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new cold war
What Exact “Security Threat” Does China Pose?
Any danger from China's rise is to the U.S.'s business and political elites, not its people.
May 02, 2023
Everyone who abhors war, detests imperialism, and favors cooperation between nations on global warming, poverty reduction, protection of biodiversity, international disarmament, implementation of international law, and other left-wing priorities ought to be appalled by the escalating tensions between the U.S. and China and actively organizing against them.
The new Cold War between “East” (including Russia) and “West” is more dangerous than the first one, not only in having already provoked a proxy war between great powers in Europe itself, and not only in undermining any progress toward goals that are urgent for all of humanity, but also in preparing the conditions for a horrific large-scale war that might well end in nuclear winter. The coming years will, to a substantial degree, determine the future of civilization, which puts a tremendous burden on all decent people to struggle to end the madness.
“Both sides,” of course, bear responsibility for the new Cold War, just as all great powers share most of the responsibility for failing to act decisively on global warming. Given the disproportionate power and imperialistic history of the United States, however, it is this country that bears most of the blame, in both cases. So it is, first and foremost, this country’s policies that we have to change. Even were this not the case, though, the principle that Noam Chomsky has enunciated would apply: It is the dangers presented by their own states, not enemy states, that citizens have a duty to organize against. Westerners should, primarily, criticize their own governments, which they can hope to influence. They can’t meaningfully influence China or Russia.
Two questions pose themselves: First, is China indeed a threat, and if so, to what, precisely? Second, is confrontation the best means to deal with whatever threat China represents?
The question arises, then, as to how best to steer America from a course of aggression to one of cooperation and conciliation. That is, how can we build an antiwar movement? A crucial task, evidently, is to delegitimize the direction of policy vis-à-vis China that began under Trump and has continued under Biden, the pursuit of military provocation and economic warfare. This entails a relentless focus on refuting the reasons Washington gives to justify its aggressive posture.
Americans are inundated with the message that China is a “threat,” and that for this reason it must be confronted. They hear it from every major media outlet—CBS, Fox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. This message reflects the attitude of Washington, which obviously views China as a major threat—to American “security,” “national security” (as stated for example in the 2022 National Defense Strategy). Two questions pose themselves: First, is China indeed a threat, and if so, to what, precisely? Second, is confrontation the best means to deal with whatever threat China represents?
National Security
The concept of “national security” has been thrown around promiscuously for generations, not only in politics and the popular media but even the international relations scholarship. Rarely is it noticed that the term, unless clarified, is meaningless, or that its meaning varies by context. Was George W. Bush protecting America’s “security” by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, thereby massively increasing terror, and terrorist recruiting, across the Middle East? Is the government protecting Americans’ present and future security by subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, thus accelerating global warming? Prima facie, the most obvious meaning of security is something like Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of religious belief, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. But this kind of security for the average person—is this a high priority of the U.S. government? Is it what is meant by the mantra that China is a security threat? Is China responsible for the economic insecurity of most Americans, or their housing insecurity, or their fear of mass shootings, or their fear of getting sick because they won’t be able to pay medical bills?
“Security,” therefore, apparently doesn’t mean the security of Americans, at least not of the vast majority. The government could invest $800 billion in, say, upgrading infrastructures of public health and housing—you know, actual security infrastructures—rather than upgrading the military and thereby encouraging a dangerous arms race with China. Realist scholars like John Mearsheimer propose an alternative definition: Security in the technical sense means the state’s very survival in an anarchic system of international relations. Potential rivals exist everywhere, so states have to be prepared for military confrontations. Their need to survive, therefore, has a corollary: “Great powers [seek] to maximize their relative power,” Mearsheimer writes, “because that is the optimal way to maximize their security. In other words, survival mandates aggressive behavior,” in order that the state can defend itself against a potential aggressive rival. The ultimate goal in this dog-eat-dog security competition is to be a regional hegemon that can trounce any opponent, and then to prevent any other country from becoming a rival hegemon.
Only through its arsenal of nuclear weapons can China even conceivably threaten the U.S., which means that the most rational American policy is not to provoke a nuclear arms race but to try to phase out all nuclear weapons worldwide.
