The U.S. doesn’t win wars anymore.
From Cuba to Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan (the list goes on), the transition to insurgency-style, localized guerilla conflicts has left a stain on the two-time World War winner’s record. The repeat failures aren’t even the worst part — it’s that the U.S., unable to coerce states into acquiescence without the use of force, keeps finding itself fighting when it shouldn’t be. This is, at least in part, due to the deterioration of Washington’s ability to dissuade emerging powers from challenging its monopolized world order. Trump’s isolationist retreat from international organizations only made matters worse, leaving allies unsure, adversaries emboldened, and American influence dwindling.
While the Biden administration has worked to rebuild U.S.-NATO ties and enhance global regional partnerships, they have been unable to completely prevent challenges to its order in Europe. Post-Ukraine, global leaders, analysts, and citizens alike are wrestling to understand what’s next: Taiwan.
Trilateral tensions between the U.S., China, and Taiwan picked up as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made a trip to the island nation. China’s vague military threats morphed into accusations that Beijing had plans to “shoot [Pelosi] down” — a widespread claim that, though misrepresented, demonstrates a delicate balance and the risks of faulty intelligence. Nevertheless, Beijing put the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on high alert and conducted live-fire drills just 12 miles off the Taiwanese coast as Washington moved an aircraft carrier into position and Pelosi received an Air Force escort. With each side quick to put its military into action over a diplomatic debacle, Biden and Xi got a frightening refresher in just how easily a cross-strait crisis could erupt.
Ultimately, the litmus test for U.S. influence isn’t whether or not a Chinese move on Taiwan goes off cleanly: It’s whether it happens in the first place. The former is a murky question contingent on specific military and strategic decisions made by Beijing. The latter is a fundamental challenge to America’s power projection capabilities.
Whether it wants to or not, the battle for Taiwan — hopefully diplomatic, but potentially militaristic — presents a series of challenges that the Biden administration has to face. And this time, abject failure isn’t an option.
But Can They Do It?
To be fair, a Chinese move on Taiwan is far from a guaranteed success. China’s chief military force, the PLA, hasn’t fought a major conflict in almost four decades, when it suffered an embarrassing loss at the hands of the Vietnamese military. Sure, the PLA has undergone rapid modernization since, but even for an established force, a cross-strait invasion is nightmarishly difficult. With little way to defend against anti-ship missiles launched from U.S. bases in the Second Island Chain, Beijing would need a level of command structure to sustain supply lines across the 110 mile Taiwan Strait that it doesn’t currently possess.
Conventional invasion a near-impossibility, Beijing would likely pursue a strategy of coercion. A hybrid deployment of a naval blockade parried with attacks carried out by Chinese strike aircraft and conventional tactical ballistic missiles — both of which the U.S. has relatively little capability to defend against, even if fully committed to the island — would put Xi in the driving seat.
The military calculus is much easier here, but that still doesn’t ensure success — Beijing would be relying on forcing the government of Taiwan to make large concessions to end the naval blockade (which may or may not occur, depending on how the world responds and how long China can sustain the offensive).
Though the operational difficulties of military action are immense, a move on the island could still be on the horizon. “The military option is not a great option for China,” Dr. Brendan Rittenhouse Green, assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, conceded in an interview with the HPR, only to explain that “it was not a great option for Putin, and he did it. So that ought to caution us about preparing for the worst.”
Washington has time. But if the U.S. fails to invest in Asia-specific capabilities and commit resources to Taiwan, Beijing’s prospects for success — and thus its willingness to take action — grow.
Balancing Act: U.S. Interests and Xi’s Scale of Risk
There is an emerging consensus that Xi is deterred from invading Taiwan. While China continues to express anger over deepening U.S. ties with Taiwan, Dr. Zack Cooper, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, explains in an interview with the HPR that “there is a difference between [not liking it] and going to war.” Even then, Dr. Cooper isolates a limited number of contingencies that would likely trigger a Chinese invasion, warning that “the Chinese are more and more willing to run risks that previously they would not have been willing to run.” The maintenance of the strained and fragile status quo relies on Washington persuading Beijing that its angst with the current system pales in comparison to the risks of positive action to take the island.
What risks Xi has to weigh, ultimately, are determined by Washington.
It is difficult to predict just what lengths the U.S. would be willing to go to ensure Taiwan’s defense in the case of a Chinese provocation, and that’s by design. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has upheld a policy of strategic ambiguity, whereby the government is purposely vague about its intentions, toeing the line between peace-maintaining diplomacy and war-preventing deterrence.
