1). “INTERVIEW: We’re seeing WW1-scale losses in UKRAINE”, March 6, 2023, George Galloway interviews Brian Berletic, duration of video 16:41, MOATS, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e88Kq7wbv6Y >
Note: this is a youtube of an interview. There is no transcript, no text.
2). “Historian Alfred McCoy: As Tensions Rise over Taiwan, U.S. & China “Edging Ever Closer” to War”, March 10, 2023, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interviewAlfred McCoy, duration of video 17:39, Democracy Now!, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG77z_ZS2Sw >
3). Transcript for “Historian Alfred McCoy: As Tensions Rise over Taiwan, U.S. & China “Edging Ever Closer” to War”, March 10, 2023, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interview Alfred McCoy, Democracy Now!, at < https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/10/xi_jinping_china >
4). “Alfred McCoy, The True Costs of War Over Taiwan”, March 2, 2023, Alfred McCoy (foreword by Tom), TomDispatch, at < https://tomdispatch.com/at-the-brink-of-war-in-the-pacific/ >
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The War Party rules over the politics and policies that the U.S. Ruling Class has been pursuing for decades. What is happening now is not really anything all that new, but the hour grows late. The damage that the planet has already suffered is extreme and stupid greedy oligarchs are continuing the same sorts of policies that have already put us in danger and peril. But we see them continue to pursue quick-profit policies to dominate the world. Brian Berletic is a former marine officer who joined up earlier in life, first enlisting when he was 17. He ended up in opposition to U.S. military policies after seeing the high amounts of abuse and exploitation suffered by the people who live near U.S. military bases or in operational areas. Berletic offers a well-informed commentary on various political and military events. He thinks that the Ukrainians are near the end of their capability to continue to fight the Russians. He also contrasts the way the Russians did not begin to thoroughly bomb Ukraine with an eye to destroying its infrastructure until months after the latest phase, of the now 9-year long war, began. This contrasts very starkly when compared to the U.S. attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan that began destroying water treatment plants, transportation and energy infrastructure with the very first bombing raids. This is an excerpt from an over 2 hour long episode of George Galloway’s MOATS talk show. The complete show is available at ”IRON CURTAIN - MOATS Episode 218 with George Galloway”, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Qeenxvml4 >
Alfred McCoy, who is no fan of the Chinese, finds the preparations for war, on both the American and the Chinese sides, very disturbing. He also has discussed previously in various articles the growing power of the Chinese, militarily as well as in industry, technology, and science; and the deteriorating position of the U.S. in many of those fields. He discusses the situation as regards Taiwan in particular during his interview, “Historian Alfred McCoy: As Tensions Rise over Taiwan, U.S. & China ‘Edging Ever Closer’ to War”, on Democracy Now! Since Democracy Now! provides transcripts of their programs. I also posted the transcript of the same show. During the interview Goodman noted an article on a related theme, “Alfred McCoy, The True Costs of War Over Taiwan”, that McCoy wrote and that was published from TomDispatch. I posted the text of that article here as well.
1). “INTERVIEW: We’re seeing WW1-scale losses in UKRAINE”, March 6, 2023, George Galloway interviews Brian Berletic, duration of video 16:41, MOATS, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e88Kq7wbv6Y >
Note: this is a youtube of an interview. There is no transcript, no text.
