Taiwan is a problem. It is a problem for China, and that makes it a problem for the United States and for what used to be called “the Free World.” There are two reasons for this. The first is geopolitical; the second is technological, economic, and strategic.
The latter concern arises from the fact that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) currently holds a monopoly on the production of the cutting-edge semiconductors necessary for supercomputers and Artificial Intelligence applications. For the time being, he who controls the fabrication plants on the island of Formosa controls computing’s future, and it is fair to say that he who controls the future of computing controls the future of the globe. TSMC’s monopoly is a situation that the United States should not have allowed to develop, and it is a temporary condition. For the government on the Chinese mainland is putting vast resources into catching up with Taiwan in this particular, and if the United States does not develop an industrial policy aimed at the same end, no one will be at fault for the fate meted out to us other than those who govern us. For a while, however, both China and the United States and her allies will be dependent on Taiwan, and that really is a problem given the first reason for concern: Taiwan’s geopolitical situation.
Located roughly one hundred miles off the Chinese coast, Taiwan belongs to what is called the First Island Chain. As such, it sits astride two of the channels that serve as entrances to and exits from the seas that Nicholas Spykman once dubbed “the Asiatic Mediterranean.” It was this region and the mainland opposite that late Imperial Japan attempted to turn into what it euphemistically called “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
For ancient China, the island of Formosa mattered not at all. The evidence from the Warring States Period suggests that the peoples on the Chinese mainland at that time were blissfully unaware of the existence of the island chain offshore. For the most part, thereafter, Taiwan remained of no geopolitical importance for China. Except for one brief period in the sixteenth century, Imperial China was a land power that focused its attention northward, westward, and southward but not eastward toward the sea. Even in the time of Mao, naval affairs were considered secondary. The presence of Chiang Kai-shek and the remainder of the Kuomintang on Formosa was an irritant but not much more.
All of this changed with the ascent of Deng Xiaopeng—when China set out to become a modern commercial power; abandoned, in considerable measure, the communist economic model; and began exporting goods by sea on an ever-expanding scale. Of course, even today Chinese defense intellectuals display a Mackinderite bias. After all, the Belt and Road Initiative has as its principal focus overland transport by railroad, and it is easy for those situated in Beijing to suppose that he who controls Mackinder’s Eurasian heartland controls the world. But Spykmann with his Rimland Thesis had a point, and Chinese defense intellectuals know that railroads alone cannot do the job. Sea transport is much, much cheaper—and the tonnage that railroads can carry cannot compare with what can be and is transported by sea.
None of this would much matter if China were a status-quo commercial power intent solely on joining and profiting from the rules-based international order. That is not, however, the case—for contemporary China’s principal aims are political, not economic. In this regard, it more nearly resembles Louis XIV’s France, the German Kaiserreich, the Third Reich, and late Imperial Japan than it does contemporary Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Its aim is to create something very much like Japan’s short-lived Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. What today’s Chinese ruling order wants is a variant of what its predecessors always wanted: dominion—tribute and trade; and the goal is to extend this “co-prosperity sphere” well beyond the Pacific Rim. It is this aim that constitutes Xi Jinping’s “China Dream.” What is “a win” for the Middle Kingdom is, Chinese diplomats repeatedly say, “a win” for everyone.
But imperial dominion the Chinese cannot achieve without becoming the dominant power at sea; and, until and unless the western Pacific becomes a Chinese lake––with Chinese control of the entrances and exits to the various seas off their coast so that their navy has easy and secure access to the world’s oceans––this cannot be done. China’s recovery of Taiwan would, as Xi Jinping and his advisors are well aware, contribute mightily to this end. So, until and unless there is a change in the regime and the attendant regime imperatives driving China, Taiwan’s centrality will be a permanent feature in the geopolitical landscape.
The stakes for the United States and for like-minded countries all over the world are high—for if they lose the leverage over China that their position athwart the exits from the pertinent seas affords them, they might well become China’s satellites. The sheer size of the China market, the capital that the Chinese have to invest, and China’s ruthless exploitation of its economic leverage makes this a plausible prospect.
But the fact that Taiwan’s independence is vital for American strategic interests does not mean that Taiwan can be defended. From 1948 until the last few years, the United States had the requisite means. China’s navy was not a threat, and the Chinese could neither mount a successful invasion of Formosa nor impose a blockade. All of that has changed or is about to change. The Chinese navy is now formidable, and it will grow more formidable with time; and the Chinese have invested a great deal of money in missile technology. They now have the capacity to destroy in short order with a missile strike every base that the United States has in the region, and the odds are good that they can also take out in a similar fashion all of the surface vessels we have in the western Pacific.
Of course, it is by no means clear that an invasion would be successful. Amphibious landings are notoriously difficult to pull off; the Taiwanese army is well-trained and well-armed; and the Taiwanese appear to be willing to fight. Xi’s crackdown in Hong Kong has had a sobering effect. A blockade, however, would be possible, and without imports Taiwan cannot feed itself. Whether a challenge to such a blockade would be effective is unclear.
What might work as a counter to China’s military superiority in this theater would be a world-wide embargo on Chinese trade. If the United States, its allies in the Indo-Pacific, the European Union, and the third-world countries under the influence of the nations in this coalition were to make it clear to China that commercial ruin would be the price exacted if they were to use military force to seize or blockade Taiwan, and if this were backed up by a credible threat that they would also institute a blockade on Chinese trade, that might be enough. Putting together such a coalition would, however, require statesmanship of the first rank on the part of the United States, but I cannot imagine the current administration summoning the energy and resolve to even make an attempt. It is telling that there is no one in a cabinet or sub-cabinet post today with a deep knowledge of East Asia. Personnel is policy.
Even, however, if such a counter were to be deployed, there would be this to ponder. Deng Xiaopeng was, like Josef Stalin, a cautious man—alert to what could go wrong and willing to wait. “Hide your strength,” he told those around him, “and bide your time.” Xi Jinping does not appear to be a patient man. He may, in fact, be like Adolf Hitler and Nikita Khrushchev—high-stakes gamblers, both. Taiwan really is a problem, and we may look back on the administrations of George H. W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama the way that Winston Churchill in 1938 looked back at the British administrations led by Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. “Improvident stewardship” is the Churchillian phrase that comes to mind.
