After President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco last month, the White House touted three modest accomplishments.
Xi had agreed to restore military-to-military communications that had been cut off after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) high-profile August 2022 visit to Taiwan. Xi also pledged to limit the export of precursors used to make the deadly drug fentanyl and threw in a promise of some new pandas for the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
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So far, none of the promises have been fulfilled.
The meeting of the presidents, at a time of escalating tensions between the two countries, had a public veneer of cordiality. Biden has gushed about the “great honor” of hosting Xi in the United States. And Xi has waxed on about mutual respect and peaceful coexistence.
But readouts from both the U.S. and China painted a different picture, of Biden appealing to Xi not to change the status of Taiwan as a self-governing democracy by force and Xi indicating that while his preference was for peace, he also sent clear signals he was not going to settle for the status quo much longer.
“The U.S. side should take real actions to honor its commitment of not supporting ‘Taiwan independence,’ stop arming Taiwan, and support China’s peaceful reunification,” the Chinese foreign ministry said, describing the discussions between Xi and Biden. “China will realize reunification, and this is unstoppable.”
“President Xi … underscored that [Taiwan] was the biggest, most potentially dangerous issue in U.S.-China relations,” a senior U.S. official told reporters.
When Biden responded that the U.S. was determined to maintain peace and stability in the region, Xi’s reply was along the lines of “peace is all well and good, but at some point, we need to move toward resolution.”
“One thing that went almost unreported amidst Biden and Xi’s summit is that Xi tripled down on his threats to Taiwan,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), chairman of the bipartisan House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the following weekend on CBS’s Face the Nation. “This should remind us that no amount of relentless diplomacy will make a difference if we don’t fix the fundamental problem, which is that the balance of hard power across the strait and throughout the Indo-Pacific region is eroding, and with it, the risk of war is increasing.”
Gallagher has been sounding the alarm for more than a year that the U.S. is entering a “window of maximum danger” of all-out war with China.
“When I use that term, I get a lot of blowback, and people claim I’m hyping the threat,” Gallagher said in an interview last month on the Hoover Institution podcast Uncommon Knowledge.
“If we come to blows with China over Taiwan, if they try to take Taiwan by force, and I think the odds of that are increasing, this could quickly spiral into a conflict that’s so severe, it has the potential to make the current wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, and even previous World Wars, look tame in comparison. It could even escalate to the level of a nuclear exchange, which would be devastating.”
Xi has given his military, the People’s Liberation Army, a goal of modernizing to the point it could take Taiwan by 2027.
But U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said there’s no sign Xi is in a rush to go to war.
“I don’t think that the conflict with China is inevitable or imminent,” Austin said during a trip to the Indo-Pacific region last month. “That’s something that nobody wants to see happen.”
The person whose job it is to figure out what China’s intentions are is Adm. John Aquilino, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Hawaii.
What’s caught his attention is China’s rapidly growing military power, which he calls “the largest military buildup in history since World War II, at the greatest speed both in the conventional lane and the strategic nuclear lane across all domains, maritime, air, land, space, cyberspace.”
It’s not just China’s dramatically increased capabilities but also its newfound willingness to use military force to intimidate and dominate its neighbors.
“The best example I would lay down is what’s happening right now with our Philippine counterparts in the vicinity of Second Thomas Shoal,” Aquilino said at a recent appearance at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California.
“They are trying to resupply their forces on their ship Sierra Madre. They are being blocked, they are being water cannoned, they are being lazed, and they’re being rammed,” he said.
China says the island is its sovereign territory, a claim that was rejected by an international tribunal in 2016.
“The Chinese have no claim to that space, yet they are enforcing an illegal claim as a part of the East and South China Sea that’s concerning,” Aquilino said.
Unlike Taiwan, the U.S. has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, and in a recent statement, the Pentagon said its commitment to its treaty obligations remains “ironclad,” making the former U.S. territory another possible flashpoint.
There has been no shortage of dire predictions of how a war with China might go, especially now that the war in Ukraine has revealed the inability of the U.S. defense base to supply and resupply the millions of rounds of munitions that are required by modern warfare, the asymmetric advantage of cheap drone warfare, and exposed the limited appetites of American politicians and average citizens for expensive and protracted foreign wars.
“The United States is a heartbeat away from a world war that it could lose,” A. Wess Mitchell, a former assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, wrote in Foreign Policy last month.
“Already, Beijing is testing Washington in East Asia, knowing full well that the United States would struggle to deal with a third geopolitical crisis. If war does come, the United States would find some very important factors suddenly working against it,” Mitchell writes. “Unlike the United States, which needs to be strong in all three of these places, each of its adversaries — China, Russia, and Iran — only has to be strong in its own home region to achieve its objectives.”
In an opinion piece in the New York Post, Harry Kazianis, a China expert at the Center for the National Interest, argues a Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack could end America’s days as a superpower.
“If the moment came and Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party gave the order, Beijing could launch a massive surprise strike that could cripple the U.S. military in any scenario over Taiwan, the South China Sea and beyond,” Kazianis writes. “China has enough advanced missiles to not only destroy nearly every U.S. military base in Asia quickly but also target and attack most U.S. Navy warships in the region.”
After a visit to Taiwan earlier this year, Gallagher argued the best chance to deter China is to turn Taiwan into a “porcupine” that would be difficult and costly to occupy.
“I return from my trip to Taiwan even more convinced that the time to arm Taiwan to the teeth was yesterday,” Gallagher said in February.
Taiwan needs a lot more weaponry, in particular Harpoon anti-ship missiles, to counter China’s superior naval power.
“We have Harpoon missiles that were purchased in 2015, approved by Congress, and are still not going to be delivered until 2027, 2029, because our foreign military sales process is totally broken here,” Gallagher said.
In the Pentagon’s annual report on Chinese military power, analysis suggests China might counter a porcupine strategy with an air and naval blockade to cut off Taiwan’s vital imports in an effort to force Taiwan’s capitulation.
“Large-scale missile strikes and possible seizures of Taiwan’s offshore islands would accompany a Joint Blockade Campaign in an attempt to compel Taiwan’s surrender, while at the same time, posturing air and naval forces to conduct weeks or months of blockade operations if necessary.”
Gallagher draws lessons from the Taiwan Strait crises in the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.
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“What did Eisenhower have to do in order to deter the CCP? He went to Congress to get advanced authorization for the use of military force. Some would say he actually threatened to use nuclear weapons. He put Matador cruise missiles on Taiwan itself,” Gallagher said.
“That’s the level of presidential intestinal fortitude and display of hard power that was necessary to diffuse crisis one, two, and three. It would require just as much, if not more, presidential courage and display of hard power to diffuse the fourth Taiwan Strait crisis when it comes.”
