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Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Friday I spoke to the incoming class of students in SAIS’s mid-career Master of Aarts in Global Policy program (MAGP). I stuck fairly close to these speaking notes:

• It is a pleasure to be here at the MAGP program. Director Sinisa Vukovic is an esteemed and ever more accomplished colleague.
• He framed this talk as Afghanistan, the past; Ukraine, the present; Taiwan, the future.
• These are three big conflict challenges that lie respectively in the past, present, and future.
• We should certainly think hard and try to draw lessons from Afghanistan and Ukraine to apply to Taiwan.
• But that is a non-trivial exercise, because the circumstances of the three theaters of war are distinct.

Afghanistan

• Let me start with Afghanistan. A civil war wracked this weak Central Asian state in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2001.
• Belatedly, the US realized it couldn’t get out of Afghanistan without doing more than chasing down Al Qaeda, not least because it failed at that task.
• That made Kabul the recipient of a massive multi-lateral post-war effort to rebuild governance along democratic lines.
• While the invasion succeeded dramatically and quickly, the state-building was arduous and ultimately failed. The Americans decided Afghanistan wasn’t worth wasting further resources, after more than 20 years of wasting resources.
• Now a distinctly anti-democratic group of Islamist militants has returned to govern Afghanistan. Hard to imagine that will work out well, but my sense is America is glad to be out and gone.

Ukraine

• Ukraine is different. It is a weak European state that suffered an unjust act of aggression on the part of a neighbor seeking to eliminate its sovereignty and independence. The United States is a key supporting actor in Ukraine, but not a belligerent.
• Ukraine is however a proxy for the West, especially NATO, which doesn’t want to risk war with a nuclear power.
• Russia is risking resources. That includes not only its political prestige but also its economic livelihood, military strength, and multiethnic social cohesion.
• For Ukraine is classic Tilly. The war is making the state while the state makes war.

Taiwan

• Taiwan is again distinct. It is a state that doesn’t claim independence but is sovereign over a clearly defined territory and population that the Taiwanese state governs democratically and effectively.
• The international community, including the US, generally recognizes China’s claimi to Taiwan, even if most of the world opposes enforcing that claim by military action.
• But the population of Taiwan isn’t keen on reunification. Who would want to suffer Hong Kong’s fate? Or Ukraine’s?
• Steering between those perils will require not only the Taiwanese but also the Americans to muster their full reserves of statecraft.

Lesssons

• Let me try, with these distinctions in mind, to suggest a few lessons from Afghanistan and Ukraine that we might want to apply in Taiwan.
• First is that there is no need to even begin to think about building a state on Taiwan. The Taiwanese have done it for themselves. Taiwan is a high-functioning, democratic state.
• The state-building challenge and lack of social cohesion that undermined the US effort in Afghanistan will have no parallel in Taiwan.
• Taiwanese are diverse in ethnic origins and political views (including on independence). But they will unite politically in resisting an invasion once it is launched.

The big challenge is military

• The bigger challenge is military . Taiwan is a densely populated island with a population of under 24 million. China is a country of 1.4 billion, 60 times larger. The Chinese army, economy, and financial capacity far exceed Taiwan’s, even if per capita income in Taiwan is much higher.
• Taiwan is more disadvantaged relative to China than Ukraine was compared to Russia, whose forces have proven inept and ill-equipped.
• The Chinese are not. Few knowledgeable people think that if Beijing throws all its resources into the fight that Taiwan can win, even with US support.
• That is precisely what most analysts thought about Ukraine. They were wrong. Ukraine has proven capable of responding effectively to Russian aggression, though Kiev is still far from anything that can be called victory.
• Taiwanese will likewise resist any occupation, with devastating longer-term effects on China. Think for example of what the Taliban did to the Americans.

The Chinese know all this

• The Chinese of course know this. They also know that Taiwan is an important source of Foreign Direct Investment in China. Ignoring Hong Kong, which today cannot be considered “foreign,” Taiwan alone accounts for about 8% of Chinese FDI. Countries likely to cut off investment if China invades Taiwan like the U.S., Japan, South Korea, and EU members constitute most of the rest.
• China is heavily dependent on Taiwanese exports of advanced computer chips. While some in Beijing might hope to take over that production, an invasion and subsequent sabotage will leave chip factories a shambles.