This “realist” reasoning might sound plausible, although one can see right away that it tends to rationalize and legitimize militarism (as shown by Mearsheimer’s judgment that the brutal expansionism of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and ’40s was quite rational, for they were only trying to survive!). Can it really be maintained, however, that contemporary China threatens the very survival of the United States? Only through its arsenal of nuclear weapons can China even conceivably threaten the U.S., which means that the most rational American policy is not to provoke a nuclear arms race but to try to phase out all nuclear weapons worldwide. This would certainly increase America’s security. Since the new Cold War only exacerbates the nuclear threat, the U.S. government’s motivation for it, contra Mearsheimer, cannot be to ensure its own survival. So, if “security” concerns are, as is often said, what motivate America’s confrontational policies, we need another definition of that perplexing word.
The work of earlier realists such as Hans Morgenthau, as well as Marxists, provides the answer: In the absence of genuine military threats to a country (like the very fortunate United States since 1812), security is nothing but a euphemism for state power and prestige. The struggle for power as an end in itself is what motivates all ruling elites and governments. Economic, military, geopolitical, ideological, cultural power—even a hegemon will insatiably strive for more power, total power, crushing all dissent everywhere to the extent possible. “A political policy,” says Morgenthau, “seeks either to keep power, to increase power, or to demonstrate power.” Whether this is because of human nature, as Morgenthau argues, or the inevitable dynamics of powerful institutions, or the fact that only power-hungry people rise to the top, it is a general principle.
Since Americans rarely look favorably on government as such, opponents of the new Cold War would do well to constantly emphasize that its primary purpose is to defend and assert the hegemonic power (i.e., “national security”) of the U.S. government, together with certain segments of the business community—for example, defense contractors—that are closely interlinked with government. Constant exposure of the belligerence of U.S. policy, as contrasted with China’s relative restraint, would undermine public support for confrontation. When U.S. officials, in characteristic fits of mind-boggling hypocrisy, charge that China is threatening global peace and stability, one might quote Kishore Mahbubani’s article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “What China Threat?”:
Quite remarkably, of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom), China is the only one among them that has not fired a single military shot across its border in thirty years, since a brief naval battle between China and Vietnam in 1988. By contrast, even during the relatively peaceful Obama Administration, the American military dropped twenty-six thousand bombs on seven countries in a single year. Evidently, the Chinese understand well the art of strategic restraint.
China is indeed a threat—to the dominance of a small American elite, centered in finance, government, and tech, over world politics and the world economy. As Deborah Veneziale explains in Washington’s New Cold War, much of the hostility of America’s capitalist class (or particular sectors of it) to China results from the difficulty of accessing the Chinese market: “U.S. tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook have virtually no market in China, while companies like Apple and Microsoft face increasing difficulties… [These companies] yearn for a change to the political system in China that would open the door to the country’s massive market, and major actors in this sector are actively working to advance Washington’s hostile foreign policy.” Finance, likewise, is unhappy with China’s capital controls, which restrict capital flows into and out of the country. George Soros expressed the frustration of many financiers when he tweeted in January 2022 that “Xi Jinping is the greatest threat that open societies face today.”
Aside from grievances due to China’s non-neoliberal character, a significant reason for Washington’s strategy of aggressive confrontation is simply that expansion of U.S. military capacity is an end in itself, for which pretexts have to be sought. As Morgenthau might say, such a policy demonstrates (and can help keep) power, which is the whole point of being a government. It is also the kind of thing that companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and BAE Systems will benefit from and lobby for. It’s hardly a secret that there is a revolving door between the Pentagon and private military contractors: Even Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was on the board of directors of companies like Raytheon before Biden appointed him. Cold Wars are in the interest of very wealthy corporations and very powerful government bureaucracies, which can use them to justify larger congressional appropriations and expansions of their power.
China Will Constrain the U.S. Empire
Returning to “security” risks—risks to the security of the global dominance (“leadership” is the preferred term) of U.S. elites—it is true that as China’s economy grows, its geopolitical power will necessarily grow as well, thus challenging U.S. “leadership.” There is some sense, therefore, if not much justice, in Biden’s attempts to slow China’s economic growth by restricting exports of cutting-edge semiconductor chips and other high-tech equipment. Whether such restrictions are in the interest of American consumers, or of humanity as a whole, is much more debatable. In any event, to partially delegitimize the trade wars that the U.S. is escalating, and which may well become quite harmful to Americans, it suffices for dissenters to note at every opportunity that these wars’ entire purpose is to hurt China’s economy so it will have more trouble challenging the global dominance of America’s tech industry and the U.S. government. Most Americans are smart enough to know that their interests and those of the government don’t usually coincide.
