Bill Tallen

As the dust stirred up by the Wyoming legislative session finally settles, let’s cast our gaze abroad again. Our “splendid isolation” does not protect us from the potential consequences of events on the world stage. What follows started as a response to an online speculative thread about the mounting indications that China is pressing forward with its preparations for an attack on what it calls its “breakaway province” of Taiwan, our friend and ally. For clarity I’ll refer to mainland, communist China as the PRC (People’s Republic of China), and Taiwan, an island governed by the ROC (Republic of China) since the communist takeover of the mainland in 1949, simply as Taiwan.

One commenter suggested that we simply declare an intent to respond to an attack on Taiwan with nuclear war on the PRC. One should usually not issue unbelievable threats, and it’s a good question whether even the fate of Taiwan would justify starting a global nuclear war, to the American public or to any U.S. president.

After setting that explosive idea gently back into its box, there remains the question of what less horrific responses there might be, to a major PRC attack on Taiwan. Other suggestions on that particular thread, short of committing civilizational suicide through the first large-scale use of nuclear weapons, included destruction of the PRC’s Three Gorges Dam, or global submarine warfare on PRC shipping. Such ideas are popular among internet warriors, amateur historians, wargamers, and junior officers who would never have authority for such a decision or be held accountable for the consequences. 

The PRC doesn’t like to admit it, but they are well aware of their inferiority to America in nuclear weapons (simply put: 500 vs. 5,000) and they are uncertain about how their conventional military, with no combat experience since 1979, would perform against American or Taiwanese or other modern first-rate forces in an offensive war. One sign of the PRC’s concerns is the substantial “unrestricted warfare” capability it has developed and (thanks to Joe Biden) deployed onto our soil and elsewhere around the world. They cannot be eager to test any of that in a general war with America, which is not in their interest or our own. An ancient Chinese proverb says that when two tigers fight, one dies and the other is crippled; and that was long before nuclear weapons were invented. The PRC is intentionally ambiguous about where its own "red line" is drawn, but it's a reasonable bet that total economic collapse from a cutoff of their imported oil, and/or tens or hundreds of millions of civilian deaths (Google “Three Gorges Dam”) might be on the bad side of that line. Let’s not find out.

These uncertainties, together with economic and political factors I am not even touching upon, discourage major PRC military action against Taiwan. I suspect their favored options are all limited war scenarios (of limited means and limited aims, as Clausewitz put it), similar to Russia’s in Ukraine, that minimize the risk of a larger and possibly nuclear war. The key to this might be for the scenario to offer a favorable outcome to the PRC, but not an existential defeat (i.e., conquest and subjugation) to Taiwan. 

One of Clausewitz's most memorable formulations, equally important for both sides in any real or potential war, was this: "The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive." 

There is, however, another option that is too often ignored: a PRC maritime blockade (an act of war under international law) against Taiwan, without an invasion. PRC forces have been rehearsing this for well over a year. A blockade could be conducted with varying intensity, for instance with or without the use of mines, or attacks on Taiwanese bases, facilities and forces. Most analysts measure Taiwan’s resilience in the face of a full shutdown of maritime commerce in terms of weeks only. Such action if successful might achieve the PRC's goals more quickly and with lower cost and less risk than any invasion scenario. How might Taiwan, America and its allies respond, and what would be the impacts on the global economy and trade? And how could the looming conflict in Iran or the ongoing war in Ukraine affect those choices? Stay tuned. These are interesting times.