Sensemaker: World War Four?

• Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble! party lost its parliamentary majority as anti-Macron alliances ate into it from the left and right (more below).
• British unions threatened months of industrial action in addition to the rail strikes planned for Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday this week.
• Swimming’s world governing body voted to ban trans women from elite women’s competition if they have been through any part of male puberty. 

The war in Ukraine makes another one over Taiwan more likely, not less. That is the message of Chinese diplomacy and rhetoric since February. It’s also the inference the US security establishment has drawn, and it conjures the scenario of an overstretched Pentagon trying simultaneously to support two democratic Davids under attack by totalitarian Goliaths at opposite ends of Asia. 

What’s at stake is how the world is run. Can nationalist Russia and communist China, bound together in a new “no limits” partnership, crush their neighbours and redraw the map at will? Or can a revived cold war alliance of democracies deter them? 

The US has a formidable military presence in the western Pacific but the framework for deterrence in Taiwan is not robust. As a former director of China policy at the Pentagon has noted: 

• There is no Nato in Asia.

• The US does not recognise Taiwan as a country.
• Nor does it have any formal military commitments to Taipei.

“Washington has few good options there and a great many bad ones that could court calamity,” Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Caitlin Talmadge write in next month’s Foreign Affairs, and it’s hard to disagree.

The rhetoric

• 15 June: Xi Jinping signed a directive allowing the “non-war” use of China’s military, sparking concern that Beijing was writing the small print for a non-war war in Taiwan like Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
• 13 June: China’s foreign minister declared that the Taiwan Strait does not count as “international waters” and claimed China “has sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction” there. He said countries (like the US) that deem the strait international waters were “threatening China’s sovereignty and security”.
• 12 June: Wei Fenghe, China’s defence minister, said Beijing would “resolutely smash any schemes for Taiwan independence”, and that China would “not flinch from the cost, and will fight to the very end” to pursue its claim over the island. 
• Last month: China sent 30 warplanes into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone, the largest such incursion since January. 

The diplomacy

• Western hopes that Xi might restrain Putin over Ukraine fizzled with their new pact, signed in February on the eve of the Winter Olympics.
• Similar hopes that Xi might look at western sanctions over Ukraine and Russia’s military quagmire there and scale back his threats to Taiwan also look premature (see above).  

Why now?

• Xi is choreographing his own installation as president for an unprecedented third term later this year. He believes a maximalist approach to what the Chinese Communist Party calls reunification boosts his case. 
• To that end, he’s spent years raising the tempo of naval and aerospace operations around Taiwan.
• Last month President Biden responded by tearing up the lexicon of “strategic ambiguity” that has guided US language on Taiwan for four decades, saying explicitly the United States would respond “militarily” if Taiwan needed to defend itself against Chinese attack.

The sit-rep. Six weeks ago CIA director Bill Burns said China’s leaders were “trying to look carefully about the lessons they should draw from Ukraine about their own ambitions in Taiwan”. Since then key voices have sounded more alarmed:  

• Avril Haines, US director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services committee the threat posed by China to Taiwan between now and 2030 was “acute”: “It’s our view that [China is] working hard to effectively put themselves into a position in which their military is capable of taking Taiwan over our intervention.” 
• Michael Tsai, a former Taiwanese defence minister, told the NYT last week: “We cannot wait; we are competing with time. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine happened in an instant – who knows when the PLA might choose to invade Taiwan.”
• Philip Davidson, a former admiral who commanded the US Indo-Pacific Command until last year, has highlighted 2027 – the centenary of the People’s Liberation Army – as a key deadline for China.  

Is Taiwan ready? No. It has some Patriot anti-missile defences and a fleet of F-16 fighter jets but its military is underpowered, mostly in terms of personnel. By one assessment, as of 2020, all its frontline military units were understaffed, with effective manpower of between 60 and 80 per cent. 

The US has urged Taiwan to forget about buying big, advanced military systems and to focus instead on manpower, training and arming itself for asymmetric warfare of the sort that the Ukrainians have excelled at in their fight against Russia. Hence the State Department’s recent rejection of Taipei’s request for the costly MH-06R Seahawk helicopter.

The idea is that Taiwan should instead stock up on anti-ship missiles, sea mines and other more agile equipment with the aim of making itself a “porcupine” – a spiky, difficult target.

And China? Not quite yet. The PLA has the largest navy in the world. According to a paper for the Atlantic Council China still “lacks the military capability and capacity to launch a full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan for the foreseeable future”. But it is building capacity: China now has three aircraft carriers to match the three (of a total of 11) that the US has on patrol in the Pacific. Its third, a high-tech, homemade ship unveiled last week, is named Fujian, after the mainland province closest to Taiwan.