“Complete national unification,” Chinese Premier Xi Jinping proclaimed at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, “is an inevitable requirement for realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The Chinese Communist Party is fond of speaking in euphemism, and, in this case, by “unification,” Xi meant subjugation of Taiwan; by “inevitable,” he meant forcible; and by “the Chinese nation,” he meant Chinese people he would coercively place under his control.
Through his speeches and provocative military sallies in the Taiwan Strait, a 110-mile nautical barrier separating the two countries, Xi has made no secret of his desire to at long last subdue Taiwan, an island nation of 23 million people that over the last eight decades has forged a remarkably free, open, and prosperous society. This genuine made-in-China success, by its shining example, presents a grave threat to the CCP’s risible insistence that Chinese people can only be governed by a rigid and autocratic communist regime, much as Ukraine and Israel give the lie, respectively, to Russian and Iranian claims that only brutal authoritarianism can thrive regionally. The more Taiwan flourishes, the stronger Xi’s desire to “unify” China by subsuming the island and eradicating any trace of liberal Chinese democracy.
Whether and how Taiwan can resist the coming onslaught, and how regional and global allies can come to its assistance, has for many years consumed Matt Pottinger, the former deputy national security adviser and China hand at the Hoover Institution and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. And in The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, a sobering series of essays Pottinger compiled and edited, a series of Taiwan and China experts convincingly delineate the steps that Taiwan and its friends must take to deter Xi’s ambitions and to thwart the invasion those aspirations augur.
In the introductory essay, Pottinger explains that soft power — economic, cultural, diplomatic — has an important role to play. But “unmistakable strength in the form of military hard power,” he insists, “is the key to persuading China to refrain from setting off a geopolitical catastrophe over Taiwan.” He invokes Kuai Tong, a statesman from the Han dynasty, who extolled the benefits of “metal ramparts and boiling moats.” Only by transforming the Taiwan Strait into such a forbidding defensive barricade can the island nation hope to survive.
To begin with, along with Gabriel Collins of Rice University and Andrew Erickson of the Naval War College, Pottinger outlines just what’s at stake, explaining why Taiwan bears such “outsize geostrategic, economic, and ideational importance.” It’s been ranked as high as eighth worldwide on a scale of democracies, ahead of all other Asian countries, as well as the United States. It dominates the development and production of semiconductors, arguably the world’s most important contemporary resource. And it stands at the crossroads of the Western Pacific, a gateway to Japan, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Its fall to Xi’s predatory regime would spell disaster in political, economic, and strategic terms; one expert predicted US GDP would drop as much as ten percent if access to Taiwan was cut off, and the authors project an “end to the U.S.-led postwar order that underpinned so much improvement in the human condition over the past 80 years.”
So what exactly should Taiwan do? George Mason’s Michael Hunzeker, Taiwanese military and diplomatic expert Enoch Wu, and Israeli strategic specialist Kobi Marom argue that it must ready itself for rapid mobilization and steel itself for a protracted war. Concretely, it must bolster its regular and reservist forces, enhance military training, massively increase its stock of munitions, and strengthen internal resolve. They urge Taiwan to emulate Israel, where national service is mandatory and extensive.
For his part, Ivan Kanapathy of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service exhorts Taiwan to more aggressively counter the People’s Liberation Army’s provocations in the Strait and in Taiwanese airspace. “Actively resisting an island grab,” he contends, “will send an unambiguous signal to the rest of the world: China is a violent revisionist power, and Taiwan is willing to fight for itself.” Along the way, the Taiwanese must respond in kind to Xi’s “gray-zone” aggression, including through defensive and offensive information warfare, augmented surveillance efforts, and careful planning for the blockade that would likely follow an invasion.
But Taiwan cannot do it alone, and its friends — America most prominently — must also prepare to come to its defense. In a chapter provocatively titled “Sink China’s Navy,” three maritime experts and Navy and Marine Corps veterans champion a strategy of “deterrence by denial,” or “getting the adversary to understand that its military strategies have little chance of success, thus discouraging it from aggression.”
China’s center of gravity in any attack on Taiwan would be its navy. Fortunately, the Center for Strategic and International Studies ran numerous simulations, and in nearly every one, the U.S. and its allies annihilated the PLA’s navy; unfortunately, they also suffered tremendous losses.
Thus, the authors urge the Pentagon to rapidly invest in submarine, bomber, and space-asset capabilities, all of which have lagged unacceptably in recent years, and to formulate rules of engagement and escalation ahead now, since time will be of the essence when Xi comes knocking. They call for an intensive two-year mobilization of troops, aircraft, and materiel that, happily, they estimate won’t add more than $15 billion to the defense budget.
Japan, too, must bolster its readiness. “A Taiwan emergency,” the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe once said, “is a Japanese emergency.” And while Tokyo currently provides critical bases and logistical support to U.S. troops, it will need to do far more to deter and, if necessary, impede a Chinese incursion. Former Vice Admiral Yoji Koda presses the Japanese defense establishment to tighten its control over critical sea lanes, open berthing facilities to service allied ships and field hospitals to treat wounded service members, and provide air-to-air refueling resources. (Other essays highlight key support roles that Australia and Europe can play as well.)
Like in many compilations, the contributions to The Boiling Moat vary in the quality of their prose and reasoning, and like many collections of strategic writing, the writers sometimes lose the reader in a forest of acronyms and other jargon.
But a single message comes through loud and clear: Neither Taiwan nor its allies are prepared for the Chinese invasion that will more likely than not materialize in the foreseeable future. By sounding a klaxon about these deficiencies, and by providing common-sense recommendations for remedying them, Pottinger and company have struck a blow for freedom and prosperity.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Reach him at michaelmrosen@yahoo.com.
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