Prevention

• The key lesson from Ukraine for Taiwan should be just this: an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.
• The problem is that we don’t know what would prevent war.
• The Ukraine experience suggests arming Taipei to resist an invasion in advance, which was not done for Kiev, is important. This will require what the Americans call a “porcupine strategy” of asymmetric defense.
• Taiwan will count on anti-ship missiles, anti-tank munitions and air defense weapons to blunt the force of a Chinese invasion.
• The Americans need to take care in arming Taiwan not to precipitate pre-emptive Chinese aggression.
• Fortunately, what Taiwan needs most is not the high-tech armaments that arouse Chinese public ire, but more mundane anti-access/area denial weapons.

Preventive intelligence and credibility

• Another suggestion from Ukraine is the importance of preventive diplomacy and anticipatory intelligence.
• The Americans repeatedly revealed Russia’s plans to portray the invasion as a response to Ukrainian atrocities against Russian speakers. This blunted Moscow’s information campaign.
• The problem with this tactic is that China won’t care much how the international community reacts if it decides to invade. And it will be difficult to muster the kind of regional response NATO offered to Russian aggression against Ukraine.
• Both South Korea and Japan will not want to see a Chinese invasion of Taiwan succeed.
• But their capacity to respond is limited. South Korea’s defense is focused mainly on the North. Japan’s is self-restrained, though less so than in the past.
• President Biden has however made it clear the U.S. will come to the defense of Taiwan, even if the White House “walks back” his commitment every time he utters it.
• That commitment is vital if conflict to avoid conflict. The Chinese will hesitate to attack Taiwan so long as they perceive the American commitment to its defense is credible.

It’s about China too

• More than that is needed. China’s claim to Taiwan is not only about sovereignty over territory.
• Taiwan represents, as Hong Kong did before 2020, a successful democratic experiment in a more or less Chinese political context.
• What Xi Jinping fears is that example. Why, a Chinese citizen might ask, can Taiwan be a prosperous multi-party state but China has to remain, even though capitalist in all but name, a one-party autocracy?
• This is comparable to President Putin’s fear about Ukraine. Why, a Russian citizen might ask, must Russia remain an autocracy if Ukraine can be democratic and aspire to membership in the European Union?
• Dial back to Afghanistan for a moment. There the Taliban need not fear nearby democratic examples. All its neighbors are autocracies of one sort or another. The failure of its own democratic experiment will poison the regional well for at least a generation.

War?

• Here I come close to a conclusion. In the long run, the big issue in East Asia is not Taiwan but rather autocracy in China. A consolidated democratic state there would not be threatening Taiwan.
• One thing we know about war. It is unlikely between consolidated democracies and between autocracies. But it is more likely when one state is a democracy and the other an autocracy.
• China is an autocracy. Taiwan has already accomplished its democratic transition. That tells you we need a lot of good statecraft to avoid war.
• China, as Beckley and Brands have made clear in their recent book, is facing major demographic and economic challenges, even as it builds its military capacity.
• Ironically, failure of the Chinese economy could create the most immediate threat from China to the US.
• The business cycle is still in force. Capitalist economies experience recessions and even depression.
• A major economic downturn in China would undermine the Communist Party’s authority.
• It is likely to use repression at home and aggression abroad to reassert domestic political authority as the demographic implosion and economic failure worsen.
• We have already seen a comparable evolution in Russia, with consequences for all its European neighbors and for Russia’s citizens, not only for Ukraine.
• The recent Congressional visits to Taiwan and President’s Biden repeatedly stated commitment to its defense, despite National Security Council objections, have sent the right political and military.
• The announcement of trade talks with Taiwan deepens the commitment.

Washington’s challenges

• Now the challenge for Washington is to back up these commitments with hard facts: weapons and strategy that can enable Taiwan to repel or at least hinder a Chinese invasion, continuing political exchanges, intelligence sharing to avoid any surprises, increased bilateral trade and investment, and a far more extensive Taiwanese official and cultural presence in the US as well as US presence in Taiwan.
• We’ll need to sustain the effort over a decade or more, which isn’t easy because of polarization in the US.
• The aim should be to avoid a major conflagration over Taiwan while China traverses what Brands and Beckley term the “danger zone,” essentially the next decade.
• Beyond that, we can hope the geopolitical challenge will become more manageable, but hope is not a policy.
• The US needs to conserve its power, as it did during the Cold War, and prepare for a geopolitical competition that could last decades more.