When the Taiwan War Will Happen – The American Spectator

A coming crisis over Taiwan is now popularly treated as a foregone conclusion. China is increasing its military budget, expanding its fleet, and securing regional allies, all the while saber-rattling over its small democratic neighbor. But uncertainty still underpins the thinking of policy makers in the U.S. and its allies — a conflict is coming, yes, but when and how? And what could be done to avert it?

Time is not necessarily on Beijing’s side, and the Chinese Communist Party knows this. The diplomatic avenue to integrating Taiwan is shut, likely forever. Such an approach was perhaps most plausible in the 2000s and early 2010s, when the China-sympathetic Kuomintang (KMT) dominated Taiwanese politics and when China’s “reform and opening up” seemed to be developing apace. Since then, however, Taiwanese civic identity has grown, and the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party has decisively supplanted the KMT in Taiwan’s politics. The CCP may speak of working with “compatriots in Taiwan” toward reunification, but the reality is that the party’s friends on the island are now few and dwindling.

The economic route to integration looks similarly implausible. Although China remains Taiwan’s largest trading partner, trade has fallen as a proportion of gross domestic product. Taipei is also well aware of the fact that its economic ties to the mainland pose a security risk, and it has created headlines (and much consternation in Beijing) with its very public efforts to seek closer trade relations with the U.S. instead. As with the diplomatic route, the longer that China waits, the worse odds it will have for dominating Taiwan without bloodshed.

Hence, as both sides of the conflict over Taiwan have by now understood, any communist takeover of Taiwan will have to be achieved through force. Knowing this, one pivotal question remains: when does China believe it will be most advantageous to begin a war over Taiwan?

Some geostrategists argue that the danger is imminent and will never be greater than it is now. A case to that effect is made in the recent book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China by Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, two American professors of geopolitics. The central contention of the book is that China’s hard power already peaked in the 2010s, alongside its working-age population, and that its coming decades will be a story of decline, not domination. Feeling that its prospects are dimming, the authors argue, Beijing will make increasingly risky and reckless moves on the world stage — up to, and including, attacking Taiwan.

There are certainly credible grounds on which to distrust the dominant growth narrative. The country’s official population figures don’t quite add up, according to some researchers; neither does its official GDP growth rate. If China is in fact ready for a fall, its current property-market meltdown provides the perfect straw to break the camel’s back. Japan’s downfall three decades ago occurred in very similar circumstances, led by a downturn in inflated asset markets.

Prominent figures in Washington have endorsed the imminent danger narrative. In mid-October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested that Beijing was shifting to a “much faster timeline” for seizing Taiwan. Two days later, Blinken’s remarks were followed by a much more explicit warning from Admiral Michael Gilday, head of the U.S. Navy, that America would have to be prepared for “potentially a 2023 window” for a Taiwan crisis.

Despite the warnings, however, China does not appear to be changing its posture to one of imminent war. President Xi Jinping’s remarks at the most recent National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party reaffirmed China’s commitment to seizing Taiwan but seemed to indicate no greater urgency than in previous years.

Militarily, if not diplomatically, time could indeed be on China’s side. The country currently spends a modest sum on its armed forces, at 1.7 percent of its GDP compared to America’s 3.7 percent. Compare either of these figures with the late Soviet Union, which was able to sustain a military budget equal to about 15 percent of its GDP for decades before its eventual collapse. In other words, the People’s Liberation Army has a lot of room to grow if political pressures require it to do so. The fact that China has made no indication of a plan to increase its relative military spending cuts against the idea that Beijing is becoming desperate.

Nonetheless, Beckley and Brands are correct in identifying the severity of the country’s demographic situation. A dearth of young people will constrain the growth of its economy and military in the coming decades. The furious rate at which Chinese manufacturers are installing robots could ward off an economic decline, but, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, a preponderance of hardware cannot always compensate for a lack of manpower when it comes to war.

There is also the fact that Taiwan itself is far from militarily negligible. The Taiwanese armed forces are currently in poor shape, but so was Ukraine’s army in 2014. Putin’s invasion, and the redoubled attention on the Pacific by both China and the U.S., may serve to stir Taipei out of complacency. Taiwan has increased its pace of arms imports from America. It may eventually expand its compulsory military-service program — long considered a political impossibility but now looking increasingly like a necessity. While the gross strength of the Taiwanese army may never match that of its neighbor, it still possesses hundreds of tanks and combat aircraft and thousands of artillery pieces, and this may already be sufficient to repel whatever fraction of army forces that China could actually transport across the strait. The longer that Beijing waits, the more that Taiwan’s capabilities will grow and the more costly any eventual war will become.

To Subdue Without Fighting

The aforementioned economic, diplomatic, and military constraints mean that China cannot afford to wait forever. But neither can it afford to be hasty. Beijing does not want a war — it much prefers to influence other countries through economic means — and especially not a war with the United States.

War between China and the U.S., even of the likely non-nuclear kind, would be one of the most economically destructive events in modern history. Some estimates suggest that the sanctions alone would directly cause 7.6 percent of China’s GDP to disappear, nearly double the economic contraction experienced by America during the Great Recession. Of course, China would also lose the ability to import vital materials and components from the West, destroying many of its domestic supply chains. Even an eventual Chinese victory could cause permanent economic damage, as international firms would shift their manufacturing to safer shores. And that is assuming victory: a defeat would be grounds for regime change, given that the CCP’s legitimacy is rooted in restoring China’s regional hegemony.

This threat of American intervention means that, despite seemingly close calls like this year’s simulated Chinese blockade of Taiwan, the threat of war is still minimal for the next few years. What China will instead seek to do throughout the 2020s is to erode America’s military and economic leverage, to the point where direct U.S. intervention on Taiwan’s behalf becomes implausible and indirect intervention becomes ineffective.

On the economic front, China seeks to immunize itself against sanctions by stockpiling resources, keeping critical manufacturing at home, pushing for a consumer-driven economy that is less vulnerable to trade disputes, and securing alternate means of buying and selling goods. When the first China–Russia railway bridge opened earlier this year in the midst of the Ukraine war, it was cited as a means by which China could indirectly support Russia’s war effort by increasing trade and alleviating its sanctions burden. But Beijing’s primary interest lies in keeping its trade options open, as was evidenced when it signed a deal last month for another railroad with Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, this time bypassing Russia. The CCP seeks a position of strength in which any trade war would result in more damage to the U.S. and its allies than to China.

Then there is the military. Here, China’s intentions are unambiguous; the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is currently deploying new ships equivalent to a European great power navy every year. This buildup is obviously not meant for Taiwan, which possesses a tiny navy composed almost entirely of coastal defense ships. Instead, the scale of the buildup, combined with the continued emphasis on large…