Vox Popoli

“The Taiwan Fixation” is a long and meandering article in Foreign Affairs that serves to obscure the primary point being made there. But the inescapable conclusion eventually reached by the intrepid reader who manages to slash-and-burn his way through the jungle-like maze of text is that Clown World’s strategerists now accept that the US military is no longer capable of winning a war with China. Which is good, because it isn’t.

The fate of Taiwan keeps American policymakers up at night, and it should. A Chinese invasion of the island would confront the United States with one of its gravest foreign policy choices ever. Letting Taiwan fall to Beijing would dent Washington’s credibility and create new challenges for U.S. military forces in Asia. But the benefits of keeping Taiwan free would have to be weighed against the costs of waging the first armed conflict between great powers since 1945. Even if the United States prevailed—and it might well lose—an outright war with China would likely kill more Americans and destroy more wealth than any conflict since the Vietnam War and perhaps since World War II. Nuclear and cyber weapons could make it worse, bringing destruction on the U.S. homeland. These would be catastrophic consequences for the United States.

As terrible as a U.S.-Chinese war would be, an American president would face immense pressure to fight for Taipei. Many U.S. policymakers are convinced that Taiwan, a prosperous democracy in a vital region, is worth protecting despite the daunting price of doing so. Political calculations may also push a U.S. president into war. By staying out, the president could expect to be blamed not only for permitting the economic meltdown that China’s invasion would trigger but also for losing Taiwan after a decades-long battle of wills between Washington and Beijing over the island’s future. That would doom a president’s legacy. Against such a certainty, any chance of salvaging the situation could look like a better bet—and by opting to fight China to protect Taiwan, the president would preserve the possibility of going down in history as a great wartime victor. In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson faced a choice between ramping up a U.S. military campaign in Vietnam and allowing the Communists to take over the country. He doubted that a war was necessary or winnable. But he sent American soldiers all the same.

U.S. leaders need a way to escape the ghastly decision to either wage World War III or watch Taiwan go down. They need a third option. Washington must make a plan that enables Taiwan to mount a viable self-defense, allows the United States to assist from a distance, and keeps the U.S. position in Asia intact regardless of how a cross-strait conflict concludes. This way, the United States could abstain from sending its military forces to defend Taiwan if China invades the island and does not attack U.S. bases or warships..

Before the moment of crisis arrives, political leaders should initiate a frank national dialogue about U.S. interests in the western Pacific. Americans must know the true costs of conflict with China: the deaths of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers, the possibility that nuclear weapons would be fired in desperation, an economic downturn dwarfing that of the Great Recession of 2008, and severe disruption to everyday life. It will take great effort for policymakers to communicate the scale of the potential devastation because a war with China would look nothing like the relatively small and contained wars that the United States has waged in recent decades.

In addition to making clear the costs of war with China, U.S. officials should stress the need to coexist with China as prominently as they discuss the need to compete with it. In the coming years, especially if Beijing’s behavior improves, American policymakers should adopt “competitive coexistence” as an approach for U.S. relations with China. In doing so, they would convey Washington’s willingness to establish stable patterns of interaction, limit security competition, and address global problems collaboratively. At a minimum, political leaders should avoid undue alarmism about Taiwan. The Biden administration was right to tamp down public speculation about the year by which China might intend to launch an invasion. The Trump administration should go further to discourage catastrophic thinking, including by communicating to the public that China would not pose an immeasurably greater challenge to the United States if Taiwan came under its control.

I don’t know why the neocons are preemptively aligning themselves with reality in the case of China when they aggressively refused to do so in the case of Russia. Perhaps they simply don’t hate the Chinese with the same irrational hatred they harbor for the Russians, perhaps the extent of the Chinese industrial advantage is simply too great for even the most magickal-thinkers to believe they can simply wish away, or, more likely, they want to reserve the limited US military resources that will be available for any foreign adventures for the Middle East.

The trade war with China should provide sufficient excitement to keep even the most inveterate drama-seekers occupied. There is simply no benefit to the United States of engaging in an actual war in the South Pacific.

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