INVASION THAT WOULD MAKE UKRAINE LOOK LIKE A SIDESHOW
As Taiwan conducts a full-scale rehearsal for an assault by China, MARK ALMOND warns the possibility is all too real... and terrifying
AS THE mournful wail of air-raid sirens rang out at 1.30pm on this day last week, residents in towns and cities in Northern Taiwan retreated indoors. The streets rapidly cleared of people and cars.
In the capital Taipei, shops and restaurants pulled down their shutters while police directed vehicles to the side of the road and ordered drivers and their passengers to seek shelter.
The screech of fighter jets scrambling to repel the enemy filled the skies, while a ‘missile alert’ text was sent to hundreds of thousands of mobile phones, urging people to evacuate to a place of safety immediately.
A rainstorm of ballistic missiles would be unleashed on the island
Terrifying, yes, but the nightmare scenario that unfolded was a necessary full-scale drill to prepare for the day – drawing closer by the hour, according to some – when Taiwan is subject to a surprise attack from mainland China.
With the eyes of the world focused on the brutal war in Ukraine, we must not underestimate the crisis simmering at the other end of Eurasia, some 8,000 kilometres away. Nor are they unrelated.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping share a common disdain for their weaker neighbours’ rights, and Taiwan has long felt the breath of the Chinese dragon on its throat.
Ever since the Communists came to power in mainland China in 1949, they have had this plucky little nation in their sights.
It is officially part of the Republic of China but, in reality, Taiwan has been an independent democracy for more than 30 years.
Just as Putin didn’t like a democratic Ukraine on Russia’s border, so having a Chinese-speaking democracy just 100 miles away is unacceptable to China’s all-powerful president, Xi.
Now, with China’s air force and navy increasingly active around and over Taiwan, all the signs are that he is rehearsing an invasion of this tiny but geopolitically important island, with a population of just 29 million people (compared to China’s 1.4 billion).
On a visit to Japan in May, US president Joe Biden made it clear that the US would be prepared to defend Taiwan if it were attacked. And, of course, no one would be happier to see that than Putin.
Diverting American forces and high-tech weapons to the Far East
from Eastern Europe would take the pressure off him in Ukraine.
But a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could quickly escalate far beyond the Ukraine conflict to become the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
So how might such an invasion unfold? What would trigger it? And how would it affect the rest of the world?
The most likely ‘excuse’ for an invasion would be a declaration of independence by the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen.
Short of that, any recognition by the West of Taiwan as a nation independent of China would fan the flames. (Indeed, following reports of a proposed visit by US politician Nancy Pelosi last week, the Chinese warned that their response could involve ‘forceful measures’.)
Taiwan, a thriving free-market economy driven by industrial manufacturing and exports of electronics and machinery, has grown rich outside Communist China. But until quite recently, it neglected defence spending.
With a relatively small number of trained troops and modern weapons, it has relied instead on its strategic value to the Americans and Japanese – at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the Northwest Pacific – to guarantee its protection.
But learning from Putin’s failure to capture the Ukrainian capital with an airborne assault of a few thousand troops in February, Beijing may well conclude that only a massive shock-and-awe attack on Taiwan would work.
A rainstorm of ballistic and cruise missiles would be unleashed on the island’s military bases and ports, its transport infrastructure and its telecommunications hubs.
The brute force of high-explosive warheads would coincide with cyber attacks to stymie co-ordination among Taiwanese troops and cause panic among civilians. At the same time, an invasion fleet would seek to land swarms of Chinese troops, tanks and trucks on the coast to occupy Taiwan in the old style.
There would undoubtedly be a huge amount of damage to infrastructure, with heavy military and civilian casualties.
Yet China cannot assume that outnumbering its enemy would deliver a rapid victory. Yes, China has a vast and growing military, but it is untested in battle. It hasn’t fought a war since 1979, when Deng Xiaoping wanted to ‘teach a lesson’ to China’s southern neighbour, Vietnam. It was the Vietnamese who taught China a few hard lessons instead.
But that war is largely ignored in China today. Instead, it is the Korean War against the US-led UN forces between 1950 and 1953 which is celebrated as Communist China’s model war.
Although tens of thousands of US troops were being killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army, President Harry Truman backed off from his generals’ demand to use nuclear weapons.
Back then, Mao had to rely on Stalin’s nuclear ‘umbrella’ over the horizon inside the Soviet Union. Today, China has its own nuclear weapons.
Beijing holds hard to the belief that, for all his fighting talk, Biden would step back from the brink, as Truman did, if a nuclear war was the most likely outcome.
But if so, Xi and his apparatchiks are underestimating America’s determination not to cede control in the Pacific. The Biden administration is, with good cause, deeply suspicious of China’s intentions in the region.
Then there is Japan to consider. Taiwan’s old imperial master (until Japan’s surrender in 1945) sees the island democracy as the southern anchor of the chain of islands that lead up to the Japanese archipelago itself.
Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated earlier this month, repeatedly warned Japan’s allies in Europe and America that their focus on the Ukraine crisis was distracting them from the much bigger threat China posed to world stability than Russia.
Would Japan, a highly scientifically advanced country, rapidly acquire the nuclear weapons it needed to protect itself and deter the Chinese if Beijing decided to attack Taiwan?
And, with North Korea already
Biden administration is deeply suspicious of Beijing’s intentions
testing nuclear weapons, might South Korea follow suit because of its fears of China and its northern neighbour?
The potential, then, for allout nuclear conflict is horrifyingly close. But even without a nuclear stand-off, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, successful or not, would be disastrous for the wider world economy.
Taiwan is one of the world’s major producers of hightech components such as semiconductors, and if its factories were destroyed or damaged that would affect everything from computers to mobile phones, pushing up prices and creating shortages of the everyday things we take for granted.
As for those who say Xi will hesitate to invade for fear of ‘killing the golden goose’ that is the Taiwanese economy, just look at Hong Kong. Over the past three years, Xi Jinping has been willing to slowly suffocate Hong Kong’s economic dynamism to stifle the democracy movement there.
He could just as easily judge that devastating Taiwan is a price worth paying to gain the strategic advantage of using it to give China’s navy access to the open ocean beyond.
Yesterday’s war preparation drill in Taiwan was called ‘Wan An’, which translates as Everlasting Peace. Peace that is ‘everlasting’ may be an unrealistic prospect, but even to achieve peace in the short term, Biden and the West must continue to strike a delicate balance between showing support for Taiwan while not provoking Xi’s China into showing it is not afraid of us.
It is a terrifying tightrope walk between the perils of appeasement and the calamitous consequences of war. And Xi has to get it right as well as the West.
The risks of miscalculation on either side are heartstoppingly high.
Tightrope walk between appeasement and war