I'd like to take a short break from whatever it is that's going on in this thread and discuss some geopolitics for a while. Here's a short piece on the Taiwan issue I wrote entitled "The Strategic Utility of Frozen Conflicts":
I've been giving some thought to the Taiwan issue, its ultimate resolution, and how it fits into China's broader strategic and historical objectives. I'd first like to briefly comment on how I define those objectives: one is China removing the last vestige of the Century of Humiliation and reclaiming its final lost territory, Taiwan, and the other is the military expulsion of the United States from Asia and establishing China as its undisputed hegemon. While those goals overlap, they are logically distinct and thus I initially thought they could be considered in isolation, especially since the former is more readily achievable than the latter in the near future. However, I've come to the realization that separating those goals is erroneous.
To see why, I have to discuss how I thought China would approach war, and I will admit that my previous thoughts on the matter were somewhat naive. I thought that the only arbiter of whether China would go to war would be how it weighed its chances of victory and at what cost victory would come, and while that clearly is a very important consideration, it's far from the whole story. I hadn't considered what one might call the "narrative" part of a war; wars must be, for want of a better term, saleable to history.
Consider the wars America fought after it emerged victorious from the Cold War - every single one was waged against pitifully weak opponents, yet all were accompanied by grandiose narratives that bordered on the comical like "the responsibility to protect." America could have flicked countries like Serbia, Iraq, etc. off the map without regaling us with its paeans to Freedom and Democracy™ and how it was going to save the world from being swallowed up by Milosevic and Saddam.
The point isn't to poke fun at the US's hamfisted lies, it's to point out that the US had to lie. Even against such feeble enemies and at such minimal costs to itself, it still had to sell its wars. There's no reason to believe the same doesn't hold true for China. It's only soulless nationalists like Yours Truly who view war as simply one of many instruments of statecraft and the decision to go to war as reducing to a clinical cost-benefit analysis; most people don't share that sangfroid and that's probably for the best. For most, the decision to support or oppose war is a deeply emotional one based on national honour, culture, pride, fear, anger, righteousness, and what have you. Nobody ever gave "because we can win" as a reason to go to war, even though it's by far and away the best reason. There are always stories and myths involved.
Once again, China is no different - a war to reunify Taiwan would be deeply emotionally resonant in China, whereas a war to expel the US from Japan and South Korea wouldn't be, even though I believe a good argument can be made for the latter being far more strategically important. How to resolve this conundrum? Well, the solution lies in the title of this piece: defer any war with Taiwan until China is powerful enough to broaden the scope of the conflict to one of serving the latter goal (America's expulsion) primarily and the former goal (reunification) secondarily. This would allow China to advance its cold national interest under the umbrella of an emotive "righteous" war.
Following this logic, my previous thinking that China should decisively resolve the Taiwan issue the moment it attains the military capability to do so is a deeply misguided one. China would gain Taiwan, but it would lose the appreciating asset that is the frozen conflict. If after this China pursued its goal to expel the US, that would smack of a war of aggression against Japan and Korea. Even the most sympathetic supporter would be forced to admit that this was a war China chose to fight after it had unified and righted the wrongs inflicted on it. However, an identical campaign waged against Japan and Korea in the context of a reunification war against Taiwan would at the very least be controversial; it would be easy to argue that these steps are necessary to defeat US intervention in support of Taiwanese separatists. That at the end of it the US would be gone from the region, well... that's a bonus.
If the US took China seriously enough to work through a similar analysis, how would it respond? Counterintuitively, the best move would be to push Taiwan into declaring independence and then leaving it high and dry. This would have the twin benefit of nullifying China's future pretexts and give the US a face-saving way out of having to defend Taiwan. If any ally looks at the US in horror, it can simply say "I said I'd help them if they didn't do anything crazy. They did something crazy, so they're on their own." In the best spirit of "be careful what you wish for", we should not want this outcome, or any political settlement with Taiwan, before China is ready to play for all the marbles.
So here's hoping the present situation remains exactly as it is now. No war, no political settlement, no declarations of independence, no resolution of any kind. Just a conflict placed in the freezer as China pumps out warship after warship.