Indeed, that’s the crucial question to keep asking in public forums: Why should we hate and fear China so much? It makes a lot more sense to hate and fear our own government, together with the corporate sector with which it is fused. China caused none of the vast human suffering, the desolation of hundreds of millions of lives over two generations, that has brought American society to its knees; it merely benefited from the decisions by corporate executives to relocate factories abroad, where it was easier to exploit labor at a higher rate. The fight of working Americans is not with China.
But what about China’s theft of intellectual property? What about its military threat to Taiwan? What about that terrifying balloon that floated into U.S. airspace? Surely all this justifies a new Cold War that could last a generation or more! Well, in fact, as every reasonable person knows, the right way to deal with whatever genuine threats China might pose is to pursue diplomacy, preferably through one of the multilateral institutions that exist for precisely such cases as these, including the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. When the U.S. rejects the obvious path of diplomacy in favor of military escalation and overblown rhetoric, it is clear that it’s merely seizing on real or imagined provocations as pretexts for pursuing some other goal it prefers not to publicize. This was clear when the Bush administration flailed around for excuses to invade Iraq—from weapons of mass destruction to ousting Saddam Hussein to building a wondrous new democracy—and it’s clear now, as the Biden administration orchestrates the wholly unnecessary military and economic containment of China.
Maybe a forced reining in of the U.S. empire could be good for Americans. Whatever constrains the power of the elite is likely to expand the power of the majority.
In fairness, it is perfectly natural for a hegemonic government, used to getting its way and running rampant over most of the world, to try to prevent the emergence of a peer competitor. As Marco Rubio said plaintively in a moment of refreshing candor some weeks ago, “Brazil cut a trade deal with China. They’re now going to do trade in their own currencies, get right around the dollar. They’re creating a secondary economy in the world, totally independent of the United States. We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.” From a superpower’s point of view, these are major crimes, the worst crimes possible. To constrain the ability to bully and browbeat that the U.S. has enjoyed since the late 1940s is totally unforgivable.
But the American people should question whether such a threat to their government’s power is also a threat to them. Maybe a forced reining in of the U.S. empire could be good for Americans. Whatever constrains the power of the elite is likely to expand the power of the majority. Those who favor peace, in any case, should welcome the emergence of a new superpower that can challenge the policies of the most warmongering country on earth, such as by brokering peace agreements the United States refuses to. However authoritarian China is internally, its role in the world might end up being relatively constructive.
This is especially the case given that, in its search for support among other countries and peoples, it can’t appeal to any democratic ideology it supposedly represents, as the U.S. at least rhetorically can. To win moral authority, China has to actually deliver rather than merely preach.
In the end, then, China’s rise poses a straightforward security threat: It threatens the security of the old order, the Washington-directed, neoliberal, war-as-a-first-resort order. It threatens to bring about a more multilateral world, with less impunity for America’s crimes and more recourses to which victims can turn. People everywhere—except the West’s power centers—should cheer this fact.
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Why We Must Stop a New Cold War Before It's Too Late
Yet it is imperative that the world’s two biggest economies find a modus vivendi if the peace of the planet is to be preserved.
Mar 27, 2023
Relations between the United States and China are spiraling dangerously downward, and neither side seems able to reverse the trend. Yet it is imperative that the world’s two biggest economies find a modus vivendi if the peace of the planet is to be preserved.
Consider the recent contretemps between the U.S. and China over a Chinese balloon that drifted over the United States. The rift caused acrimonious accusations by both sides and a cancellation of the Secretary of State’s visit to China, which had been designed to tamp down tensions.
China’s first reaction was a public regret, only later to be followed by more belligerent language. Wouldn’t it have been better if President Biden had taken China’s expression of regret and ignored the later, harsher responses? Wouldn’t it have been better if the secretary of state’s visits had gone forward?
That’s what President Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis six decades ago when the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev sent an emotional message suggesting that, rather than “doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war…let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let’s take measures to untie the knot.” The very next day, Russia upped the ante with a much harsher message demanding that American missiles in Turkey be removed.