2). “Historian Alfred McCoy: As Tensions Rise over Taiwan, U.S. & China “Edging Ever Closer” to War”, March 10, 2023, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interviewAlfred McCoy, duration of video 17:39, Democracy Now!, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG77z_ZS2Sw >
3). Transcript for “Historian Alfred McCoy: As Tensions Rise over Taiwan, U.S. & China “Edging Ever Closer” to War”, March 10, 2023, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interview Alfred McCoy, Democracy Now!, at < https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/10/xi_jinping_china >
Introductory Statement: U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines is calling China the “most consequential threat” to U.S. national security. Meanwhile, the Chinese parliament has unanimously voted to give Xi Jinping a third five-year term as president. On Monday, Xi directly accused the United States of suppressing China’s development, stating, “Western countries — led by the U.S. — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us.” Both countries are beefing up their military presence along China’s naval borders, and President Biden has made repeated remarks that the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily if it was attacked by China — statements backed by $619 million in high-tech arms sales to Taiwan. To make sense of fraying U.S.-China relations and rising tensions over Taiwan, we are joined by Alfred McCoy, history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who examines the developments in his latest piece, headlined “At the Brink of War in the Pacific?”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The Chinese parliament has unanimously voted to give Xi Jinping a third five-year term as president. Today’s vote comes just months after China’s Communist Party formally reelected Xi Jinping to the party’s general secretary for another five years.
This comes as tensions continue to escalate between the United States and China, in part over Taiwan. On Thursday, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told senators China poses the “most consequential threat” to U.S. national security.
AVRIL HAINES: In brief, the CCP represents both the leading and most consequential threat to U.S. national security and leadership globally, and its intelligence-specific ambitions and capabilities make it for us our most serious and consequential intelligence rival. During the past year, the threat has been additionally complicated by a deepening collaboration with Russia, which also remains an area, obviously, of intense focus for the intelligence community.
AMY GOODMAN: When asked if the United States would defend Taiwan militarily, Haines said, quote, “I think it’s clear to the Chinese what our position is, based on the president’s comments.” She was referring to Biden’s repeated remarks that the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily if China attacked the territory.
Last week, the Biden administration approved $619 million in high-tech arms sales to Taiwan, including new missiles for its F-16 fighter jets. China’s new foreign minister, Qin Gang, recently condemned the U.S. arming of Taiwan.
QIN GANG: [translated] The Chinese people have every right to ask: Why does the U.S. talk at length about respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity on Ukraine while disrespecting China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity on the Taiwan question? Why does the U.S. ask China not to provide weapons to Russia while it keeps selling arms to Taiwan?
AMY GOODMAN: To look more at U.S.-China relations and the rising tensions over Taiwan, we’re joined by Alfred McCoy, history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book is titled To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. His new piece for TomDispatch is headlined “At the Brink of War in the Pacific?”
Professor McCoy, welcome back to Democracy Now! Well, let’s put that question to you. Is the U.S. at the brink of war in the Pacific with China?
ALFRED McCOY: Good morning, Amy.
We’re edging ever closer to that brink. Yes, we are. Look, when — history teaches us one thing. As Barbara Tuchman said in her famous book, The Guns of August, referring to August of 1914, trying to explain how the great powers fought a war that nobody won, World War I, and basically what she found was that by preparing for war, that the powers inclined themselves. They increased the probability that war would come. And from the very apex of power in both Beijing and Washington, all the way down the chain of command, both powers are preparing for war. The leaders are making statements, and their commanders are falling in line with preparations for war. And that greatly increases the probability of conflict breaking out.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Alfred McCoy, I wanted to ask you, in terms of this whole issue — and we’re seeing it portrayed repeatedly in the U.S. press as China as a rising aggressive power in the world. Now, I confess I have a lot of problems understanding this, when you look at the record. From what I can tell, the last three times that China’s military went outside of its borders were back in the 1950s and '60s. And there was Korea. There was a brief war in ’62 with India, a border war that was a 1979 border war with Vietnam that China participated in. Meanwhile, since that time, by my count, the United States invaded Grenada in ’83; in 1990, Panama; in 1991, the first Gulf War; in 1999, the attack, the air war on Serbia; in 2001, Afghanistan; in 2003, Iraq. And there's the Libya bombings, the U.S. intervention in Syria. So, how is China being portrayed by our media and by the Western powers as the aggressive in the world these days?
ALFRED McCOY: The United States has been the dominant power in the world for 75 years. For the past 30 years, we’ve essentially been the world’s sole superpower. So, from that perspective, any challenge is a serious challenge. And China is the first power that’s become capable of mounting that challenge.
