By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, October 05, 2021
We warned China to stop its
incursions into Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone — and the Chinese
responded by flying even more aircraft into the zone.
The 52 Chinese flights on Monday brought
the total for October to 145, already the year’s highest monthly total.
The flights have been steadily increasing
in recent years, as Beijing harries Taiwan and demonstrates its
discontent with the island nation’s closer relationship to the United States.
The Chinese may also want to wear down the Taiwanese by forcing them to
constantly respond.
Regardless, the flights underscore why
Taiwan is the most dangerous and potentially most consequential flashpoint on
Earth.
If China can successfully absorb Taiwan
while limiting the military, economic, and diplomatic costs, it would vindicate
President Xi’s vision of an ascendant China undoing past humiliations,
represent a milestone in China’s campaign to establish hegemony in the most
important region of the world, and, perhaps, collapse the credibility and
global position of the United States.
On the other hand, a debacle in Taiwan
could have devastating economic and diplomatic consequences for China,
threatening Xi’s rule.
In other words, attention must be paid —
the trajectory of the modern world is conceivably at stake.
The Trump administration began to reorient
the U.S. defense posture toward this threat, and the Biden administration has
followed up, most importantly, with the nuclear-submarine deal with
Australia.
It’s been completely obvious for a long
time that China has been preparing, if it so chooses, to take Taiwan by force
of arms and keep us from being able to do anything about it.
It has massively increased its force of
ballistic missiles, better to target a wide array of ships and hold at risk
U.S. ground units. Prior to the latest, more serious iteration of the missile
threat, Tom Shugart of the Center for New American Security estimated that a
preemptive Chinese strike on our bases in the region “could crater every runway
and runway-length taxiway at every major U.S. base in Japan, and destroy more
than 200 aircraft on the ground.”
China has been churning out long-range
strike aircraft and engaged in a historic naval buildup. It now has the largest
navy in the world.
Nonetheless, invading and occupying Taiwan
after launching a gigantic, logistically taxing amphibious operation across a
110-mile strait would be no small feat, to put it mildly.
It should be our objective to keep China
at bay, toward the goal of keeping it from establishing its dominance over
Asia, as former Trump defense official Elbridge Colby argues in his compelling
new book The Strategy of Denial.
But the Taiwanese haven’t exhibited the
urgency one would expect of an island of 24 million people coveted by a nearby
nation of 1.4 billion people that makes no secret of its compulsion to try to
swallow it whole.
Until a few years ago, Taiwan’s defense
budget was shockingly inadequate. Its military reserves are lackluster. Its
frontline units tend not to operate at full strength. It has often been seduced
by the allure of so-called prestige weapons, such as top-end fighter aircraft
that are irrelevant to its predicament.
We should be fortifying Taiwan and making
it as difficult as possible for China to take. That means stockpiling food, energy,
and munitions against a Chinese blockade. It means making its infrastructure
more resilient and enhancing its cyber capabilities. It means increasing its
capability to detect an early mustering of Chinese forces. It means more mines,
anti-ship missiles, air-defense capabilities, and unmanned systems to frustrate
a cross-strait invasion.
The Chinese have been focused on “area
denial,” missiles, and the like to deny our access to Taiwan and its environs.
But these capabilities can be turned against China, too.
If we are ever inclined to forget about
how pressing the threat is, not to worry, the Chinese will have more flights or
other provocations to remind us.
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