Now, don’t let Taiwan become next Ukraine

Judging by official Chinese media, President Xi Jinping appears to have focused more on the question of Taiwan than the Russian invasion of Ukraine when he spoke with his US counterpart Joe Biden. If Xi fears US support for what he calls “Taiwan independence” forces, many US analysts worry about the opposite — that China might be inspired by the Russian assault to seek its own takeover of Taiwan. At the very least, the US should be drawing some important lessons from the crisis in Europe about how to prepare for that possibility.
In theory, Vladimir Putin’s struggles in Ukraine should give Chinese leaders pause. The Russian military has suffered a series of tactical failures on terrain friendlier than what Chinese commanders leading an amphibious assault on Taiwan would face. Western nations have imposed severe economic costs on Russia with stunning speed. Even the limited weaponry that Nato countries have provided Ukraine has proved lethal. In Taiwan, China may have to face a combat-tested and technologically advanced US military directly.
On the other hand, Chinese saber-rattling has ramped up massively under Xi. If China begins to pay a price for its support of Russia, or internal critics question Xi’s handling of the situation, he could easily seek to rally support by shifting focus to Taiwan.
Openly committing to US intervention remains unwise. Abandoning the “strategic ambiguity” that has marked Washington’s policy toward Taiwan for decades would needlessly provoke China and could embolden Taiwanese leaders to take undue risks.
The Ukraine crisis should spur action on other fronts, though. The Ukrainian military, for instance, has benefited immensely from stepped-up training after Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea. The US should expand its own training of Taiwanese forces, while speeding up delivery of the kind of shoulder-fired anti-tank and air-defense weapons Ukrainian soldiers have deployed so effectively. It should help Taiwan harden its cyber-defenses, perhaps even hunting for threats directly on Taiwanese networks. And it should provide more of the anti-ship missiles, sea mines and drones that would be needed to defend against an attempted Chinese invasion.
For their part, Taiwanese leaders need to begin a serious debate about increasing the country’s requirement for national service from four months to a year or more, as in countries such as Singapore and Israel. The process of strengthening Taiwan’s woeful reserves also needs to be accelerated. Like the Ukrainians, Taiwanese would stand a better chance of attracting outside help if they show they’re prepared to fight for their own freedom. To be in a better position to provide such aid, the US should be redeploying forces now. The US military has talked of dispersing small, mobile forces across southern Japanese islands and elsewhere in the Pacific, to bring troops closer to the fighting while presenting a smaller target for Chinese missiles. It should be rotating troops and equipment through those areas now, and ensuring access for its forces in the future. It should also beef up missile defenses at its existing bases on Guam, a primary target in any conflict.
More generally, the US and its partners should be using this time to think through how they would respond to actions short of a full-scale invasion. China could choke off Taiwan’s trade-dependent economy through a range of so-called gray-zone measures — “accidentally” spilling sea mines outside Taiwanese ports, for instance, or even imposing a naval quarantine under the pretext that Taiwan is importing components to build a nuclear weapon. Taiwan’s friends need to map out how they’d respond to such provocations.
Similarly, the US and its allies should be quietly brainstorming what an effective sanctions campaign against China would look like.

—Bloomberg