And in that sort of process of U.S. hegemony, the threat to Taiwan is serious. One of the keys to American global power has been what the Chinese call the first island chain; we call it the Pacific literal. At the start of the Cold War back in the 1950s, the United States had five mutual security agreements, starting in Japan, going through South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Australia. And that is the fulcrum of U.S. global power, enabling the United States to defend one continent, North America, and dominate another, the vast continent of Eurasia. And so, apart from everything else, the loss of Taiwan would break that geopolitical chain, that is the fulcrum for U.S. global defense, and threaten to push the United States back to what’s called the second island chain, essentially running from Japan through Guam and further south.
And so, from a geopolitical perspective, China represents — both, first of all, by its sheer size of its military, the second largest, the size of its economy, by many estimations now the world’s largest — a major threat, the first real threat to U.S. global power in over 30 years.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But hasn’t the United States, to a large degree, basically helped the enormous economic development of China by all of the U.S. companies that made China the manufacturing center of the world, invested there, built their factories there, and used the cheap products of China to keep providing a better standard of living for people in the West? So, isn’t the U.S., in a sense, responsible in large degree for this economic rise of China?
ALFRED McCOY: Well, first of all, the Chinese have done it themselves. But what the United States has done is admitted China as a full member of the global economy. Look, when the history of the American empire is written and scholars try and find some of the key decisions that Americans made, American leaders made, that doomed the U.S. empire to defeat, one of the things they’re going to, I think, focus on is, back in 2001, there was a bipartisan decision by leaders of both Republican and Democratic Party to admit China to the World Trade Organization.
Now, this was essentially an organization that mediated trade among comparable industrial powers. And for the first time, this enormous developing nation was admitted to the World Trade Organization as a full trading partner. And they then used it kind of like Pac-Man to just gobble up the world’s industry. And now China is the world’s premier industrial power, with twice the industrial capacity of the United States, larger than any other industrial power on the planet. And that’s largely due to the admission of China to the World Trade Organization.
At the time it was done, Washington, in a supreme act of imperial hubris, thought that China would play the global game by America’s clearly written rules. All right? That they would become a nice, compliant, cuddly big panda bear China. OK? Our nice little toy that would produce our toys for our economy at low-cost prices. And it clearly hadn’t happened that way. China is a great power. It is arguably the world’s most powerful empire throughout history. And China, from its perspective, is simply recovering its rightful place as the leader of the world.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we wanted to address what’s happened over the last few weeks with these extremely blunt statements of China. The Chinese president, Xi, directly accused the United States of suppressing China’s development, in what The Wall Street Journal described as a, quote, “unusually blunt rebuke of U.S. policy.” Xi said, “Western countries — led by the U.S. — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.”
Xi’s comments came just days after the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a nearly 4,000-word report”:https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202302/t20230220_11027664.html condemning U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s report began, “Since becoming the world’s most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry went on to say about the U.S., quote, “It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a 'rules-based international order.'”
So, there’s a lot there — the new foreign minister, the Foreign Ministry statement, Xi himself now saying that they’re going to increase their military budget by something like 7% this year.
ALFRED McCOY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this change and how you see this playing out.
ALFRED McCOY: Sure. We haven’t seen rhetoric — anti-American rhetoric coming from Beijing really since the early 1960s, when Mao Zedong became furious with Moscow, because during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, China wanted Russia to launch nuclear strikes on the United States from its missile installations in Cuba. And that was one of the contributing factors, among many, but still one contributing factor to the final rupture between China and Russia that caused the famous Sino-Soviet split. So, we haven’t seen rhetoric like this in 60 years. OK? Ever since the United States recognized China in 1979 diplomatically, generally the rhetoric has been very polite, very circumscribed.
