In one of her most haunting passages, the historian Barbara Tuchman once described Europe, in the run up to the World War I, as “a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others.” No rational actor truly desired the cataclysmic conflict, yet all major and minor powers ineluctably sleepwalked into the abyss, since “[o]nce the mobilization button was pushed, the whole vast machinery for calling up, equipping, and transporting [millions of] men began turning automatically.”
Nowadays, Taiwan finds itself at the center of a similarly explosive dynamic, as China and the United States tussle over the fate of the self-governing island nation. For almost half-a-century, the three protagonists carefully maintained a fragile status quo based on an “impossible trinity”.
First, the US, adopting a policy of ‘constructive ambiguity’, backed Taiwan politically, but no longer recognized its formal sovereignty after adopting a “One China” policy in the wake of the Nixon-Mao détente in the early 1970s.
On its part, Beijing claimed the island nation as its own, but lacked the requisite capability to impose its will, thanks to the massive asymmetry of naval power between the US and China that was fully on display during multiple crises across the Taiwan Straits.
As for Taiwan, the self-governing island nation often flirted with outright declaration of independence, most dramatically under maverick politicians such as Chen Shu-bian, but even its most radical elected leaders never dared to invite open conflict with China.
In recent years, however, cracks have begun to appear in this frozen conflict, as Beijing rapidly builds up its offensive military capabilities amid a resurgence of revanchist nationalism, the US comes under intense pressure at home and overseas to assist the beleaguered democratic nation, and the Taiwanese economy decouples from China’s while its boisterous electorate progressively drifts away from Beijing in a clear rejection of any potential “One Country, Two Systems” model in the wake of the Hong Kong crisis. No wonder then, The Economist has gone so far as describing Taiwan, with a particularly grim urgency rather than journalistic sensationalism, as “the most dangerous place on earth”.
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The dogs of war
It has increasingly become difficult to ignore the Taiwan Straits crisis amid the drumbeat of war, which is reaching a fever pitch. Over the past few years, Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping has warned of his country’s “firm will, full confidence and sufficient ability to defeat all activities to split the country”, while his Defense minister, Gen. Wei Fenghe has made it clear that all options are on the table, including military invasion of the island.
Grim forecasts have dominated headlines, accordingly. Some have warned of a potential conflict as early as 2024, when Taiwan is expected to be electing a fully pro-independence candidate, while others have warned that China would be fully ready to invade the island by 2025. Taiwanese defense officials are now publicly warning of a potential Chinese blockade of the island in the near-future, while Japanese defense officials have raised the possibility of a “Crimea-style” asymmetric, multi-phased invasion of Taiwan by Chinese forces.
Amid rising tensions in late 2021, rumors of an impending invasion of Taiwan triggered panic among Chinese citizens, who started stocking up on survival gear and food in anticipation of a major showdown. More entrepreneurially-minded citizens, meanwhile, contemplated futures markets of potential investment opportunities in post-invasion Taiwan.
The prospect of all-out war may not be a matter of decades anymore, but instead years. Facing growing threat from Beijing, the Tsai Ing-wen administration has doubled down on its international diplomacy, as sympathetic democratic powers from neighboring Japan to the US as well as parliamentarians from the European Union step up their support for the island nation.
It’s easy to dismiss all these warnings as ‘noise’ rather than ‘signal’ of a major reconfiguration in the China-Taiwan-US strategic triangle. But the reality is that tectonic geopolitical shifts are taking place, thus dramatically raising the risks of reckless brinkmanship as well as accidental clashes leading to rapid escalation into military confrontation/kinetic action.
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The major contributing factor to rising cross-straits tensions is China’s increasingly assertive foreign policy, coupled with an unprecedented military build-up. Under Xi Jinping, the Asian powerhouse has effectively discarded a whole generation of foreign policy pragmatism, which was pioneered by former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who advised his proteges to “hide your strength, bide your time”.
Political and military escalation
Under Xi’s watch, Beijing has rapidly enhanced its asymmetric anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, best exemplified by the development of “carrier killer” anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs) such as the DF-21D and DF-26 platforms, which could raise the cost of any American naval intervention in China’s adjacent waters.
