There should be no war over Taiwan

After a week of consultations and briefings in Taiwan with a team from Brookings Institution — our visit was sandwiched between those by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in time, and by Chinese missiles, airplanes and warships in space — I came back to the United States convinced more than ever that there really should be no war over Taiwan — not soon, not in a few years, not ever.

Of course, war is always bad and should be avoided when possible. But I am trying to say more than that. Specifically, none of the three governments that could begin a war over Taiwan — those in Washington, Beijing and Taipei — should see war as in its interest. To do so would be to make an even worse mistake than Russian President Vladimir Putin’s when he chose to attack Ukraine in February in the apparent belief that he could achieve a quick and relatively easy win.  This is true today and will remain so for the foreseeable future — though the United States and Taiwan should take steps to improve the odds that Chinese President Xi Jinping will see war as highly undesirable, if he does not see it that way already.

As I attempted to show in a paper released by Brookings during our Taiwan trip, it is unrealistic, if not impossible, to predict which side would win any conflict over Taiwan. That would be true even if the war were to remain limited in geography and scale. For example, China could lose most of its submarine fleet, in some scenarios, and see any blockade defeated, according to certain plausible assumptions about how well our anti-submarine warfare platforms might function as they searched for those submarines. But there is no guarantee of that outcome, either. If the submarines were particularly hard for us to find — especially likely if China can successfully attack air bases on Okinawa and ships we might use to create convoys east of Taiwan, a possibility that cannot be dismissed — we could lose much of our surface Navy and fail to end the strangulation of Taiwan by China’s submarine force. Either of these outcomes is plausible, and in my view, impossible to dismiss in advance. 

Most likely, the war would not remain limited. Neither Beijing nor Washington would accept defeat in a limited engagement. Instead, the conflict probably would expand horizontally to other regions and vertically, perhaps even to include nuclear weapons threats — or their actual use. It literally could become the worst catastrophe in the history of warfare.

Even if a war were somehow to be “winnable” — perhaps because Taiwan’s political leadership were arrested or killed and a successor regime chose to surrender rather than fight, or because the United States somehow chose to sit the war out and China rapidly prevailed — the economic consequences would be enormous. For all the talk of “decoupling” China’s economic relationship with the West, that is not really happening. Rather, some investments in areas such as high technology that might have been envisioned for China some years ago are instead being directed elsewhere, to safer harbors. But most existing trade patterns are being sustained, even in the face of America’s tariffs dating to the Trump administration. 

By contrast, if China attacks Taiwan, everything will likely change. America surely would find it unacceptable to maintain most existing economic relationships with China. Current investments and trade patterns would be wound down over the months and years to come — to the extreme detriment of both sides (especially China, and especially if most of our allies made the same policy changes, since there is nowhere else besides the Western world where China can find 1 billion wealthy consumers looking to purchase its goods).

More specifically, this is why it would be a huge mistake for each party to blunder into war:

• For Taiwan, any belief that the United States could rescue it from the jaws of an angered China would fail to appreciate the above military realities. China has the second-best military in the world and geography gives it a home-field advantage in any war over and near Taiwan. None of the weapons systems or other innovations that the Pentagon is considering today will change the basic reality that, in an era of precision-strike modern weaponry, Taiwan will be extremely hard for us to defend — even with allies and even in the best of circumstances. If Taiwan’s leaders do not understand this, they need more military briefings. Fortunately, I believe President Tsia Ing-wen does get it and will avoid the kinds of escalatory steps (such as declaring independence) that could make war likely.

• For the United States, any belief that U.S.-China war is virtually inevitable due to the “Thucydides’ Trap” (what often happens historically when a rising power meets an established superpower) is deterministic, fatalistic and foolish. Yet there are quarters of the American strategic community that hold this view. We must appreciate that, while America should not abandon its democratic friend in Taiwan, the issue of Taiwan’s future is a particularly sensitive one for not just China’s Communist Party but most of its people — akin to how we might feel if Alaska or Hawaii were to seek independence. Nor should we become so enthralled with any new defense strategy, whether of Jim Mattis or Lloyd Austin or anyone else, that we believe it somehow can restore the kind of reliable war-winning capabilities we once wielded against China in the western Pacific. The world will always be more complicated going forward.

• For the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi, deciding that Taiwan must be brought into the “motherland” by some specific date or during the tenure of the current president would be a mistake of colossal proportions given all of China’s other ambitions and needs. There is a good chance that World War III would result. This goal is simply not worth it, especially when there is considerable hope that someday — even if probably well after Xi’s rule — Taiwan and China could agree to form some kind of loose confederation.

In short, however unsatisfying, the status quo — China claiming and wanting reunification with Taiwan but not achieving it anytime soon, Taiwan wanting autonomy and self-governance but forgoing independence, and America wanting peace in the region and self-determination for Taiwan but needing to maintain vigilance indefinitely to achieve those outcomes — is much better than rolling the dice on war to try to settle the issue.

Still, there is work to do. For the United States and Taiwan, two steps in particular are crucial.  First, we need to improve our respective military modernization programs to further complicate China’s chances of a successful attack on Taiwan. That means, among other things, more tools for Taiwan to carry out a “porcupine defense” of the island (with lots of mobile anti-ship missiles, rapidly-deployable shallow-water minefields, Stingers and Javelins and other such short-range missiles, and hardened communications networks); more survivable weaponry for the United States in the western Pacific that does not require big fixed airfields or aircraft carriers to launch sensors and weapons; and better preparation for the consequences of what could be a long economic war against China (by reducing our dependencies on China to some reasonable extent).

But second, we also need to stop demonizing China, even as we do push back against its repressions of internal minorities or dissidents and its assertive behavior abroad. Among other things, that means avoiding accusations that China is committing “genocide” against the Uyghurs (a loaded term if ever there was one) and recognizing the great accomplishments it has made in recent decades in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, in China and beyond.

There will not be an easy answer to the challenge of China’s rise, and its consequences will be with us for all of our lifetimes. The goal must be, first and foremost, avoiding war so that those lifetimes can run their natural course rather than being risked in hegemonic conflict.

Michael O’Hanlon is the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and the author of several books, including “The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint,” “Defense 101: Understanding the Military of Today and Tomorrow,” and the forthcoming “Military History for the Modern Strategist.” Follow him on Twitter @MichaelEOHanlon.