What would happen in a China–Taiwan war

There is today only one question that matters for Taiwan’s security: will the United States defend the island if it comes under attack from China?

As recently as the first decade of the 21st century, it was plausible to think that Taiwan could hold off a Chinese invasion even without direct American assistance. However, so dramatic has been the swing in the balance of military power across the Taiwan Strait over the past 30 years that Taiwan’s prospects of withstanding a Chinese assault without help from American forces are now grim.

Officially, the US has always remained cagey about whether it would come to Taiwan’s aid, but the mere prospect of it exercised a deterrent effect on China. Under the Trump administration, however, ambiguity is giving way to the suspicion that US intervention is so unlikely that this deterrent will wear off. During his second term, US President Donald Trump has threatened, insulted and bullied allies around the world. After a trip to Beijing in May, he said of the prospect of protecting Taiwan: “The last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9500 miles away.”

Predictably, Trump got the facts wrong. The distance between Washington, DC, and Taipei is less than 8000 miles; but his instinct for questioning the verities of US security policy remains acute.   

All of which made it remarkable to find, as I did on a recent visit to Taipei, that the Taiwanese appear reluctant to talk about the implications of an eroding American deterrent. To understand why, it is important to appreciate the military situation Taipei now faces.

China’s explosive economic growth since the early 1990s has enabled a massive increase in its defence budget, much of it devoted to increasing its ability to invade Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party regards as its territory. Beijing spends at least 12 times as much on its military as Taipei does.

The “weight of fire” China can now direct at Taiwan – that is, the amount of high explosive it could fire at the island to suppress its defences – has grown sharply through the modernisation of its air and missile forces. The growth in China’s ability to move tens of thousands of troops and their equipment across the strait to mount an amphibious invasion has been slower, but that’s also changing.

Last year, photos emerged of Chinese invasion barges, mobile platforms that can be sailed to shallow waters where legs would be lowered to fix the vessels to the ocean floor. When several such vessels are connected end-to-end by bridging equipment, they create a long pier that can allow ships to dock alongside, to then disgorge hundreds of vehicles over a beach.

The implications for Taiwan were obvious and ominous.

It is true that amphibious operations are highly complex, dangerous and resource intensive. The narrow Taiwan Strait remains a formidable natural barrier to any Chinese ambition to subjugate the island by force. The ships crossing it will be vulnerable to Taiwanese missiles, drones and mines.

In Taiwan’s rush to learn tactical lessons from the Ukraine war, it seems the strategic lesson is being missed or perhaps wilfully ignored. Yet when one steps back to examine the big picture, the parallels between that war and a prospective conflict over Taiwan are ominous.

The war in Ukraine has given Taiwanese policymakers and strategists hope because it sets an example of a smaller state defying the military odds against a great power. Of special significance to Taiwan is Ukraine’s spectacular success against the Russian navy. Using anti-ship missiles and small, uncrewed surface vessels, Ukraine has effectively neutralised the Russian Black Sea fleet which, at least on paper, vastly outweighed Ukraine’s navy at the start of the war in 2022.

However, Taiwan would face a much larger maritime force than Russia could muster and, unlike Ukraine, it has no land borders with friendly countries to allow for the easy resupply of vital weapons.

Moreover, despite the hope offered by Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression, there is no prospect that Taiwan can correct the military imbalance with China.

At a conference I attended in Taipei, the director of the American Institute in Taiwan, which acts as the de facto US embassy, said he too was encouraged by the Ukraine war. Director Raymond Greene spoke of “a new era of warfare, an age of asymmetry that rewards ingenuity and rapid adaptation”. Taiwan was lauded for increasing its defence spending and for passing a supplementary defence budget devoted to building a drone industry.

Yet it’s hard to see this making enough of a difference. China only spends about 2 per cent of GDP on defence, so it too has room for substantial growth. And China already has a massive lead in drone technology. If there was now a China–Taiwan drone arms race, there is no doubt about the winner.

The “asymmetric” advantage offered by drones has also been overstated. The period in which it allowed a smaller power to overcome or at least permanently frustrate a larger enemy appears to be over. The wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf demonstrate that big powers can adapt too – both Russia and the US have deployed versions of Iran’s cheap and plentiful Shahed drone, the weapon that popularised this new era of warfare.

Old action-reaction patterns are asserting themselves. A new offensive weapon like the Shahed begets a defensive response, in the form of Ukraine’s network of anti-drone weapons, now being offered for export to Persian Gulf states. That in turn provokes development of more sophisticated and thus more expensive attack drones to overcome the new defences. And so on. Thus, the asymmetric moment quickly passes.

More importantly, in Taiwan’s rush to learn tactical lessons from the Ukraine war, it seems the strategic lesson is being missed or perhaps wilfully ignored. Yet when one steps back to examine the big picture, the parallels between that war and a prospective conflict over Taiwan are ominous.

Both cases involve a nuclear-armed great power invading a smaller neighbour that has close security ties to the US. If the Taiwanese were looking for a signal about what the US might do in response to a Chinese invasion, Ukraine offers a chilling lesson. Granted, Washington has given Ukraine vital military supplies and intelligence support and imposed heavy sanctions on Russia. These have helped Ukraine to frustrate Russia’s ambitions to overthrow the Zelensky government and install a puppet regime. Moscow cannot realistically achieve its war aims against Ukraine.

Yet Moscow has achieved one objective by demonstrating that the US steadfastly refuses to directly enter a war in which its vital interests are not at stake. Former president Joe Biden drew the line firmly just after Russia’s invasion: “We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

The phrasing was apposite because, as Biden understood, any direct confrontation between American and Russian forces could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons.

Of course, Taiwan’s relationship with Washington is not exactly analogous to that between Washington and Kyiv. The US and Taiwan have much deeper historical ties. The Taiwan Relations Act, dating from the Carter administration, commits the US to providing Taipei with arms and declares that the use of force against Taiwan would be of grave concern to the US.

Still, those legal and historical ties must be weighed against the possibility that, just like in Ukraine, direct confrontation between Chinese and US military forces could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. The US would need an excellent reason to commit itself to Taiwan in the face of such risks. Even the prospect of losing access to Taiwan’s chip fabrication plants would not pass the test. None of this was a problem when the Taiwan Relations Act was signed in 1979, because China was weak, but that’s no longer true.

In the event China threatens Taiwan, whoever occupies the White House will be asking the same unsentimental question about the limits of America’s interests. Trump merely exacerbates Taiwan’s dilemma by speaking so plainly: why would the US take major risks to help a country so far away?

One interlocutor in Taipei told me, only half in jest, that when it comes to Taiwan policy, he prefers to ignore Trump and listen only to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a more conventional Republican figure who remains committed to Taiwan’s defence.

One sympathises. Australia, too, finds it difficult to face the painful prospect that US security guarantees are nothing of the sort. Australia also prefers to cling to old certainties, even as evidence accumulates that the US is not committed to protecting its allies. The difference is that Australia has excellent prospects for a viable and affordable defence, even if we assume the US won’t come to our aid in an emergency. Taiwan does not.

Watch Sam Roggeveen and Hugh White discuss Australia’s Taiwan options in the latest episode of Foreign Exchange at The Saturday Paper’s YouTube page.