Kennedy ignored the second message and replied to the first. In due course, the Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba and the American missiles from Turkey, although the latter was not officially part of the deal.
How much better it would have been if the Secretary of State Blinken had gone ahead with his mission, met with his counterpart in China, and made an effort to reduce the tensions between China and the United States instead of accelerating them.
When I looked up the purpose of the new House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, I found the following:
The Select Committee “is committed to working on a bipartisan basis to build a consensus on the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and develop a plan of action to defend the American people, our economy and our values.”
No one is denying that there is serious competition between the United States and China, but does it justify such a defensive crouch? Wouldn’t it have been better to form a committee that would also develop a plan of action so that the two major competing powers can avoid conflict?
Although the growing antagonism between the United States and China has not grown to the level of the Cuban Missile Crisis, nevertheless it presents the greatest danger to the world today. Much has been written about the “Thucydides Trap,” Graham Allison’s warning that all too often in history the tension between a rising power and an established power results in war, as it did between Sparta and Athens in 431 BC, and German and Great Britain in the early 21th Century.
It is imperative that cooler heads in China and the United States work to defuse tensions. The prospect of nuclear war that so terrified the world in the fifties and sixties has lost some of its emotional punch. The historian Christopher Clark writes that Europe’s leaders in 1914 knew that a general European war would be massively destructive, but did they really feel it? He posits that in the 1950s and 60s decision makers and the general public not only understood the dangers of nuclear war, but viscerally felt it. Today that visceral fear has fallen away among younger generations.
China is not without blame for the growing confrontation between the United States and China. Under President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has reasserted its dominant role over the economy and returned China to a more Maoist centralized state with aggressive and at times bullying diplomacy and military actions in the South China Sea and in the Himalayas. But that said, a drumbeat of anti-Chinese rhetoric from the Western powers only enables China’s hardliners and handicaps those in China who would seek a less belligerent accommodation with the West.
After all, China does not seek to overthrow our system of government. The Chinese Communist Party does not seek to export revolution as did the old Soviet Union. It is hard to imagine Cambridge University students becoming traitors as did Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean in the 1930s for the sake of the Chinese Communist Party.
As Singapore’s Bilahari Kausikan has pointed out: “Competition within a system cannot by definition be existential because the survival of the system is not at stake. China is the principal beneficiary of the existing system and has no strong incentive to kick over the table and change it in any fundamental way because its own economy rests on the foundation of that system.”
Americans have always suffered under the delusion that China should become more like the United States. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American missionaries fanned out across China in an effort to convert the Chinese to Christianity. President Woodrow Wilson was delighted when he discovered that Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, had become a Christian. More recently, when Deng Xiaoping abandoned Maoism for a market economy, Americans concluded that a political liberalization was sure to follow, that China would become more like the United States. It didn’t happen, but is China responsible for this miscalculation and disappointment, or are we?
It is one thing to deny China technology that could be used militarily, but the bipartisan inflammatory language emanating from the United States is counter- productive to America’s interests and the preservation of peace. China and the United States are drifting, like sleepwalkers, toward confrontation much as Europe did in 1914 which of course resulted in a devastating war nobody wanted.
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The Horror of All-Out War in the Pacific
Let us only hope that today’s leaders in both Washington and Beijing prove more restrained than did their counterparts in Berlin and Paris in August 1914 when plans for victory unleashed a war that would leave 20 million dead
Mar 02, 2023
While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: when nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war.
In The Guns of August, her magisterial account of another conflict nobody wanted, Barbara Tuchman attributed the start of World War I in 1914 to French and German plans already in place. “Appalled upon the brink,” she wrote, “the chiefs of state who would be ultimately responsible for their country’s fate attempted to back away, but the pull of military schedules dragged them forward.” In a similar fashion, Beijing and Washington have been making military, diplomatic, and semi-secretive moves that could drag us into a calamitous conflict that, once again, nobody wants.
At the apex of power, national leaders in Beijing and Washington have staked out starkly contrasting positions on Taiwan’s future. For nearly a year now, President Joe Biden has been trying to resolve the underlying ambiguity in previous U.S. policy toward that island by stating repeatedly that he would indeed defend it from any mainland attack. In May of last year, in response to a reporter’s question about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, he said, “Yes,” the U.S. would intervene militarily. He then added: “We agree with the One China policy. We signed on to it and all the attendant agreements made from there, but the idea that it can be taken by force, just taken by force, is [just not] appropriate.”
