Reality Check - Taiwan cannot be defended

The fourteenth issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines the rising tensions over the future of Taiwan, as China’s pursuit of “unification” pits it against the United States and US allies such as Australia. The Taiwan Choice looks at the growing risk of a catastrophic war and the outlook for Australia as it faces a strategic choice that could reshape its future in Asia.
Published on 21 February, Issue 14 examines the rising tensions over the future of Taiwan and Hugh White discusses why war over Taiwan is the gravest danger Australia has faced.
Hugh White AO is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University.
His work focuses primarily on Australian strategic and defence policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, and global strategic affairs especially as they influence Australia and the Asia-Pacific.
He has served as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments, as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, as a senior adviser on the staffs of Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and as a senior official in the Department of Defence, where from 1995 to 2000 he was Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence, and as the first Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). In the 1970s he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities. He was the principal author of Australia’s 2000 Defence White Paper.
His major publications include Power Shift: Australia’s future between Washington and Beijing, [2010], The China Choice: Why America should share power, [2012], Without America: Australia’s future in the New Asia [2017], and How to defend Australia [2019]
For a copy visit www.australianforeignaffairs....
Discount Code for your copy of the Australian Foreign Affairs - 14th Ed - AFA3OFF
#taiwan #china #uschina #indopacific #asia #quad #anu #hughwhite

[@philipwong895]

It will be challenging for the US and its allies to deal with nuclear-armed Russia and China, considering their past attempts to introduce their democracy, values, regime change, nation-building, and rules-based order to the farmers of Vietnam (which caused the death of three million Vietnamese), Grenada, Yugoslavia, the goat herders of Afghanistan, Iraq (up to 1 million Iraqis died), Libya, Syria, etc. Russia: Let's be friends US: No EU: No China: Yes Global South: Yes China: Let's be friends US: No EU: Maybe Russia: Yes Global South: Yes

[@LovingFeelingThinking]

Brilliant summary. You got it! lol

[@phil20_20]

The Right Wing has done us wrong.

[@magnaviator]

Very insightful analysis.

[@alanfriesen9837]

An awful lot of people in Taiwan have ancestral roots on the mainland. If there is a lot of identifiable resistance after reunification, troublemakers could be sent back to their ancestral villages. I don't think it would take too long to integrate Taiwan back into the rest of China. At one point people in Taiwan could look at the mainlanders as backwards, but I don't think that's the case anymore.

[@liubang9375]

When China decided to liberate Taiwan they will take on consideration that US will luanch military or economical intervention, therefore with or without US interference the Chinese will still go ahead with it ..

[@naguoning]

Taiwan can't be "liberated" by China, only raped. We don't want to be a part of the PRC. It is not a liberation.

[@AaBb-nj1hd]

Apprecuate the comphrehensive, rational, and insightful deductions!

[@bentao3352]

Kiev was a feint. What the guest is saying validates the strategy

[@scottbuchanan9426]

Yes, I was reading a fascinating article in The National Interest by a PhD student at the University of Chicago, and he made essentially the same point. It makes no sense otherwise (and all evidence to that point would argue against rashness on Putin's part).

[@fannyalbi9040]

fear and hate political correctness ideology does in fact useful mind tool

[@alfred-vz8ti]

taiwan has been and will be a province of china. that is both history, and prevailing shift of power from usa to prc. prc can wait a bit, but too long and usg will imagine they have won. prc is reluctant to ruin taiwan, while usg doesn't care. so prc must prefer peaceful means of reclaiming their province. but there must be a limit to reluctant. it's a puzzlement! perhaps the solution is to open a chinese base in a central american nation, and start regular patrols of the caribbean sea. mexico would be good. now that they are in brics, one more step toward prc would be an education moment to the pople of usa.