The million-strong People’s Liberation Army (PLA), meanwhile, has rapidly expanded its fleet of aircraft carriers, fifth-generation fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines, while upgrading its potentially game-changing hypersonic missile capabilities. Based on a more accurate measurement, China’s annual defence spending has surpassed $500 billion, only second to that of the US.
By all indications, China is developing the requisite “counter-intervention” capabilities to deter any potential US intervention in behalf of regional allies. Touting the “great rejuvenation” of China, Xi will likely press his point over Taiwan before stepping down from office. In the short-to-medium run, the Chinese leader has every reason to leverage a more aggressive foreign policy to rally support at home amid concerns of a structural economic slowdown in China, which has been exacerbated by the ongoing trade war with Washington.
The second factor is the growing bipartisan consensus in Washington in favor of a more robust American commitment to Taiwan’s survival. For the past seven decades, the very existence of Taiwan as a separate political entity has been, in many ways, a function of America’s power in Asia. For more than four decades, successive US presidents adopted ‘strategic ambiguity’ over Taiwan, walking a tightrope in order to appease pro-Taipei forces at home, while maintaining functional ties with China.
But things began to change under the Trump administration, which oversaw a gradual yet decisive shift in America’s China policy, including on Taiwan. Backed by a broadly sympathetic Congress, the Trump administration expanded high-level diplomatic exchanges with Taiwan and cleared a massive $62 billion arms deal, including sale of state-of-the-art fighter jets to Taiwan, which aims to enhance the island nation’s ability to deter, forestall, or significantly slow down a potential Chinese invasion, providing sufficient time for military intervention by the US forces in the Pacific.
As China builds up its offensive capabilities, the Biden administration has come under growing pressure, including by Democrats in the Congress, to make security guarantees to Taiwan. Confronting growing pressure in the US Congress, Biden, on at least two occasions, went so far as (erroneously) claiming that Washington has an alliance commitment to come to Taiwan’s rescue in an event of an all-out invasion by China. But no such treaty-based guarantees exist in the Taiwan Relations Act, which has governed US-Taiwan ties over the past four decades.
It’s important to note that Biden’s diplomatic gaffes came on the heels of America’s “hard and messy” exit from Afghanistan, which has emboldened rivals such as Russia and China, thus further eroding confidence in Washington’s commitment to its allies, especially in Asia. The most important factor, however, is Taiwan’s drift towards an indigenous identity centered on democratic values and, accordingly, opposition to communist China.
In recent decades, the resurgence of identity politics, which has strengthened the left-leaning, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) electoral dominance at the expense of the more Beijing-friendly, conservative Kuomintang (KMT), whose years-long engagement policy towards China failed to bear fruit.
The trendlines are clear. During the 1996 presidential elections, the DPP, led by democracy activist Peng Ming-min, could only mobilize less than a fourth (21 percent) of the votes. By 2020, the DPP, led by Tsai Ing-wen, increased its share of presidential election votes to 57%, with almost 20% more votes than the KMT’s standard-bearer, Han Kuo-yu. In 2016, the DPP managed to win, for the first time, both the presidential and legislative elections, ushering in a new era of potential hegemony for the left-leaning, pro-independence party.
The DPP’s increasingly dominant performance in presidential elections broadly tracks with the deepening sense of “Taiwanese” identity on the self-ruling island nation. Back in 1996, more than 50% of the population self-identified as both “Chinese and Taiwanese”, with just over a fifth of the populace identifying as “Taiwanese”. By 2020, a Pew Research Centre survey showed that up to two-thirds of the population self-identified as “Taiwanese”, with only 4% calling self-identifying as “Chinese”, underscoring the incredible ideational transformation in the island nation.
China’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s democratic movement has further deepened distrust towards Beijing among the Taiwanese youth and broader population. A century earlier, the world sleep-walked into a prolonged and devastating global conflict, even when none of the major power truly desired it. If current trends continue, the world might slip into another cataclysm, with the first shots likely fired over the fate of Taiwan.