As Biden acknowledged, by extending diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1979, Washington had indeed accepted China’s future sovereignty over Taiwan. For the next 40 years, presidents from both parties made public statements opposing Taiwan’s independence. In effect, they conceded that the island was a Chinese province and its fate a domestic matter (even if they opposed the People’s Republic doing anything about it in the immediate future).
Nonetheless, Biden has persisted in his aggressive rhetoric. He told CBS News last September, for instance, that he would indeed send U.S. troops to defend Taiwan “if, in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.” Then, in a significant break with longstanding U.S. policy, he added: “Taiwan makes their own judgments about their independence… That’s their decision.”
Within weeks, at a Communist Party Congress, Chinese President Xi Jinping responded with a strong personal commitment to the unification of Taiwan — by force if necessary. “We insist on striving for the prospect of peaceful reunification,” he said, “but we will never promise to give up the use of force and reserve the option to take all necessary measures.”
After a long burst of applause from the 2,000 party officials massed in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, he then invoked the inevitability of Marxian dialectical forces that would insure the victory he was promising. “The historical wheels of national reunification and national rejuvenation are rolling forward,” he said, “and the complete reunification of the motherland must be achieved.”
As the political philosopher Hannah Arendt once reminded us, a sense of historical inevitability is a dangerous ideological trigger that can plunge authoritarian states like China into otherwise unthinkable wars or unimaginable mass slaughter.
War Preparations Move Down the Chain of Command
Not surprisingly, the forceful statements of Biden and Xi have been working their way down the chain of command in both countries. In January, a four-star U.S. Air Force general, Mike Minihan, sent a formal memo to his massive Air Mobility Command of 500 aircraft and 50,000 troops, ordering them to ramp up their training for war with China. “My gut tells me,” he concluded, that “we will fight in 2025.” Instead of repudiating the general’s statement, a Pentagon spokesman simply added, “The National Defense Strategy makes clear that China is the pacing challenge for the Department of Defense.”
Nor is General Minihan even the first senior officer to have made such foreboding statements. As early as March 2021, the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, warned Congress that China was planning to invade the island by 2027: “Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions… And I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years.”
Unlike their American opposites, China’s service chiefs have been publicly silent on the subject, but their aircraft have been eloquent indeed. After President Biden signed a defense appropriation bill last December with $10 billion in military aid for Taiwan, an unprecedented armada of 71 Chinese aircraft and many more military drones swarmed that island’s air defenses in a single 24-hour period.
As such tit-for-tat escalation only increases, Washington has matched China’s aggression with major diplomatic and military initiatives. Indeed, the assistant defense secretary for the Indo-Pacific, Ely Ratner, has promised, ominously enough, that “2023 is likely to stand as the most transformative year in U.S. force posture in the region in a generation.”
During a recent tour of Asian allies, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed some significant strategic gains. On a stopover in Seoul, he and his South Korean counterpart announced that the U.S. would deploy aircraft carriers and additional jets for expanded live-fire exercises — a distinctly escalatory move after the curtailment of such joint operations during the Trump years.
Moving on to Manila, Austin revealed that the Philippines had just granted U.S. troops access to four more military bases, several facing Taiwan across a narrow strait. These were needed, he said, because “the People’s Republic of China continues to advance its illegitimate claims” in the South China Sea.
China’s Foreign Ministry seemed stung by the news. After a successful diplomatic courtship of the previous Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, that had checked U.S. influence while accepting the Chinese occupation of islands in Philippine waters, Beijing could now do little more than condemn Washington’s access to those bases for “endangering regional peace and stability.” Although some Filipino nationalists objected that an American presence might invite a nuclear attack, according to reliable polling, 84% of Filipinos felt that their country should cooperate with the United States to defend their territorial waters from China.
Both of those announcements were dividends from months of diplomacy and down payments on major military deployments to come. The annual U.S. “defense” bill for 2023 is funding the construction of military installations across the Pacific. And even as Japan is doubling its defense budget, in part to protect its southern Islands from China, U.S. Marines in Okinawa plan to trade their tanks and heavy artillery for agile drones and shoulder-fired missiles as they form “littoral regiments” capable of rapid deployment to the smallest of islands in the region.
