We must deal with China and Russia at the same time
Michael Rubin
Beijing has threatened to “resolutely smash” any Taiwanese move toward independence, never mind that mainland China has seldom in its history controlled the island.
Elbridge Colby, founder of the Marathon Initiative and the lead writer of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, argues that any Chinese aggression will be overwhelming. “If they’re really serious about it … they’re gonna go big, and they’re gonna take it, and they’re gonna dare us to try to reverse the trend,” he explained.
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To prepare for that contingency, he argues, the United States should allow neither Russia nor Ukraine to distract it from the real threat: China. For much of the intelligence community, Colby’s arguments represent conventional wisdom.
Colby is right that China poses a real threat, though both his assessment of China and the either-or scenario with Ukraine are wrong.
First, there is limited evidence that China would go big on Taiwan. Despite a massive military build-up that successfully leads weak leaders in Washington and outside to self-deter, China’s go-to strategy of choice has been to salami-slice: Make successive tiny moves that fall below the threshold of generating a military response that in sum achieve much the same aim.
This served China well not only in the South China Sea, where it has annexed Filipino, Vietnamese, and Malaysian reefs and rocks and transformed them into islands that the People’s Liberation Army has fortified, but also in India. China continues to occupy a chunk of Kashmir the size of Maryland and, in recent years, has encroached further not only in Ladakh but also in Arunachal Pradesh.
While China could rain death and destruction upon Taiwan’s cities with artillery and missiles, occupying the country is another thing entirely. Taiwan’s topography is among the most challenging in the world. To occupy Taiwan might mean sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of men fighting the inevitable guerilla campaign. Here, China’s demography is an Achilles’ Heel: Thanks to the legacy of the one-child policy, its army consists of only children.
China may be an increasingly totalitarian dictatorship, but even dictators must be mindful of angering their core supporters, in this case, the elite families from Beijing and Shanghai, who will be loath to lose their only sons upon whom they counted for their future prosperity. Ordinary Chinese, brainwashed by the Chinese media bubble, may rally around Xi Jinping’s irredentism just as Russians embrace Vladimir Putin’s nonsensical interpretation of history. Xi likely understands that the mountains of central Taiwan would be his Bakhmut, with consequences far more grave.
His strategy would likely be to slowly tighten the noose and cause the Taiwanese to doubt outside support.
The Taiwan Relations Act may be the basis of U.S. commitments to support Taiwan, but it does not apply to the entirety of the country; rather, it specifies that the U.S. will only seek to defend the main island and the Pescadores, a small archipelago in the middle of the Taiwan Strait. Matsu and Quemoy, epicenters of the first Taiwan, lie outside the Act’s commitments. So too, does Pratas Island, which lies closer to Hong Kong than it does to Taiwan’s main island. China can seize these and establish the precedent of encroaching on Taiwanese sovereignty in a way that creates a precedent and undermines future commitment to defend the island.
Simply put, Xi may calculate that Joe Biden is no Dwight Eisenhower, Antony Blinken is no John Foster Dulles, and Jake Sullivan is just a shadow of Robert Cutler.
Xi shares with Putin a hostility to the rules-based liberal order. The two are as crucial to each other as Imperial Japan was to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Just as leaving one theater to concentrate solely on the other was nonsensical to the Greatest Generation, so too should abandoning Ukraine to counter a poor China-Taiwan assessment be a nonstarter today.
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Standing up to dictators, including those acting in concert, is important. Prematurely ceding freedom to one plays into the autocracy sought by both.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.