So, this is all part of the rising tensions over Taiwan. In many ways, when you unpack most of those Chinese statements, what you find is what they’re really talking about is the U.S. is challenging China’s claim to Taiwan as being an integral part of the Chinese state. And indeed, President Biden, in one of his four statements last year — in, I think, probably the most provocative statement — said that Taiwan alone should determine its independence. And that was a fundamental rupture on what has been known as the One China policy. When we recognized China diplomatically in 1979, it has been bipartisan U.S. policy, under Republican and Democratic presidents — and you can go through every single one, who said it — all of them were opposed to Taiwan independence. They said there’s one China. The qualifier in that was that the United States did not want the People’s Republic to resolve the issue by force. But the United States — every American president, since the recognition of China over 40 years ago, has been absolutely consistent: Taiwan is a part of China; there is one China. And President Biden’s statement, that Taiwan should determine its own independence, is a real rupture, a real break with that bipartisan foreign policy.
And China has responded in kind. Last October, at the 20th Party Congress, Xi Jinping made, really, a phenomenal statement. He said that the wheels are turning to reunify Taiwan with China. And what he was referring to was these dialectical forces, Marxian dialectical forces, that inevitably mean that Taiwan will become integrated with China. And as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt taught us, that when authoritarian states like China speak in terms of inevitability, that’s when they’re capable of waging — conducting unspeakable atrocities, mass murders, or plunging into unwinnable wars. So, on both sides, we’re seeing very sharp rhetoric that’s part of that process of preparing the United States and China for war over Taiwan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you — if such a war were to break out, I’m wondering your sense of the reaction in other parts of the world, especially the Global South, in view of the enormous expenditures that China has made in its Belt and Road Initiative in countries throughout Africa, Latin America, India and other parts of the world. What would — how would the Global South respond to such a conflict?
ALFRED McCOY: Well, first of all, it would depend on the way the war broke out. OK? There are number of think tanks that have been war-gaming a possible U.S.-China war over Taiwan. One scenario is that China would simply impose a customs blockade, saying that this is our sovereign territory and that nobody can sail directly to Taiwan. You have to call first, by aircraft or by ship, on China, or some similar pronouncement, and then ring the island with ships and submarines and aircraft to block all communication. Now, if that were to happen, China could do that very quickly, in a matter of hours. And that would mean the United States, in order to break that blockade, would have to mobilize its fleets from Honolulu and Yokosuka in Japan and sail and attack the Chinese ships, sailing in what they claim to be their own territorial waters.
That would mean that the United States is attacking China. We would, under those circumstances, no matter what we’d say — to the world, we would look like an aggressor. All right? That we’re attacking Chinese ships in what is, by China’s standard, indeed by international standards, China’s territorial waters surrounding Taiwan. And so, right from the start, in the Global South, we would be seen to be an aggressor. We’d probably carry Europe with us under the NATO alliance. But beyond that, it would be very, very difficult diplomatically for the United States.
Now, by contrast, if — the other most extreme scenario is that China launches a lightning, massive amphibious invasion across the Taiwan Strait. China has 2,900 aircraft. They have now the world’s largest navy. They have ample capacity for such an operation. That capacity increases every day. You know, now, in some scenarios, the Taiwan defense probably has about three or four days in it to kind of resist this attack. China has — the People’s Republic of China has over 2,900 aircraft; Taiwan has about 470. So, you know, the Chinese have basically got four aircraft to lose to every one of Taiwan. So —
AMY GOODMAN: Professor McCoy, we have 30 seconds.
ALFRED McCOY: So, basically, what would happen in a war like that, China, if the war went China’s way, they would capture Taiwan before the United States’ main fleet could arrive from Honolulu. And in that case, the United States would again be an aggressor. It would again look like we’re attacking China. And we might face international condemnation for doing that.
AMY GOODMAN: Alfred McCoy, history professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book is titled To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. We’ll link to your piece at TomDispatch headlined “At the Brink of War in the Pacific?”
