Is the United States ready for an invasion of Taiwan?

Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Timetable

Maintaining its global dominance appears to have pushed the West to become more involved in the Ukrainian conflict, as former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently demonstrated. argue in a chronicle that a Russian victory would constitute a turning point in history, the moment when the West would finally lose its post-war hegemony. Such a decisive outcome, however, seems doubtful, given the attritional nature of the war in Ukraine and the gradually gets worse Western involvement in the conflict.

The decisive moment that officially ends the era of Western pre-eminence will likely be a surprise Chinese aggression aimed at subjugating Taiwan.

As wars in Ukraine and the Middle East test U.S.-led alliances and America already seeks to too extensiveChinese aggression against Taiwan may come sooner than many American policy circles think.

There are worrying signs that Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare your country for a war against Taiwan. But whether the United States is prepared to respond to such an eventuality is becoming a thorny question, especially as the international community grows increasingly concerned that Xi may consider U.S. concerns about conflict extended in Europe and the Middle East as a window of opportunity to act, without triggering a real reaction. -a full-scale war with the United States

The defense of Taiwan is of greater importance to international security for two other reasons. The first is the possibility that Xi may seek to replicate in the Taiwan Strait the techniques of incremental expansionism that his regime successfully perfected in the South China Sea without eliciting a concerted response from the United States.

It is telling that three successive US administrations have failed to credibly push back against China's growing expansionism in the South China Sea. count instead on rhetoric or symbolic actions. As a result, the American debate now focuses largely on how the South China Sea was actually lost and what can be done now to meet China's growing demands. aggressive maritime tactics aiming to tighten its grip on this strategic corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

These tactics spark a number of incidents with other claimant states, including the Philippines and Vietnam, even as China seeks to interfere with US and allied air and sea transits.

China's recent threatening military exercises surrounded Taiwan It seemed like a rehearsal to put in place at least one blockade with the aim of slowly strangling island democracy. In fact, it was China's third dress rehearsal in less than two years for an attack on Taiwan.

Compared to the first large-scale Chinese military exercise in August 2022, during then-Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taipei, the latest exercises were more sophisticated, more elaborate, and more geographically extensive.

The second reason is the United States' inability to truly turn its attention to Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific, despite US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's assertions that this region is our region . priority theater operations and heart of American grand strategy.

One just released book, Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power, by two former US policymakers, Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine, laments that the strategy of pivoting from the Americas to Asia (first revealed in 2011) has failed so far because a coherent approach to the Indo-Pacific remains largely absent. As a result, the United States was unable to adequately respond to China's aggressive rise, which the authors call one of the greatest mistakes of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy. .

The fact is that as long as conflicts elsewhere distract the United States from pressing security challenges in Asia, the Indo-Pacific is unlikely to become the center of its grand strategy.

The latest US foreign aid package, which provides $60.8 billion for Ukraine and a meager $8.1 billion for security in the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan, has dimmed the outlook for 'a correction of skewed strategic priorities. In fact, US President Joe Biden recently plunged the United States Deeper in the war in Ukraine by allowing kyiv to use US-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia.

More fundamentally, the drawn-out war in Ukraine undermines U.S. policy toward China and weakens its deterrence posture in the Indo-Pacific, making a Taiwan Strait crisis more likely.

In order to prevent the United States from carrying out its worst geopolitical nightmarea formal Sino-Russian alliance, and to deter China from directly aiding the Kremlin war machine, Biden was forced to take a more conciliatory approach towards Beijing.

This approach, in turn, encourages China towards Taiwan. While intensifying coercive pressure on Taiwan, Beijing is clarifying its ultimate goal. Xi recently declared that the essence of his campaign for national renewal is the unification of the homeland. And his new Minister of Defense, Dong Jun, accusing the United States with malicious intentions [that] who are dragging Taiwan into the dangers of war, declared at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that “anyone who dares to separate Taiwan from China will be reduced to pieces and will court their own destruction.”

Yet some in the West insist that the United States must first rout Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield before deterring China. As if Xi would wait to act against Taiwan until the United States has humiliated Russia in Ukraine in a long war and then turns to China. In fact, the last thing Xi wants to end the war in Ukraine because it would leave the United States free to turn to Asia.

Make no mistake: As China's growing shadow belligerently darkens Taiwan's gates, the risks of failing to deter Chinese aggression against the self-governing island increase. Therefore, calls are increasing In the United States, Washington must demonstrate strategic clarity regarding the defense of Taiwan by abandoning its outdated policy of strategic ambiguity, formulated when China was still backward and incapable of annexing Taiwan.

The United States' increased involvement in the war in Ukraine at a time when it appears ill-prepared for armed conflict over Taiwan is a strategic mistake that could end up haunting its long-term security.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asias New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).