[@hydroac9387]

This hasn't aged well. 1) A pack of destroyers can block the majority of oil going through the Straits of Malacca, as long as they are outside of the Chinese substantial missile force. Seeing that China is reliant on imported oil for ~70% to ~80% of its needs and the vast majority of this oil comes through the Straits this is going to be problematic in the extreme for China. Then there's food, which China huge net importer also. The USA could position a quad of destroyers (just west of the Strait) with orders to interdict oil and food to China. Since they don't have a blue water navy China couldn't respond. This could be kept in place long as necessary 2) The Chinese demographic situation is that they are now #2 (behind India, which is #1) and have 1.3 billion people. And they are by some measures the fastest aging country in history of the world. In fact, the UN forecasts that by 2100 they will have about 850 million people. Some forecasters think this is optimistic, and that for the Chinese the worst case scenario is that China will have 700 million people. This puts them on the clock, among other problems. By comparison, the USA is projected for steady growth through the 2050s, which is astounding since by 2100 the populations of the USA and China may very well be comparable 3) The economic troubles in China are enormous: the semiconductor limitations orchestrated by the USA; the wildly over-built residential property sector; and the tumbling stock market, just to name a few. They certainly have not had the post-Covid bounce back, which was expected. These are all serious issues that won't be settled quickly, and its very distracting for the Chinese 4) The Chinese are trying mightily to avoid US sanctions due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is one malady they've by and large dodged, much to Russia's dismay The bottom line is that President Xi will think twice before ordering an invasion

[@lukuanvx]

