Taiwan has enjoyed the protection of the U.S. defensive umbrella ever since the fall of Nationalist China to Mao’s Communists in 1949. Although the United States ended its mutual defense treaty with Taiwan in 1979, it has continued to deter China from invading Taiwan by selling arms to Taiwan and maintaining the specter of military intervention. Although President Biden has in the past questioned the need to confront and contain China, recent Chinese behavior has made it more difficult for any American president to remove the protective umbrella. The slow strangling of democracy in Hong Kong has eroded American hopes that Taiwan could be peacefully united with China without losing its democratic institutions, and Americans are increasingly fearful of a Chinese takeover of the Taiwanese economy, especially its semiconductor industry.
Whether the United States has the wherewithal to help Taiwan repel a Chinese attack successfully depends on the nature of the Chinese attack and whether a successful defense is defined as one that spares Taiwan from massive physical devastation. It is conceivable that China would launch an attack so indiscriminate in its destructiveness that it would leave Taiwan in smoldering ruins. Beijing might view the physical damage as an acceptable price for the seizure of Taiwan’s territory and the termination of its democratic government. But such a conquest would deprive China of access to Taiwan’s high-tech industries, assets that China’s rulers covet.
An initial Chinese attack would therefore more likely begin the concentration of China’s most powerful military asset—ballistic missiles—on Taiwan’s military assets. Chinese missiles could devastate most of Taiwan’s military assets in a matter of minutes. If Taiwan refused to capitulate after taking the initial blows, the Chinese could move ground forces to Taiwan by sea and by air.
Should the Chinese simultaneously attack American forces to inhibit an American response, their weapons could destroy or seriously damage most of the American military assets in the vicinity of Taiwan. The Chinese government, however, might refrain from striking the Americans, in the hope that the United States would acquiesce to the defeat of Taiwan in order to avoid a great-power conflict, much as it acquiesced to Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Even if the United States were not attacked, though, it might launch a counterattack with the full range of American conventional forces. No one can be certain how that conventional counterattack would play out, or whether it would escalate to nuclear war. Chances would be high, however, that Taiwan would suffer horrific damage, with highly adverse economic consequences for both China and the United States.
Admiral Philip Davidson, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, has spoken publicly of the need to increase American conventional power in the Pacific to deter Chinese attacks on Taiwan and other strategic allies. Increases in American conventional strength certainly affect China’s strategic calculus, by increasing the pain China would incur at the outset of hostilities and the amount of time the United States would have to marshal resources from elsewhere in the world. The situation is similar to that in Europe during the Cold War, when the United States did not maintain enough conventional power to ensure the failure of a conventional Soviet invasion but possessed enough to slow a Soviet advance into Western Europe. Then as now, nevertheless, nuclear power is the most compelling deterrent.
Deterrence, of course, also depends on a nation’s will to employ its capabilities. The Chinese are unlikely to attack Taiwan unless they calculate that the United States has lost the will to come to Taiwan’s defense. The only way they would reach that conclusion would be clear indications from the White House that the United States would not fight for Taiwan. Two of America’s most recent wars—the Korean War and the Gulf War—began when the United States gave indicators that it would not fight for allies. It is thus imperative that the Biden administration continue to make clear the willingness of the United States to defend Taiwan, and that it reinforces the message by continuing the robust arms sales of the previous administration.
