Yes, China will fight over Taiwan
The United States has long ignored Moscow's warnings about Ukraine, writes 19 Forty Five. According to the author of the article, it is extremely important that Washington does not repeat the same mistake in relations with China, because Beijing is not bluffing at all.
Ted Carpenter
Despite all the objections and warnings from Beijing, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, put her plans into practice and still included Taiwan in a tour of East Asia. Pelosi became the highest-ranking guest of Taiwan in a quarter of a century. She announced her intentions in July. Since then, Beijing has issued a number of harsh warnings, and one Chinese publication even called for her airliner to be shot down along with a US military escort.
Fortunately, the Chinese government did not take this reckless step. However, it warned of "serious consequences" for relations with the United States if the visit takes place. What exactly to expect is not yet known, but it is already clear that Pelosi's visit has aggravated the already unpleasant tension in bilateral relations. At the same time, her trip is just the tip of the iceberg, just one of the reasons why relations between Washington and Beijing are constantly deteriorating.
In a sense, the US leaders are stepping on the same rake in the Taiwan issue as in relations between Russia and Ukraine. Taiwan is of vital interest to China — just like Ukraine is to Russia. Vladimir Putin's government has been warning for ten years that it will not allow Kiev to join NATO or become an ally of the United States. The intensity of the warnings reached its peak at the end of 2021, when the Kremlin demanded written security guarantees from the United States and NATO that Ukraine would not join the North Atlantic Alliance, that the West would not deploy troops and weapons there, and that the United States would reduce its military presence in other Eastern European countries that had already joined NATO. Putin reinforced his warning by pushing 200,000 soldiers to the Ukrainian borders.
As many as four American administrations in a row ignored Moscow's increasingly harsh warnings — and now we are reaping tragic fruits. Therefore, it is extremely important that Washington does not make the same mistake about Chinese warnings. After all, China will use force to protect vital national security interests with the same probability that Russia will use force to repel US interference in Ukraine's affairs. So Washington should take the Chinese warnings about Taiwan much more seriously than it is now.
The crisis has been growing since 2016, when the Taiwanese stunned Beijing by electing Tsai Ing-wen from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as president. This is how the Party for Independence took the helm of the country for the first time. Earlier, the leaders of the People's Republic of China worked with Tsai's predecessor Ma Ying-jeou from the more moderate Kuomintang Party and established extensive bilateral economic ties. Beijing tried to convey to the Taiwanese that closer cooperation would bring considerable benefits and pave the way for reunification according to the "one country, two systems" scheme proposed by the PRC. However, the 2016 elections demonstrated that this strategy failed, and Tsai's re-election in 2020 (after Beijing's brutal repression in Hong Kong) and the victory of the DPP, even more ambitious than in 2016, convincingly confirmed this.
Although Tsai is by no means an ardent supporter of independence, her administration is trying to push the boundaries of the island's de facto autonomy and increase its international status. The pro-Taiwan forces in the US government are increasingly supporting it. In 2018, Congress passed the Taiwan Travel Act, abolishing the forty-year-old policy and allowing senior U.S. officials to meet with Taiwanese counterparts. Then National Security Adviser John Bolton met with Secretary General of the National Security Council of Taiwan David Lee during his visit to Washington in May 2019. Congress has taken other measures to support the island, and this trend is not abating: Taiwan's supporters advocate even more decisive steps. Strategic and even military cooperation between Washington and Taipei is ongoing.
The more obvious and substantial the US supported Taiwan under the administration of Donald Trump, the louder the warnings of the PRC sounded that Washington's behavior was unacceptable. Beijing has made no secret of its anger over the meeting between Bolton and Li, and the tone of the protests only hardened when more and more cabinet-level officials began to come to the island. Another reason for discontent was the new supply of American weapons to Taipei. Beijing considered that they went beyond the "defensive weapons" provided for under the Law on Relations with Taiwan from 1979, when Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in favor of Beijing. Suspicions and irritation of the PRC have worsened due to the fact that the United States is increasing its naval presence, and its ships are making provocative passages through the Taiwan Strait.
With each escalation by the United States, the Chinese protests sound sharper. In November 2021, the Defense Ministry categorically warned that attempts by Taiwanese leaders to achieve independence and "outside interference" in support of their ambitions would mean war. As usual, American officials reacted with astonishing indifference. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the Pentagon "sees no reason why tensions over Taiwan should lead to any confrontation."
Shortly before Pelosi's visit, Xi Jinping urged the United States "not to play with fire" in Taiwan and threatened that they might "get burned." In theory, this was supposed to bring the United States out of their pompous self-intoxication. The increasingly confrontational course of the PRC resembles the consistent tightening of the Russian position when Moscow demanded Western security guarantees for Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022. The same can be said about the fact that Beijing is deploying more and more air and naval forces near Taiwan. China hardly wants a war with the United States, but just as Russia turned out to be ready to fight to repel the threat to vital interests in Ukraine, so Beijing will follow the same course on Taiwan.
Biden's foreign policy team, detached from reality, should understand that Beijing is not bluffing. The Administration has taken a fundamentally wrong approach to the latest foreign policy crisis. She can't afford to fail another one.
Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow in Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute and editor of 19FortyFive magazine, author of 13 books and more than 1,100 articles on international affairs.