Professor White's viewpoints are refreshing in the current era of fake news from the western media. 1) Taiwan’s Situation: Between 2008 and 2016, people in Taiwan and China had been very friendly. The tourist industry and trade benefitted Taiwan tremendously. Both sides shared a view that people from both sides were Chinese even though they have different political systems and each side has a different “One China interpretation” according to the 1992 Consensus Agreement. However, there is always a group of people in Taiwan who refuse to admit that their ancestors are Chinese and they choose whatever ways to undermine the eventual unification of China and Taiwan. In 2016, this group, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won the election by spreading the fear and hatred of China and again in 2020 by exploiting the fear due to Hong Kong’s Extradition Bill. The party started cutting all ties with China and tore up the 1992 Consensus Agreement. After Trump became president, he accepted the congratulatory phone call from Taiwan’s president to provoke China. For President Trump, Taiwan is the best dagger he can use to attack China. His tactics is to increase the weapon sales to Taiwan and initiate trade wars and tech wars to suppress China’s rise. After the outbreak of COVID-19, Trump grew desperate and blamed China for spreading the virus as the main strategy of his re-election campaign. He sent high level officials from US to Taiwan to provoke China and he sent aircraft carriers to the South China Sea some 7000 miles away from USA. Can you imagine if China sends their aircraft carriers to Hawaii? In the meantime, Taiwan’s DPP utilized every opportunity to attack China to show that they have the courage and the support from USA to pursue the independence of Taiwan. For example, they cut off the supply of masks to China in January 2020 and they bar the Chinese vaccines when China offered the vaccines to Taiwan to alleviate the extreme shortage of the vaccine in Taiwan. The Taiwanese president kept using “Wuhan Virus” to provoke her base just like what Trump did in his re-election campaign. Yet, the DPP made no effort to reject Trump’s demand to move part of TSM’s production to Arizona (forced technology transfer to USA!!!) and ban semiconductor sales to Huawei. In case you don’t know, TSM is considered the Silicon Shield of Taiwan since it is a national treasure that China would not want to damage. It is hard to blame the people in China for feeling betrayed since the DPP used the huge trade surplus with China ($87 billion in 2020) to buy weapons from the USA. As a result, most Chinese people in mainland China are angry and, since 2019, are in favor of using force to reunify. It is Xi who uses his power to suppress the anger of the Chinese people from spiraling out of control. 2) Fighting spirit in Taiwan: Young men in Taiwan have little interest in joining military service and most of them are against being drafted even though they claim that they would be willing to fight Chinese PLA! In fact, most young Taiwanese between 18 and 20 expect US soldiers fight the Chinese PLA for them. At least 20% of the population in Taiwan would be happy to see the Chinese PLA remove the DPP from the island. The Taiwanese military expect US soldiers to fight with them, shoulder to shoulder, against the Chinese PLA. The top Taiwanese generals said that they could perhaps hold for two weeks. Realistically, they may only hold for 3-10 days without seeing US soldiers by their side, which is slightly better than the Afghanistan soldiers. Taiwanese military force is never going to be like the Israeli soldiers. There are no differences in religion, culture, lifestyle, or entertainment between Chinese and Taiwanese people. Both sides have a lot of friends and relatives. If you think Chinese CCP is the evil dictator while Taiwan under the DPP is the angel-like creature of democracy that deserves the lives of American soldiers, you would be very wrong. The Taiwanese DPP is corrupt, incompetent, and perhaps worse than CCP as the DPP just shut down a major TV station (CTI Television in Taiwan is comparable to CNN or Fox in the US) in 2020 because the station supported the opposition party. Taiwan does not have an independent justice branch so the DPP can manipulate the system including seizing assets from the opposition party. Taiwan is no longer a true democratic country that we would like to believe. The only thing they are good at is their propaganda machine which fools many Taiwanese as well as Americans. The tension from the two sides started because of DPP’s election strategy and Trump’s plot of dividing the two sides. 3) USA fighting Chinese PLA: We can prepare all the military actions we like. If China and USA attack each other, the market will tank 60% and sink the world economy into depression. Do you really think any US president would be that crazy to destroy his own political future as well as the lives of many US soldiers? If the death of 13 soldiers in Kabul caused such grief, can you imagine two USA carriers being sunk by DF-21D? What if the USA decided to drop nuclear bombs on China? China has only 300 nuclear warheads now. We would be stupid to provoke them into building up their nuclear capability. Keep in mind that Taiwan is China’s core interest. China would be willing to pay dearly (3 to 1 casualty if USA is involved) to get Taiwan back if they believe that USA is encouraging DPP to pursue independence. Don’t expect any other country to fight China in a proxy war unless American soldiers are standing in the frontlines. If Japan dares to join the US, Russia may join China for WW3. Then, the DPP’s dream will comes true as both China and USA will be annihilated. 4) If President Biden really wants to see a peaceful Taiwan Strait, he should demand Taiwan abide by the1992 Consensus Agreement so that both sides can work together again. This is the best solution for the people in Taiwan, China, and the world even though China Hawks in the USA would be greatly disappointed. 5) Of course, if the US wants to use Taiwan to provoke China (“Trump tactics”) into invading Taiwan, then we should identify the time frame that will cause the greatest pain for China. (e.g., US economic sanctions). One Chinese scholar believes that when their GDP exceeds the USA by 50%, they can handle these sanctions from the US. It could be 12 years from now. So, we would like to trick China into making the move in 6 years or so. In the meantime, we can continue to sell huge piles of decommissioned weapons to the Taiwanese for more than $5 billion per year, which is not bad business. Even though 200,000 Taiwanese may die, it is possibly the best outcome for the US since we would have completed the forced technology transfer from TSM to the US by then and the EU would agree to go along with the sanction against China. China’s rise will be delayed by 20 years or more. Is there anything cleverer than that? If Trump can think of that, it would make it a worthwhile discussion. It is somewhat cruel, but it could be the best solution to suppress China from threatening America’s hegemonic status in the world without the US getting involved militarily. Just close our eyes, think of USA first, and pull the trigger to see if Xi would fall for it and the Taiwanese would be as stupid as the Ukrainians.

[@scottbuchanan9426]

Quick word of advice: very few people are going to read a KZbin combox comment this long. You're better off starting your own blog.