4). “Alfred McCoy, The True Costs of War Over Taiwan”, March 2, 2023, Alfred McCoy (foreword by Tom), TomDispatch, Tomgram, at < https://tomdispatch.com/at-the-brink-of-war-in-the-pacific/ >
At the Brink of War in the Pacific?
The Nightmare of Great Power Rivalry Over Taiwan
(Foreword by Tom). I must admit that, from time to time, the true madness of our world, of us, gets under my skin. Here we are, once again, doing what we humans seem best at (that is, of course, worst at!): making war. The ongoing events in Ukraine are a catastrophe for humanity and not just for all the obvious reasons: the deaths of tens of thousands, the unsettling of millions, lives ruined, cities wrecked, staggering sums of money invested in killing and destruction. I mean, you know the tale. Who doesn’t after all these centuries?
But here’s the thing: while that war plays out in devastating headlines daily, the planet itself, only half-noticed, is going down — at least as a habitable place for humanity and so many other species as well. The weather (in case you hadn’t noticed) is growing ever more severe and ever deadlier; the heat is rising; the ice is melting ever more quickly; and so it goes. As with war, you more or less know the story when it comes to climate change. Which leads me to today’s piece by TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, whose superb history of empire, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, takes us from the 16th century to this moment when the peril lurking in the word “imperial” has gained a new and far more ominous meaning.
And it’s in this context, including a strident post-balloon anti-China fervor in Congress, that I find McCoy’s piece on the possible next war on Planet Earth, the one between the two greatest greenhouse gas emitters, eerily unsettling. And yes, the face-off between those two destructive imperial powers seems to be — under the circumstances, I hate to use the word, but I can’t help it — heating up in a distinctly (or do I mean madly?) perilous way.
Honestly, what all-too-apocalyptically-inclined creatures we turn out to be. Tom
Text of Article:
(Cation: USS Kidd and USCG Cutter Munro conduct a routine Taiwan Strait transit by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command )
By Alfred McCoy
While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: when nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war.
In The Guns of August, her magisterial account of another conflict nobody wanted, Barbara Tuchman attributed the start of World War I in 1914 to French and German plans already in place. “Appalled upon the brink,” she wrote, “the chiefs of state who would be ultimately responsible for their country’s fate attempted to back away, but the pull of military schedules dragged them forward.” In a similar fashion, Beijing and Washington have been making military, diplomatic, and semi-secretive moves that could drag us into a calamitous conflict that, once again, nobody wants.
At the apex of power, national leaders in Beijing and Washington have staked out starkly contrasting positions on Taiwan’s future. For nearly a year now, President Joe Biden has been trying to resolve the underlying ambiguity in previous U.S. policy toward that island by stating repeatedly that he would indeed defend it from any mainland attack. In May of last year, in response to a reporter’s question about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, he said, “Yes,” the U.S. would intervene militarily. He then added: “We agree with the One China policy. We signed on to it and all the attendant agreements made from there, but the idea that it can be taken by force, just taken by force, is [just not] appropriate.”
As Biden acknowledged, by extending diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1979, Washington had indeed accepted China’s future sovereignty over Taiwan. For the next 40 years, presidents from both parties made public statements opposing Taiwan’s independence. In effect, they conceded that the island was a Chinese province and its fate a domestic matter (even if they opposed the People’s Republic doing anything about it in the immediate future).
Nonetheless, Biden has persisted in his aggressive rhetoric. He told CBS News last September, for instance, that he would indeed send U.S. troops to defend Taiwan “if, in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.” Then, in a significant break with longstanding U.S. policy, he added: “Taiwan makes their own judgments about their independence… That’s their decision.”
Within weeks, at a Communist Party Congress, Chinese President Xi Jinping responded with a strong personal commitment to the unification of Taiwan — by force if necessary. “We insist on striving for the prospect of peaceful reunification,” he said, “but we will never promise to give up the use of force and reserve the option to take all necessary measures.”
