While Taiwan has the eighth largest economy in the world, is important to U.S. interests, and occupies a militarily vital area astride critical sea lanes, it is not worthwhile for the United States to risk confronting a major nuclear-armed power such as China to stop the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from invading Taiwan.
Instead, Taiwan should be spending much more than it has on its own defense, such as purchasing U.S.-made weapons platforms, rather than passively expecting the United States to rescue Taiwan from a Chinese invasion.
So said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies with the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank. “Three percent of [Taiwanese economic output] spent on security is woefully inadequate,” and Taiwan isn’t spending even that short-of-the-mark amount on military needs, Carpenter said.
But that view drew a strong objection from John Tkacik, senior research fellow in the Asian Studies Center of the Heritage Foundation, another Washington think tank.
They engaged in a lively debate at a forum of the Center for National Policy, yet another Washington think tank.
To be sure, Tkacik agreed with Carpenter that “it is hard for me to see how this ends well,” as China acquires ever more arms and obstinately continues to demand that Taiwan capitulate and submit to rule by Beijing.
But Tkacik likened the U.S. and Taiwanese positions of trying to calm Chinese leaders and somehow stave off an invasion, indefinitely, to the approach of some European nations in attempting to placate a bellicose Germany in the 1930s, seeing just as much chance of success in employing that approach toward the China of today.
Make no mistake, Tkacik said, China even now is directing aggression and belligerence toward Taipei, attempting to “isolate Taiwan and strangle it,” despite what the people of the island nation want, and despite what the United States wants.
At this point, Taiwan should be arming itself rapidly with purchases of air defense assets, submarines and anti-submarine platforms, Tkacik said.
Even then, tiny Taiwan will be outgunned and outspent by the Sino military giant. “It costs Taiwan six times as much to bring down [any incoming] Chinese missile as it does China to launch the missile,” Tkacik said.
He sees little chance of pacification moves succeeding in the long run, while Carpenter said it would be worth a try to see if tensions could be reduced, possibly through reciprocal moves on either side.
If Taiwan lowers the volume on debate about a possible vote for independence, Carpenter said an adequate Chinese response would include “freezing its missile deployments” that currently are adding about 100 more weapons a year pointed across the waters toward Taiwan, stopping the Chinese “diplomatic strangulation strategy against Taiwan,” and Beijing “giving the Taiwanese government more international space,” such as not opposing Taiwan joining the World Health Organization.
“I hope that this will occur and we will see a significant reduction in tension across the straits,” Carpenter said.
However, none of the forum participants predicted any sudden move by China to drop its territorial claims on Taiwan, with Carpenter saying it is difficult to see “how this ends well.” He noted that on the other side of the strait, “a majority of Taiwanese favor an indefinite prolongation of the status quo,” in which Taiwan doesn’t declare its independence, but de facto continues to act as a sovereign and independent nation.
One move Tkacik recommended, strongly, is that U.S. allies in the western Pacific region begin to shoulder the financial-military burden here that has been borne in the main by the United States.
“It is nuts to require Japan to have a purely defensive capability,” as post-world War II Japanese law does, when Japan could be helping the United States in ensuring peace and stability in the region, Tkacik reasoned.
Similarly, Carpenter said that “we need to indicate to countries in that region that we’ll [no longer] be picking up the dinner check every time” for security costs. “Other countries want to free-ride on the United States”
On a practical basis, many military analysts say that China is pursuing an area access denial strategy against U.S. forces, with more than 1,000 radar-guided missiles aimed across the Strait of Taiwan, ready to fire at any visible target in the strait, on Taiwan or beyond the island. And current U.S. Navy ships aren’t radar-evading platforms, but instead would be highly visible, and vulnerable, to Chinese missile batteries, if the United States maneuvered those ships close enough to halt a PLA invasion.
The forum participants didn’t deliver any assessments to differ with that view. Rather, Tkacik said that the first priority for the United States in that situation would be to annihilate those Chinese missile batteries, and other Chinese assets as well. “This is a requirement,” he said. “You’ve got to hit these targets in China.”
Carpenter agreed with Tkacik on that point.
That obviously would require using radar-evading U.S. aircraft, such as the Lockheed Martin [LMT] super-stealth F-22 Raptor fighter-attack supersonic cruise plane, and the Northrop Grumman [NOC] B-2 Spirit stealth heavy bomber. Congress now is about to consider moves to extend production of the Raptor. The buy was cut from an initial 750, to 381 the Air Force said it required, to 277, and then to 183. Perhaps 20 more might be purchased, or more if that is seen necessary to replace F-15 fighters with structural problems.
But would the United States, a nation with enormous economic ties to China involving hundreds of billions of dollars worth of trade in goods each year, risk damaging those ties to defend the diminutive Taiwan? U.S.-based giant globalized corporations have enormous investments in China, where they operate factories or purchase goods made by Chinese companies.
Carpenter said that would be a dangerous and questionable proposition to assume an automatic U.S. move to defend Taiwan from invasion.
“I think that’s a very dangerous assumption,” Carpenter said, adding that while the United States and Taiwan may wish to continue indefinitely the status quo of de facto independence of Taipei, China will not accept continued Taiwanese independence, Carpenter predicted.
And, Carpenter added, China increasingly is pressuring U.S. allies in the region to move toward its views, including a muscle-flexing military that is “terrifying the Japanese.”
But Tkacik recoiled from that view, emphatically asking how the United States could countenance permitting a communist dictatorship, China, to invade and control a democratic, capitalist nation such as Taiwan.