Secret Strategies
In contrast to those public statements, semi-secret strategies on both sides of the Pacific have generally escaped much notice. If the U.S. military commitment to Taiwan remains at least somewhat ambiguous, this country’s economic dependence on that island’s computer-chip production is almost absolute. As the epicenter of a global supply chain, Taiwan manufactures 90% of the world’s advanced chips and 65% of all semiconductors. (In comparison, China’s share of chips is 5% and the U.S. slice only 10%.) As the world’s top producer of the most critical component in everything from consumer cell phones to military missiles, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the leading innovator, supplying Apple and other U.S. tech firms.
Now, American officials are moving to change that. Having overseen the breaking of ground for a $12 billion TSMC chip-production factory in Phoenix in 2020, only two years later, Arizona’s governor announced that “TSMC has completed construction of its main facility.” Last August, just before President Biden signed the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo insisted that “our dependence on Taiwan for chips is untenable and unsafe.”
Only three months later, TSMC reached for a large slice of those federal funds by investing $28 billion in a second Phoenix factory that, when opened in 2026, will produce what the New York Times has called “more advanced — though not the most advanced — chip-making technology.” At a ceremony featuring President Biden last December, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook proclaimed, “This is an incredibly significant moment.”
That might be true, but the focus on Phoenix obscured equally significant chip factory projects being put in place by Samsung in Texas, Intel in Ohio, and Micron Technology in New York. Add it all up and the U.S. is already about halfway to the “minimum of three years and a $350 billion investment… to replace the Taiwanese [chip] foundries,” according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
In other words, if Beijing did decide to invade Taiwan after 2026, TSMC’s intellectual capital, in the form of its top computer scientists, would undoubtedly be on outbound flights for Phoenix, leaving little more than a few concrete shells and some sabotaged equipment behind. The global supply chain for silicon chips involving Dutch machines (for extreme ultraviolet lithography), American designs, and Taiwanese production would probably continue without much of a hitch in the United States, Japan, and Europe, leaving the People’s Republic of China with little more than its minimalist 5% of the world’s $570 billion semiconductor industry.
China’s secret calculus over an invasion of Taiwan is undoubtedly more complex. In mid-February at Munich, Secretary of State Antony Blinken charged that Beijing was considering giving Moscow “lethal support” for its war in Ukraine, adding that “we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for… our relationship.”
But China is faced with a far more difficult choice than Blinken’s blithe rhetoric suggests. From its impressive arsenal, Beijing could readily supply Moscow with enough of its Hong Niao cruise missiles to destroy most of Ukraine’s armored vehicles (with plenty left over to demolish Kyiv’s faltering electrical infrastructure).
Bleeding NATO in that way would, however, pay limited dividends for any possible future Chinese plans vis-a-vis Taiwan. In contrast, the types of ground-warfare armaments Washington and its allies continue to pour into Ukraine would do little to strain the U.S. naval capacity in the Western Pacific.
Moreover, the diplomatic and economic price Beijing would pay for a significant involvement in the Ukraine War might well prove prohibitive. As the world’s largest consumer of imported cheap oil and wheat, which Russia exports in abundance, China needs a humbled Putin, desperate for markets and compliant with its designs for greater dominion over Eurasia. A triumphant Putin, bending the will of timorous states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia while negotiating ever-tougher deals for his exports, is hardly in Beijing’s interest.
Ignoring the existential threat Putin’s war poses for the European Union would also cost Beijing decades of diplomacy and billions in infrastructure funds already invested to knit all of Eurasia, from the North Sea to the South China Sea, into an integrated economy. In addition, siding with a distinctly secondary power that has blatantly violated the core principle of the international order — which bars the acquisition of territory by armed conquest — is hardly likely to advance Beijing’s sustained bid for global leadership.
Vladimir Putin might indeed try to equate China’s claim to a breakaway province in Taiwan with his own bid for former Soviet territory in Ukraine, but the analogy is anathema to Beijing. “Taiwan is not Ukraine,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced last year, the day before Putin invaded Ukraine. “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China. This is an indisputable legal and historical fact.”