After a long burst of applause from the 2,000 party officials massed in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, he then invoked the inevitability of Marxian dialectical forces that would insure the victory he was promising. “The historical wheels of national reunification and national rejuvenation are rolling forward,” he said, “and the complete reunification of the motherland must be achieved.”
As the political philosopher Hannah Arendt once reminded us, a sense of historical inevitability is a dangerous ideological trigger that can plunge authoritarian states like China into otherwise unthinkable wars or unimaginable mass slaughter.
War Preparations Move Down the Chain of Command
Not surprisingly, the forceful statements of Biden and Xi have been working their way down the chain of command in both countries. In January, a four-star U.S. Air Force general, Mike Minihan, sent a formal memo to his massive Air Mobility Command of 500 aircraft and 50,000 troops, ordering them to ramp up their training for war with China. “My gut tells me,” he concluded, that “we will fight in 2025.” Instead of repudiating the general’s statement, a Pentagon spokesman simply added, “The National Defense Strategy makes clear that China is the pacing challenge for the Department of Defense.”
Nor is General Minihan even the first senior officer to have made such foreboding statements. As early as March 2021, the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, warned Congress that China was planning to invade the island by 2027: “Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions… And I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years.”
Unlike their American opposites, China’s service chiefs have been publicly silent on the subject, but their aircraft have been eloquent indeed. After President Biden signed a defense appropriation bill last December with $10 billion in military aid for Taiwan, an unprecedented armada of 71 Chinese aircraft and many more military drones swarmed that island’s air defenses in a single 24-hour period.
As such tit-for-tat escalation only increases, Washington has matched China’s aggression with major diplomatic and military initiatives. Indeed, the assistant defense secretary for the Indo-Pacific, Ely Ratner, has promised, ominously enough, that “2023 is likely to stand as the most transformative year in U.S. force posture in the region in a generation.”
During a recent tour of Asian allies, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed some significant strategic gains. On a stopover in Seoul, he and his South Korean counterpart announced that the U.S. would deploy aircraft carriers and additional jets for expanded live-fire exercises — a distinctly escalatory move after the curtailment of such joint operations during the Trump years.
Moving on to Manila, Austin revealed that the Philippines had just granted U.S. troops access to four more military bases, several facing Taiwan across a narrow strait. These were needed, he said, because “the People’s Republic of China continues to advance its illegitimate claims” in the South China Sea.
China’s Foreign Ministry seemed stung by the news. After a successful diplomatic courtship of the previous Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, that had checked U.S. influence while accepting the Chinese occupation of islands in Philippine waters, Beijing could now do little more than condemn Washington’s access to those bases for “endangering regional peace and stability.” Although some Filipino nationalists objected that an American presence might invite a nuclear attack, according to reliable polling, 84% of Filipinos felt that their country should cooperate with the United States to defend their territorial waters from China.
Both of those announcements were dividends from months of diplomacy and down payments on major military deployments to come. The annual U.S. “defense” bill for 2023 is funding the construction of military installations across the Pacific. And even as Japan is doubling its defense budget, in part to protect its southern Islands from China, U.S. Marines in Okinawa plan to trade their tanks and heavy artillery for agile drones and shoulder-fired missiles as they form “littoral regiments” capable of rapid deployment to the smallest of islands in the region.
Secret Strategies
In contrast to those public statements, semi-secret strategies on both sides of the Pacific have generally escaped much notice. If the U.S. military commitment to Taiwan remains at least somewhat ambiguous, this country’s economic dependence on that island’s computer-chip production is almost absolute. As the epicenter of a global supply chain, Taiwan manufactures 90% of the world’s advanced chips and 65% of all semiconductors. (In comparison, China’s share of chips is 5% and the U.S. slice only 10%.) As the world’s top producer of the most critical component in everything from consumer cell phones to military missiles, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the leading innovator, supplying Apple and other U.S. tech firms.
Now, American officials are moving to change that. Having overseen the breaking of ground for a $12 billion TSMC chip-production factory in Phoenix in 2020, only two years later, Arizona’s governor announced that “TSMC has completed construction of its main facility.” Last August, just before President Biden signed the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo insisted that “our dependence on Taiwan for chips is untenable and unsafe.”