While national security adviser Jake Sullivan has repeatedly made clear that America’s Taiwan policy has not changed, his boss has made things difficult. Three times now, Biden has answered inquiries into his willingness to come to Taiwan’s aid unambiguously: “Yes … that’s the commitment we made.”
Though he maintains that “the policy of strategic ambiguity is the right policy,” Cooper also contends that “if there was an invasion of Taiwan, Biden would probably come to Taiwan’s aid.”
The interests motivating the president’s official, policy-defying declarations, take on two flavors, one considerably more persuasive than the other.
First, and what the Biden administration and senior U.S. officials broadcast most willingly, is the importance of Taiwan’s relative sovereignty and democracy in maintaining the rules-based order, a series of agreements and norms that the White House views as essential to a “stable and open” world. Efforts by China to supersede the island’s controversial legal right to democratic self-government by the use of force disrupt the rules-based system.
More importantly, Taiwan occupies a unique structural role in the Biden administration’s Asia-forward foreign policy and plays an essential part in upholding U.S. credibility — the administration’s second motivator. In support of the White House’s premier foreign policy goal to counter Chinese influence, Taiwan gives the U.S. an unparalleled platform to project power to the mainland and throughout the region. Dubbed a “sea fortress,” the island’s positioning in the First Island Chain helps restrict Chinese expansionism into the Pacific and serves as a conduit for freedom of navigation operations in the region. Normatively, neglecting and failing to protect the island induces a referendum on U.S. influence in the region that would jeopardize fragile relationships with key regional allies.
While maintaining the island’s sovereignty won’t make the Biden administration’s foreign policy record, losing Taipei will break it.
For the President: A To-Do List
Biden can’t afford another conflict on his record. To shore up American influence (and give himself a fighting chance at reelection), Biden and his team must take steps to prevent positive action from Beijing. White House leadership can start here:
Deal with Ukraine, which is admittedly easier said than done. It’s naively optimistic to prescribe peace, but if he wants to keep Asia in the No. 1 spot, Biden must reduce the policymaker attention and resources earmarked for Ukraine and recommit them to maintaining the delicate balance in the Indo-Pacific. The longer the conflict drags on, the more the Biden administration has to contemplate transforming its foreign policy approach to a doctrine that shifts weight from Asia to Europe. Taiwan, China, and Asia broadly represent the future-made challenges to the U.S. order — these issues must continue to come first.
Enable preemptive self-defense. The West got away with poor anticipation and lackluster preparation in Eastern Europe because easy geographic access made getting weapons to Kyiv, even once conflict began, a logistically simple feat. Taiwan is very different; once China were to begin a hybrid invasion-blockade, the Biden administration and its allies would be hard-pressed to airlift defensive weaponry into the island. Starting now, the West should work with Taiwan — in a publicized way — to ensure its defensive capabilities are sufficient and singal to Beijing that military action will be met by the island’s equipped resistance. The Pentagon and State are making moves on this front, approving the potential sale of $95M of equipment and training to support Taipei’s Patriot Air Defense System, but follow through and support from the White House are key to demonstrate executive resolve.
Straighten out White House policy. The president’s supposed gaffes about his commitment to Taiwan, coming after a president who wasn’t going to do anything in the case of invasion, only makes things more difficult. Here’s the paradox: strategic ambiguity must be communicated clearly. White House retractions and clarifications do little to assure Xi that, just because formal policy remains the same, Biden isn’t leaning into a more hawkish approach. The White House needs to give itself options, and ambiguity enables just that.
Even then, Washington can only do so much. The ultimate burden falls on Taiwanese officials to persuade Beijing that any attempts to invade the island would be costly and that the island’s government and its peoples would not soon capitulate. There are a series of practical measures to be taken here — building up Taiwan’s reserve force and implementing automated retaliatory strikes — but the government must also instill a national will of defense to the end, much like President Zelensky has done.
Implications for the Empire
With world-threatening political, military, and technological challenges mounting, Washington’s aim becomes clear. The goal isn’t to win a war over Taiwan: it is for there to be no war over Taiwan.
A battle for Taiwan would make clear China’s dwindling fear of American superiority, reaffirm the unwillingness of rising powers to accept the U.S.-led world order, and could signal the beginning of a paradigm-shifting transition of power. The White House must garner support — from the public, Congress, and executive leadership — to push back against Beijing’s adventurism.
Washington should be cautious, but it cannot afford to be indecisive.
Image by Martin Lindstrom is licensed under the Unsplash License.
