Could Taiwan become the "Asian Ukraine"?
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Editor's Note:
David A. Andelman, CNN contributor and two-time winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a Knight of the French Legion of Honor, author of "A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen" and has a blog at Andelman Unleashed.
He was previously a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia.
The opinions expressed in this comment belong solely to its author.
(CNN) --
Taiwan is not Ukraine.
China, especially in that part of the world, is not Russia.
Yet with his offhand remarks that the United States will come directly to Taiwan's rescue if Beijing decides to take the self-governing island by force, President Joe Biden has awakened China's worst nightmare.
It looks like a simple thing: There will be no easy or peaceful accession of Taiwan to the mainland anytime soon, if at all.
As China has come to recognize, the United States is determined to resist or at least curb China's ambitious expansion into the seas and around the islands off its coast.
The goal is to make clear to China the price it could pay for any attack on Taiwan or any US ally in the region.
All of this only raises the stakes for China and raises the diplomatic and military temperature throughout the region.
There is no doubt that the United States is focused on establishing military ties with other nations in the region that can be worthy allies if the worst happens.
When Biden met with Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio in Tokyo on Monday, the leaders' joint statement noted that "their basic positions on Taiwan remain unchanged, and they reiterated the importance of cross-strait peace and stability." of Taiwan as an indispensable element for security and prosperity in the international community. They encouraged the peaceful resolution of the issues related to the strait".
Japan has been quietly developing the capacity to be a worthy partner of such interests.
Last month, the country's ruling party proposed doubling Japan's defense budget from 1% to 2% of gross domestic product, the same level NATO requires of its members.
There is also the Quad.
Biden's meetings with the leaders of the major Asian powers, South Korea, India, Australia and Japan, are designed to demonstrate that the United States has the backing it needs to confront and curb an aggressive China whose actions may backfire. of other regional interests in the strategically vital waterways that surround the Asian continent.
ANALYSIS |
China is under alert by the Quad strategic security group, but its warnings only strengthen it
At least for the moment, Taiwan is the most contentious point.
"All Quad members share an interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait," Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, told reporters at a White House briefing ahead of Biden's trip.
The president, he observed, "he doesn't want to see unilateral changes to the status quo and we certainly don't want to see military aggression."
All this said, it is not at all sensible, or even prudent, to provoke China or to show off the power of the United States in the region.
That could be eminently counterproductive.
To show its resolve, China this week announced a series of air and sea drills in the South China Sea to coincide with Biden's visit.
And China has begun to directly warn the United States.
His top diplomat, Politburo member Yang Jiechi, called Sullivan last week to say, as China's state news agency Xinhua reported, "if the US insists on playing the 'Taiwan card' and goes every time further down the wrong path, it will surely lead to a dangerous situation."
Beijing's biggest concern, and what could ignite a new round of Chinese preparation, is its perpetual paranoia combined with inordinate ambition to be considered a great power, especially in its own backyard.
This largely explains China's construction of outposts on at least 20 islands in the Paracels and seven more in the Spratlys, many of them fully militarized with airfields and missile launch facilities.
At the same time, China's military has previously deployed a vast arsenal of thousands of short- and medium-range cruise and ballistic missiles off its own coast, many of them aimed at Taiwan, while dramatically increasing the number of military aircraft. who fly daily around and within the immediate airspace of Taiwan.
Between September 2020 and August 2021, China's air force conducted 554 intrusions into Taiwan's air defense zone, according to the Small Wars Journal.
China also has the world's largest armed coast guard, most regularly deployed in these waters, according to a Pentagon report.
From a defensive point of view, Taiwan is not prepared for a full-scale amphibious invasion by air and sea.
It apparently has a standing army of 188,000, and many of its troops are too poorly trained to sustain a determined assault, especially since China has the largest active military force in the world, more than 2 million against China. the 1.4 million in the United States, according to the International Center for Strategic Studies.
Also, unlike US forces, which are widely dispersed, virtually all of China's military is deployed in and around its mainland.
What happens between China and Taiwan?
Everything you need to know about the dispute
That said, a confrontation over Taiwan, or especially a Chinese invasion, would leave the island and the United States worse off than Ukraine, where long land borders allow regular shipping of materiel by NATO forces.
Furthermore, unlike Russia, China has been practicing and preparing for such an attack on Taiwan for more than 72 years, ever since Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army drove Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces from the mainland to Taiwan. exile in Taiwan.
Beijing's "grey zone" tactics are designed every day to make it clear to the people of Taiwan that they are in danger.
They have even practiced sending huge sand dredges to Taiwan's outlying islands in an effort to pulverize their will to resist.
Also, Taiwan is an island, so resupply would only be done by air or by sea, both of which are potentially very vulnerable to Chinese air and naval assets.
That said, China acknowledges that it has weaknesses.
It still does not have a nuclear arsenal remotely comparable to that of the United States or Russia: just 350 nuclear warheads compared to 5,500 in the United States, according to the 2021 Yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
However, the Pentagon estimates that China has set out to triple that arsenal.
Comments like Biden's certainly provide ammunition for China's leadership watchers to push for a rapid expansion of its deployable nuclear weapons.
ANALYSIS |
Top US general warns about China's Army.
This is the context according to an expert
The last thing needed now is an obvious reason to push China in this kind of direction.
China has been spending years and billions of dollars on its New Silk Road Initiative, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, trying to earn the kind of respect it so desperately wants, and it would be destroyed in an instant by an invasion. Taiwan Navy.
At the same time, Biden and Sullivan, after excluding China from their Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity talks this week, were right to leave Taiwan out as well.
China has for years understood the position of a succession of US administrations on how it should deal with Taiwan militarily.
There is no reason to rub things in China's face again.
Joe BidenTaiwan