Only three months later, TSMC reached for a large slice of those federal funds by investing $28 billion in a second Phoenix factory that, when opened in 2026, will produce what the New York Times has called “more advanced — though not the most advanced — chip-making technology.” At a ceremony featuring President Biden last December, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook proclaimed, “This is an incredibly significant moment.”
That might be true, but the focus on Phoenix obscured equally significant chip factory projects being put in place by Samsung in Texas, Intel in Ohio, and Micron Technology in New York. Add it all up and the U.S. is already about halfway to the “minimum of three years and a $350 billion investment… to replace the Taiwanese [chip] foundries,” according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
In other words, if Beijing did decide to invade Taiwan after 2026, TSMC’s intellectual capital, in the form of its top computer scientists, would undoubtedly be on outbound flights for Phoenix, leaving little more than a few concrete shells and some sabotaged equipment behind. The global supply chain for silicon chips involving Dutch machines (for extreme ultraviolet lithography), American designs, and Taiwanese production would probably continue without much of a hitch in the United States, Japan, and Europe, leaving the People’s Republic of China with little more than its minimalist 5% of the world’s $570 billion semiconductor industry.
China’s secret calculus over an invasion of Taiwan is undoubtedly more complex. In mid-February at Munich, Secretary of State Antony Blinken charged that Beijing was considering giving Moscow “lethal support” for its war in Ukraine, adding that “we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for… our relationship.”
But China is faced with a far more difficult choice than Blinken’s blithe rhetoric suggests. From its impressive arsenal, Beijing could readily supply Moscow with enough of its Hong Niao cruise missiles to destroy most of Ukraine’s armored vehicles (with plenty left over to demolish Kyiv’s faltering electrical infrastructure).
Bleeding NATO in that way would, however, pay limited dividends for any possible future Chinese plans vis-à-vis Taiwan. In contrast, the types of ground-warfare armaments Washington and its allies continue to pour into Ukraine would do little to strain the U.S. naval capacity in the Western Pacific.
Moreover, the diplomatic and economic price Beijing would pay for a significant involvement in the Ukraine War might well prove prohibitive. As the world’s largest consumer of imported cheap oil and wheat, which Russia exports in abundance, China needs a humbled Putin, desperate for markets and compliant with its designs for greater dominion over Eurasia. A triumphant Putin, bending the will of timorous states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia while negotiating ever-tougher deals for his exports, is hardly in Beijing’s interest.
Ignoring the existential threat Putin’s war poses for the European Union would also cost Beijing decades of diplomacy and billions in infrastructure funds already invested to knit all of Eurasia, from the North Sea to the South China Sea, into an integrated economy. In addition, siding with a distinctly secondary power that has blatantly violated the core principle of the international order — which bars the acquisition of territory by armed conquest — is hardly likely to advance Beijing’s sustained bid for global leadership.
Vladimir Putin might indeed try to equate China’s claim to a breakaway province in Taiwan with his own bid for former Soviet territory in Ukraine, but the analogy is anathema to Beijing. “Taiwan is not Ukraine,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced last year, the day before Putin invaded Ukraine. “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China. This is an indisputable legal and historical fact.”
The Costs of War
With both Beijing and Washington contemplating a possible future war over Taiwan, it’s important (especially in light of Ukraine) to consider the likely costs of such a conflict. In November 2021, the venerable Reuters News Agency compiled a series of credible scenarios for a China-U.S. war over Taiwan. If the United States decided to fight for the island, said Reuters, “there is no guarantee it would defeat an increasingly powerful PLA [People’s Liberation Army].”