The Costs of War
With both Beijing and Washington contemplating a possible future war over Taiwan, it’s important (especially in light of Ukraine) to consider the likely costs of such a conflict. In November 2021, the venerable Reuters News Agency compiled a series of credible scenarios for a China-U.S. war over Taiwan. If the United States decided to fight for the island, said Reuters, “there is no guarantee it would defeat an increasingly powerful PLA [People’s Liberation Army].”
In its least violent scenario, Reuters speculated that Beijing could use its navy to impose a “customs quarantine” around Taiwan, while announcing an Air Defense Identification Zone over the island and warning the world not to violate its sovereignty. Then, to tighten the noose, it could move to a full blockade, laying mines at major ports and cutting underwater cables. Should Washington decide to intervene, its submarines would undoubtedly sink numerous PLA warships, while its surface vessels could launch aircraft and missiles as well. But China’s powerful air-defense system would undoubtedly fire thousands of its own missiles, inflicting “heavy losses” on the U.S. Navy. Rather than attempting a difficult amphibious invasion, Beijing might complete this staged escalation with saturation missile attacks on Taiwan’s cities until its leaders capitulated.
In the Reuters scenario for all-out war, Beijing decides “to mount the biggest and most complex amphibious and airborne landing ever attempted,” seeking to “overwhelm the island before the United States and its allies can respond.” To hold off a U.S. counterattack, the PLA might fire missiles at American bases in Japan and Guam. While Taiwan launched jets and missiles to deter the invasion fleet, U.S. carrier battle groups would steam toward the island and, “within hours, a major war [would be] raging in East Asia.”
In August 2022, the Brookings Institution released more precise estimates of likely losses from various scenarios in such a war. Although China’s “recent and dramatic military modernizations have sharply reduced America’s ability to defend the island,” the complexities of such a clash, wrote the Brookings analyst, make “the outcome… inherently unknowable.” Only one thing would be certain: the losses on both sides (including in Taiwan itself) would be devastating.
In Brookings’ first scenario involving “a maritime fight centered on submarines,” Beijing would impose a blockade and Washington would respond with naval convoys to sustain the island. If the United States were to knock out Beijing’s communications, the U.S. Navy would lose just 12 warships, while sinking all 60 of China’s subs. If, by contrast, China maintained its communications, it could possibly sink 100 vessels, mostly U.S. warships, while losing only 29 subs.
In Brookings’ second scenario for “a broader subregional war,” both sides would use jets and missiles in a struggle that would engulf southeastern China, Taiwan, and U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa, and Guam. If China’s attacks proved successful, it might destroy 40 to 80 U.S. and Taiwanese warships at a cost of some 400 Chinese aircraft. If the U.S. got the upper hand, it could destroy “much of China’s military in southeastern China,” while shooting down more than 400 PLA aircraft, even as it suffered heavy losses of its own jets.
By focusing largely on military losses, which are chilling enough, both studies grossly underestimate the real costs and potential devastation to Taiwan and much of East Asia. My own instinct tells me that, should China impose a customs blockade on the island, Washington would blink hard at the thought of losing hundreds of aircraft and dozens of warships, including an aircraft carrier or two, and retreat to its longstanding policy of regarding Taiwan as China’s territory. If the U.S. did challenge that customs interdiction zone, however, it would have to attack the Chinese blockade and might, in the eyes of much of the world, become the aggressor — a real disincentive from Washington’s point of view.
Should China launch an all-out invasion, however, Taiwan would likely succumb within a few days once its air force of just 470 combat aircraft was overwhelmed by the PLA’s 2,900 jet fighters, 2,100 supersonic missiles, and its massive navy, now the world’s largest. Reflecting China’s clear strategic advantage of simple proximity to Taiwan, the island’s occupation might well be a fait accompli before the U.S. Navy ships could arrive from Japan and Hawaii in sufficient numbers to challenge the massive Chinese armada.
If Beijing and Washington somehow let the pull of policy and planning drag them into such an ever-widening war, however, the damage could still prove incalculable — with cities devastated, untold thousands dead, and the global economy, with its epicenter in Asia, left in ruins. Let us only hope that today’s leaders in both Washington and Beijing prove more restrained than did their counterparts in Berlin and Paris in August 1914 when plans for victory unleashed a war that would leave 20 million dead in its wake.
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