US blind spot could lead to China’s victory in Taiwan war
Joel Gehrke
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Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping has a military option for attempting to subjugate Taiwan that U.S. strategists have neglected, former officials and American analysts fear.
“They’ve got two choices: invasion or blockade; and, if the invasion fails, the blockade is a fallback option,” Foreign Policy Research Institute senior fellow Lonnie Henley, a retired intelligence officer who specializes in China issues, told the Washington Examiner. “The advantage of a blockade is there’s not much we can do about it. The disadvantage is it takes a long time to achieve its effects. Starving people out is a slow process.”
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That’s a bleak assessment from an analyst whose four-decade intelligence career culminated in a tour as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior expert for East Asia before his retirement in 2019. And yet, it coexists with a widespread consensus that political and strategic calculations could put pressure on either side to fight, whether they perceive themselves as ready or not, and despite a likely-mutual desire to avoid a clash.
“Any war over Taiwan is going to be devastating for everything else that China cares about,” Henley said. “It would be a very long, very hot Cold War after the shooting stops — if the shooting ever does stop. So the Chinese prefer — strongly prefer — to solve the Taiwan problem without violence.”
The other current and former officials agreed. “The one big caveat is, of course, if Taiwan was to declare independence, or the U.S were to change [policy] to say ‘we support an independent Taiwan, we’re going to put a division of Americans on Taiwan to enforce this,” said a Pentagon strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Then Xi would be forced to move.”
That consideration contains the hope that the United States can mitigate the risk of war through a tempered posture towards Taiwan. Yet the acrimony that has overtaken U.S.-China relations in recent years complicates the picture. Secretary of State Antony Blinken took a conciliatory message to Xi this week — “We do not support Taiwan independence,” he emphasized in Beijing — but Chinese officials panned even his boilerplate talking points as a subtle provocation.
“The U.S. characterization of the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question as the core content of its one-China policy is a tampering of its political commitment,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s lead official for North America, Yang Tao, told state media.
The hard-line response to standard U.S. diplomatic rhetoric underscores the political tensions that have sparked American anxiety about the regime’s potential truculence. Four-star Air Force Gen. Michael Minihan expressed a “gut feeling” that the U.S. and China will “fight in 2025” in a February memo to service members under his command. Minihan’s projection offers a shorter time frame even than outgoing Adm. Philip Davidson’s warning, during an appearance before the Senate in 2021, that “the threat is manifest” by 2027.
“I think part of what they’re saying is ‘When I look at the balance — and I look at the incapacity of the Taiwan military, and I look at our inability to flow force into a battle zone … if I were in the [People’s Liberation Army’s] shoes, I’d go,’” a second retired senior intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner. “The reality, though, is the PLA is, by its own admission, not yet prepared.”
China’s vaunted military modernization has placed at Xi’s disposal the largest navy in the world, air defenses capable of targeting all but the most advanced U.S. aircraft, and an arsenal of ballistic missiles designed “to conduct strikes against regional air bases, logistics and port facilities, communications, and other ground-based infrastructure” throughout the region, as the Defense Department’s latest report on Chinese military power acknowledged.
Still, no bombardment of American forces can change the size of the Taiwan Strait or the shape of the island, and U.S. attack submarines and long-range bombers could haunt the invading Chinese forces.
“The sheer difficulty of doing speedy invasion — that’s the main deterrent against China so far,” the Pentagon strategist said. “If China were to invade tomorrow, they would lose. The U.S. would intervene but not efficiently or very effectively.”
Still, China’s staging of a blockade following then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) visit to Taipei last year points to a range of more difficult scenarios, other analysts believe.
“I think the blockade is a much more appealing option for China,” Michael O’Hanlon, Brookings Institution foreign policy research director, told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t think it’s been completely neglected, but it gets lesser attention than the invasion scenario. And I think it’s actually much more likely than the invasion scenario.”
It’s possible that a Chinese blockade would just “trade one set of problems for another,” as the Pentagon official put it, by miring Chinese forces in a protracted struggle.
“It gives the U.S. time to build its logistics chain; it gives the U.S. time to rally up a coalition and to coordinate that coalition,” the Pentagon strategist said. “It would probably be easier than trying to do like a rapid provision right away, but it would not be easy, and as time goes on, the Chinese will not have an overall sense of control. … Things might happen that might not be to their expectations, and that is something the party cannot tolerate.”
Yet other observers counter that a blockade scenario would turn the island’s geography into an impediment for the U.S., or any force seeking to relieve Taiwan, rather than China. Taiwan’s main ports lie on the western side of the island, well within the range of the full panoply of Chinese military assets.
“Any ships we send in to break the blockade, we might do it once, but … the ability to then even offload containerized cargo is going to be really questionable,” the second former senior intelligence officer said. “It’s really untenable for a country like Taiwan that imports all their energy, much of their food, and, you know, myriad other things that they would need to sustain just to be viable.”
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Neither U.S. nor Taiwanese officials have come to terms with that problem, according to Henley, raising the possibility that the U.S. and Taiwan could win the initial battle but lose in the next phase of the fight.
“Too many U.S. military planners want to jump straight from defeating the invasion to the regional conflict with China and forget about Taiwan,” Henley said. “China’s not necessarily guaranteed to win, but they’re more likely to win if we don’t do anything to prepare for it. And that’s my big message: We are not doing anything to prepare for that part of the fight.”