greatly bolstering confidence and morale in Taiwan.
It would be unwise for the U.S.-Taiwan military and security relationship to continue being so heavily dependent upon arms sales alone. Resiliency in any relationship is not found by creating single points of failure. The U.S. president and his top advisors should conduct regular exchanges with their Taiwanese counterparts, in person and on the phone. Taiwan should be invited to participate in activities such as international maritime events and negotiations over territorial disputes. U.S. military commanders, especially those at the two-star and above rank with significant joint experience, should regularly visit Taiwan from the Pentagon, Pacific Command, and Seventh Fleet. In a crisis, it will be imperative that they are able to provide the White House with military judgments that are informed by actual knowledge of the local terrain. The highest-ranking U.S. defense official serving in Taiwan should be a general, not a colonel, as was the case from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Other efforts to demonstrate support for Taiwan’s government are possible and would be important components of a closer military and security relationship. Reciprocal ship visits, bilateral exercises, and defense industrial cooperation should all be positively considered. Taiwan’s capable military should be allowed to work side-by-side with the U.S. military in conducting humanitarian and disaster relief operations, counter-terror operations, and cyber operations. , the nuclear disaster in Japan, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and Ebola in Africa. Much more can and should be done to make sure that Taiwan’s future efforts are closely coordinated with those of the U.S. military.
Taiwan, for its part, has every right to be wary and cautious when dealing with China. It is now clear to Taipei that Beijing will never accept Taiwan’s sovereignty and allow it to enjoy the international position in the world it deserves. The PRC has shown it will not hesitate to use every tool at its disposal, including economic links and cultural exchanges, to undermine Taiwan’s government. The strongest and most enduring friend Taiwan has is the United States. Given the competing challenges that Washington is grappling with at home and around the world, Taipei is right to continue highlighting its concerns and its desire for a better bilateral relationship. Closer ties are needed.
As for defense matters, it might be thought that some small profit could be gained from an analytical overview of available Chinese writings. By knowing what the potential adversary plans to do, one may know where he might be best countered; and by knowing what he fears, one knows what weaknesses, real or imagined, to exploit. Several conclusions can be drawn from those PLA writings that have been analyzed in this book. The following briefly lays out three.
First, Taiwan’s development of counterstrike capabilities seems to have significantly impacted PLA planning. On both the strategic and operational battlefields, joint interdiction capabilities have a strong effect.[561] It would be unwise for Taiwan to reduce its capacity to conduct strikes far across the Taiwan Strait. To the contrary, Taiwan should probably expand its stockpiles of long-range mobile missiles, fighter aircraft, rocket artillery, and drones, and consider deploying the most survivable of them close to PRC territory.
Second, engineering projects to harden and fortify island groups in the Taiwan Strait, especially Kinmen, Matsu, and the Penghus, appear to have successfully added a degree of complexity to PLA war plans. By creating forward bastions for intelligence collection and counterstrike in the Strait, the ROC military has made it more difficult for Chinese generals to imagine a fast and easy campaign to land on Taiwan proper. In the same vein, efforts to construct fortification lines and deeply buried underground facilities on the main island appear to have shaken the PLA’s confidence that it could actually purchase an invasion campaign at an acceptable price, especially when defense works are combined with camouflage, concealment, deception, force dispersal, sheltering, and rapid repair.[562]
Third, Taiwanese electronic warfare capabilities for protecting command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms, while denying them to the enemy, are critical. PLA writings make it clear that the first targets of their attack would be Taipei’s eyes and ears in order to affect an information blackout. They demonstrate a widely held belief that victory is not possible for them if their forces do not control the electro-magnetic spectrum at every stage of the conflict. At the same time, Chinese officers view themselves as reliant upon information and communications capabilities, especially vulnerable satellites. The ROC military should continue efforts to make sure PLA commanders will not have unimpeded access to their satellites in a war. Chinese demands for intelligence on Taiwan, including intelligence derived from space assets, apparently still outstrip collection and analysis capabilities.[563]
When it comes to studying the threat posed by the PLA, both Taiwanese and American strategists have to overcome mirror imaging, a problem which plagues analysis the world over and must be avoided to the greatest extent possible. It is too easy to forget that reality and facts are things that are arbitrary and subjective. The same situation will often be perceived in radically different ways by those in opposing governments, each with their own personalities, experiences, organizational logics, politics, cultures, and sub-cultures. Strategic mistakes happen this way, often with tragic outcomes. The good news is that PLA officers only rarely underrate the challenges posed by the ROC military. Assuming that the civilians who sit on the all-powerful CCP Politburo Standing Committee listen to their military advisors, no invasion of Taiwan is going to be seriously contemplated as a viable option for many years to come. To understand why, one needs only to review the foundational beliefs that run throughout internal Chinese military documents.
One major assumption is that Taiwan’s defenders are unlikely to ever give up. The Chinese military establishment nurtures hope that an interlocking combination of psychological warfare, subversion, electronic attack, bombing, and blockades might compel Taiwan’s government to break and surrender. This would allow them to conquer and occupy the island cheaply. However, their assumption is that Taiwan’s military will fight to the death to defend their cherished freedoms and democratic way of life. For this reason, Chinese troops must be prepared to invade Taiwan and face the traumas of urban warfare, mountain warfare, and colonial occupation.
Another major assumption is that the United States will almost certainly intervene. From the Chinese perspective, Taiwan occupies a critical geostrategic location. Whoever controls this island controls East Asia and the West Pacific. They believe it is widely recognized around the world that Taiwan is the high ground that will decide the outcome of the U.S.-PRC strategic competition. They take it for granted that the “Strong Enemy” and “World Hegemon” will not allow it to fall into their hands easily. PLA writings assume that America will help defend Taiwan, and they express concern that this might result in a great power war which would unhinge the CCP regime. Given their expressed fears, it seems unlikely that China would resort to invading Taiwan if it did not have some reasonable prospect that the United States could be deterred or sufficiently delayed from acting to secure its interests in Asia.
The next major assumption, which relates to the first two assumptions, is that a rapid and decisive war is imperative. PLA strategists recognize that China will have the luxury of choosing when, where, and how to invade. There is little that Taiwan could do to force the invasion before China had a chance to build up requisite forces. However, once the course of action had been decided upon and all the pieces were in place, amphibious operations would have to be launched suddenly to catch Taiwan off-guard. The objective would be to astonish and destroy Taiwan’s government before the Americans could gather sufficient resolve to spoil their landings. Achieving surprise and rapid results would be critical, but they are viewed by PLA experts as highly unlikely.
These basic assumptions are foundational to the invasion scenario alone. They do not account for other possibilities, including a long and drawn-out stalemate. Rather than invade, China could opt to engage in a war of nerves that played out over the course of years or even decades. This should be considered more probable than invasion, especially if the correlation of forces continues to confront Chinese leaders with the prospect of a prohibitively costly and uncertain war. American strategists should prepare for the worst case, while using all instruments of national power to prevent conflict and secure a brighter future in Asia.
US military bases in the west Pacific