In its least violent scenario, Reuters speculated that Beijing could use its navy to impose a “customs quarantine” around Taiwan, while announcing an Air Defense Identification Zone over the island and warning the world not to violate its sovereignty. Then, to tighten the noose, it could move to a full blockade, laying mines at major ports and cutting underwater cables. Should Washington decide to intervene, its submarines would undoubtedly sink numerous PLA warships, while its surface vessels could launch aircraft and missiles as well. But China’s powerful air-defense system would undoubtedly fire thousands of its own missiles, inflicting “heavy losses” on the U.S. Navy. Rather than attempting a difficult amphibious invasion, Beijing might complete this staged escalation with saturation missile attacks on Taiwan’s cities until its leaders capitulated.
In the Reuters scenario for all-out war, Beijing decides “to mount the biggest and most complex amphibious and airborne landing ever attempted,” seeking to “overwhelm the island before the United States and its allies can respond.” To hold off a U.S. counterattack, the PLA might fire missiles at American bases in Japan and Guam. While Taiwan launched jets and missiles to deter the invasion fleet, U.S. carrier battle groups would steam toward the island and, “within hours, a major war [would be] raging in East Asia.”
In August 2022, the Brookings Institution released more precise estimates of likely losses from various scenarios in such a war. Although China’s “recent and dramatic military modernizations have sharply reduced America’s ability to defend the island,” the complexities of such a clash, wrote the Brookings analyst, make “the outcome… inherently unknowable.” Only one thing would be certain: the losses on both sides (including in Taiwan itself) would be devastating.
In Brookings’ first scenario involving “a maritime fight centered on submarines,” Beijing would impose a blockade and Washington would respond with naval convoys to sustain the island. If the United States were to knock out Beijing’s communications, the U.S. Navy would lose just 12 warships, while sinking all 60 of China’s subs. If, by contrast, China maintained its communications, it could possibly sink 100 vessels, mostly U.S. warships, while losing only 29 subs.
In Brookings’ second scenario for “a broader subregional war,” both sides would use jets and missiles in a struggle that would engulf southeastern China, Taiwan, and U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa, and Guam. If China’s attacks proved successful, it might destroy 40 to 80 U.S. and Taiwanese warships at a cost of some 400 Chinese aircraft. If the U.S. got the upper hand, it could destroy “much of China’s military in southeastern China,” while shooting down more than 400 PLA aircraft, even as it suffered heavy losses of its own jets.
By focusing largely on military losses, which are chilling enough, both studies grossly underestimate the real costs and potential devastation to Taiwan and much of East Asia. My own instinct tells me that, should China impose a customs blockade on the island, Washington would blink hard at the thought of losing hundreds of aircraft and dozens of warships, including an aircraft carrier or two, and retreat to its longstanding policy of regarding Taiwan as China’s territory. If the U.S. did challenge that customs interdiction zone, however, it would have to attack the Chinese blockade and might, in the eyes of much of the world, become the aggressor — a real disincentive from Washington’s point of view.
Should China launch an all-out invasion, however, Taiwan would likely succumb within a few days once its air force of just 470 combat aircraft was overwhelmed by the PLA’s 2,900 jet fighters, 2,100 supersonic missiles, and its massive navy, now the world’s largest. Reflecting China’s clear strategic advantage of simple proximity to Taiwan, the island’s occupation might well be a fait accompli before the U.S. Navy ships could arrive from Japan and Hawaii in sufficient numbers to challenge the massive Chinese armada.
If Beijing and Washington somehow let the pull of policy and planning drag them into such an ever-widening war, however, the damage could still prove incalculable — with cities devastated, untold thousands dead, and the global economy, with its epicenter in Asia, left in ruins. Let us only hope that today’s leaders in both Washington and Beijing prove more restrained than did their counterparts in Berlin and Paris in August 1914 when plans for victory unleashed a war that would leave 20 million dead in its wake.
Copyright 2023 Alfred W. McCoy
Featured image: USS Kidd and USCG Cutter Munro conduct a routine Taiwan Strait transit by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 / Flickr
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Alfred McCoy
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. His newest book is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (Dispatch Books).
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