[@naguoning]

Typical CCP BS. Understand we are not all Chinese ethnically. You need to learn about the first Taiwanese being Taiwanese Aboriginals. Actually the second group of people to impose any control /governance in Taiwan were not even Asian. They were Dutch. I am a citizen of Taiwan but I am not ethnically Chinese. Like most Taiwanese I don't have family from China. That is true of most Taiwanese as even most of the ethnically Chinese came a few hundred years ago. I was working in a restaurant that relied heavily on tourists in the Ma YingJiou years and we had very few China customers. Really those tourists only benefited a small section of Taiwan as they tended to only travel on group tours to pre-organized venues etc. We actually had more customers from HK than mainland China (we were over 90 percent local customers though). Tsai IngWen has been an excellent president in her 2nd term. I don't know yet for last year but I know for the year before we had higher economic growth than any other developed economy (over 6 percent in one year) which shows what a lie the CCP are telling when they say the DPP is bad for the economy. They only shut down one station after having repeatedly being caught broadcasting verifiably fake news which in one instance resulted in the suicide of a person who was unfairly maligned. In China they news is absolutely absurd (eg look how low their death reports are now for the virus). In Taiwan yes, we kept calling it WuHan pnemonia but well that name actually came from China (I first heard the phrase in China, not Taiwan). The attitude with regards to military service is changing. Note how it has already been announced (with high public support) that it will be extended. I think many younger Taiwanese were woken up by the NSL in HK and how the peaceful protests were crushed by the CCP who can never be trusted where as in Taiwan we have had multiple changes of party in power and different parties wining in different elections (eg presidential vs local), a sure sign we are actually democratic. The 1992 consensus has been verified as being just made up. Taiwan is an island with few natural landing points. It is a lot easier to defend an island than take it. Taiwan can probably hold out longer than most people understand. Note also Taiwan has American made planes that are far superior to Chinese ones even though China has more planes.

[@bellybutton6138]

@@naguoning Tsai Ling Wen is favorite pet. 😂 UN considered Formasa as part of China. How about Taiwan declaring independence? Shouldn't be difficult. Now Japan has pledged to protect Taiwan. 😂

[@naguoning]

@@bellybutton6138 You are a complete #^&*&(*)(. You can't even use English properly but you comment in English! WTF is "Tsai Ling Wen is favorite pet.". The UN also didn't recognise the PRC for a few decades. Perhaps you think the PRC didn't exist in the 1960s/70s?

[@carlossenequiert4791]

@@naguoningcateto los primeros fueron los portugueses y luego los españoles,date un baño de cultura antes de escribir memeces,pequeño capo racista.

[@ADerpyReality]

If we don't to trade with China we can just recognise Taiwan.

[@fannyalbi9040]

that’s fantasy not reality check 😅

[@simonchowkwchow5083]

Australia should copy the North Korea solution.😁

[@arcencielc2065]

Please read up on China and Taiwan's history. If you need inspiration, kindly watch Roger Waters' interview with CNN.

[@MattsFikezolo-lo7wq]

The US has fought many wars after the WW2, but never fought a strong and nuclear armed country. Always fought weak countries, most of them developing countries.

[@Ffsniper-zi1cx]

Probably bit too paranoid about CHN's rise. All CHN needs is respect, TW is part of it, not being pushed around by US is also part of it. Although may seem "violent" from Anglo Saxon perspective for now, after those boxes ticked, a few nice words would be sufficient to keep distance between CHN and AUS. The Chinese value is essentially to elevate their social status through business and exams, - not through wars like in the European tradition, because the latter never had the state organized exam system. Besides, even after US retreats from Asia, AUS would still be affiliated with US within a US protection circle, due to culture and language. With good relationship with both CHN and US at that point, there will be little worry from conflicts with India or Indonesia, which will become reality in multipolarity. But, the idea of siding with US to take on CHN, over TW or SCS - that is simply suicide. Geographically and industrially CHN has all the advantage. And remember, that violates CHN's fundamental requirement for respect, especially after the century of humiliation. Professor White is definitely right about that being a bad option for AUS.

