Xi Jinping is Not a Taipei Personality

 

           Over 200 PRC Vessels Practice 

              Encircling Taiwan in May

Xi Jinping is Not a Taipei Personality

Intentional Strategic Ambiguity: Constraints and Restraints

There have been a series of China’s (the People’s Republic of China or PRC) clear efforts to ramp up their claim to Taiwan as an inseparable province of the mainland. The rhetoric has risen. The People’s Liberation Army (the entire PRC military) is more modern, larger and clearly has a larger array of nuclear weapons than ever, including a navy that is both huge and sophisticated. And while the PRC has never possessed and ruled Taiwan, it has maintained that Taiwan is legitimately theirs, a claim strongly asserted, since the end of the Korean War. But the world is changing.

In the June 3rd edition of China Talk, writers Jordan Schneider, Nicholas Welch, Jared McKinney, Lily Ottinger and others address the modern challenge of Deterring a Taiwan Invasion. They note that: “In terms of American military power — after the Korean War, we became de facto engaged in the defense of Taiwan from a communist invasion, and then de jure or formally engaged in the defense of Taiwan from a Chinese invasion with the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty onward. As a result of the de facto and then de jure commitment, we interposed US naval power regularly in the Taiwan Strait in a dedicated unit called the Taiwan Strait Patrol. We station tens of thousands of US soldiers in Taiwan.

“Later on in the Cold War, we actually put tactical nuclear weapons there — a fact that is now declassified. We had a formal commitment. We backed up the commitment. And then there were two crises in which China signaled some aggressive intent in 1954 and 1958. Both times, we threatened nuclear war in response to PRC saber-rattling. Nuclear war was not something China was interested in, especially since China didn’t have nuclear weapons until 1964. Those were some pretty robust deterrents, even if there were some scares in this period.

“Usually, when people talk about preventing war, they discuss deterrence, but we think that it’s actually more useful to think about deterrents… Taiwan’s deterrents played a significant role during this period — for example, Taiwan’s air power… Guess who got the first air-to-air kills in the history of air combat using precision-guided weapons? It wasn’t the United States. It was the Republic of China Air Force in 1958, which fired Sidewinder missiles to shoot down PLA fighters in the strait. They achieved kill ratios of about 30:4.”

In 1972, Richard Nixon opened formal relations with Mao Zedong’s PRC, including replacing Taiwan (the Republic of China) in the United Nations with the PRC. Upon the ascension of Deng Xiaoping to China’s leadership a decade later, the PRC hyper-accelerated into modernity, eventually lifting a billion Chinese out of poverty with an economic machine that soon became our greatest trading partner. Stability reigned, even as the PRC never lifted its claim over Taiwan. But China grew stronger as the United States fell into complacency.

Today, a new “Mao” dictator, Xi Jinping, had solidified his position, ended presidential term limits and ramped up his repression of any opposition within his country. But his mismanagement of the pandemic, the failure of his central economic reforms – facing massive unemployment, especially among younger educated workers, a real estate debacle with an accompanying banking crisis and a fall in manufacturing output – seemed to call for a distraction and a rallying cry to his citizens. Parallel with this reality is/was the severe polarization within its archrival, the United States, and the potential reelection of isolationist candidate, Donald Trump. With Trump’s threats to abrogate military treaties (even perhaps his defense treaty with Taiwan) and possibly withdraw from NATO, the US seemed to be unraveling… to Xi’s delight.

Even as Xi’s natural ally, Vladimir Putin was mired in Russia’s own claims over Ukraine, Xi moved towards reinforcing a Sino-Russian combination to counter the United States and offer Europe an alternative to an unreliable United States. Europe may care about Ukraine, but to most leaders on that continent, Taiwan was expendable. With the recent election of Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te (aka “William Lai”), a champion of Taiwan’s independence, China reacted quickly. Rising up beyond the PRC’s escalating claim over much of the entire region’s waterways, that election elicited a more serious PRC response, even as the Taiwanese continue to believe that the awkward status quo would continue.

“The mood in Taiwan, with a few false invasion warnings aside, seems to be one of the status quo. Sometimes, Taiwanese people will say that Taiwan has been under threat from the PRC since the late 1940s. They think, ‘If we’ve had scares for the past seventy years, why should we be unusually afraid today?’… They understand that the PRC is a threat, but it’s been a threat for a long time…

“Taiwan’s government agencies are battered by 5 million cyberattacks every day. China is holding invasion drills at a replica of Taiwan’s presidential palace in Inner Mongolia. [In late May], the PLA openly rehearsed an encirclement of Taiwan in so-called ‘punishment drills.’… [But after that Taiwan election, what?] In very simple terms, a constraint is something prohibiting you from doing something or limiting your ability to do it — while a restraint is something internal to your own mind, prohibiting or limiting you from doing something… When looking at the interlocking constraints and restraints, it’s very striking how in the twentieth century, the US and Taiwan relied almost exclusively on constraints like US naval dominance, nuclear deterrence, and Taiwanese air superiority.

“Then, at the turn of the century, most of those constraints disappeared, and now we almost exclusively rely on restraints like China’s positive expectations about trade with Taiwan and the US, or Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.” China Talk. So where are we? Is a nuclear war on the table? US policymakers are at a crossroads. With internal American dissention, even with her current economic issues, China is asking if this is their time to make that final move to take Taiwan. What should the United States do? Like Israel’s Netanyahu announcing that his war in Gaza will continue at least through the end of the year – conveniently after the US elections – Xi may well wait to see if Donald Trump is reelected… and simply remove any US deterrence from the equation. Stay tuned.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for those who believe that the United States should walk away from its international role and turn inward, the economic catastrophe that would follow might well become an irreversible disaster for America.