[@davidgillman5368]

The history of Australia and submarines is fraught with inefficiency and difficult relationships with domestic and foreign players. We now want to relate to the USA and UK, NATO and AUKUS for our greater umbrella of defence. For submarines, we need to avoid the numerous earlier poor defence spending decisions and then now to end up with the currently requested in service fission nuclear-powered submarines. This is a terrible idea as these are now suddenly also about to be out of date and will soon become relatively obsolete like all their Australian predecessors and all Fission Nuclear Radiation Problematic issues. Contrary to what has yet been broadly publicised we have solved the problem of compact, inexpensive and totally safe FUSION NUCLEAR POWER and so this immediately becomes the vastly prefered option to power the newer necessary hunter-killer submarines. We need to immediately strive to take the new and world-leading path to new these "State of the art" nuclear submarines, the vastly superior technology of which will not yet be available to potential enemies. I would love to hear the opinions of our actually presently serving submariners and from potential new recruits. Almost costless electricity from simple, plentiful, and universally obtainable hydrogen fuel stock to enable new Fusion NuclearPower is now immediately upon us, even though you may not have yet heard about it. We have recently taken a new step to advance the physics of power production by enabling the chemistry of the atomic nucleus, or "nuchemy", in the newest FUSION NUCLEAR POWER., the technology of the SAFIR REACTOR. We are passing the chemistry level where we interacted with the atomic electron shells and are moving on to manipulations in this "NUCHEMY" atomic nuclear era when we interact and multiply nuclear protons. We have rediscovered the lost work of the alchemists and can make new elements with different atomic weights. This was ably demonstrated in "TheSafire Project". We now have hydrogen stock and enough energy in it to manipulate the atomic nucleus much more easily by creating a compartment, or what is a local region of plasma containment so reactions at this atomic nuclear level can easily take place. This is about to practically enabled really fantastic and almost costless and unlimited energy production for the whole of mankind. This with hydrogen, which can be free fuel obtained from water or atmospheric moisture anywhere in the world. This new Fusion Nuclear Energy is at the industrial commercial production final development point as of now. The energy argument and other power methodologies are all now virtually irrelevant as we have new and very physically and economically powered practical and local community level fusion nuclear power. The only question is whether or not Canada and the USA (DARPA) will allow it to be produced and disseminated worldwide as they hold the vital patents for this potentially earth-changing Fusion Technology. While Solar roof plus Teslawall battery may be the present way to go domestically but megapack batteries and multiple storage technologies interconnected with an expanded ugly and vulnerable electric grid have a less certain requirement when you consider new any-scale community based and 24 hr reliable and self-fuelling fusion nuclear in the form of this such compact, radiation-safe and super-inexpensive "SAFIRE REACTOR". Learn all bout it at the Canadian company's "AUREON ENERGY.COM". website Learn the newer EU Theory and the greater expanse of plasma physics at "THUNDERBOLTS PROJECT.COM" and you will be permanently re-educated with this advanced new EU Theory that will also allow you to understand more about the astrophysics of our whole universe and all within. Sincerely, Dr David M.Gillman at [e-mail]

[@amiigose]

😂😂😂😂lol

[@sophiemariekung5086]

China+ the U.S.+ Australia are huge geographical nation, whereas Germany+Japan want to expand their territorial boundaries. This is where Hugh White failed to analyze the root cause of Ukraine and Taiwan connection. Both the Brookings Institution in DC + Hugh White concluded Taiwan cannot be defended after identifying the international determinants--power, geography, natural resources, population, technology. However, both failed to analyze the change inside the black box, meaning how Germany-Japan use John Mearsheimer and Francis Fukuyama to influence the U.S. policy, allowing Scott Morrison to destroy China-Australia good relations.