China and the United States face a growing likelihood of conflict over the status of Taiwan, a contest that current and former officials fear could lead to upheaval unseen since World War II.
“I am sure that we are going to be in a kinetic conflict with China in five years,” retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said Wednesday. “I hope I’m wrong, but I believe within the next five years there’s going to be a kinetic conflict — missiles, submarines, aircraft; not so much land operations. … It’s just about inevitable.”
That prospect presents a high-stakes dilemma for U.S. officials, who could face a choice between rallying to the embattled island democracy or conceding the loss and allowing Chinese communist officials to achieve a major victory that might empower Beijing to break the broader U.S. alliance network and dominate the Indo-Pacific region. President Joe Biden’s team has declined to say explicitly whether he would send U.S. forces to defend Taiwan, but his administration is telling Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping not to risk a clash with the United States.
“I think it would broaden quickly, and it would fundamentally trash the global economy in ways that I don’t think anyone can predict,” Kurt Campbell, the White House National Security Council’s lead official for the Indo-Pacific, said Tuesday during a discussion hosted by the Financial Times while contemplating what would happen if the U.S. and China were to come to blows.
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Campbell refused to declare explicitly that the U.S. would defend Taiwan in a crisis, in keeping with a long-standing U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” about how Washington would respond.
“I believe that there are some significant downsides to the kind of what is called strategic clarity that you lay out,” he said.
U.S. officials and lawmakers are nevertheless growing more emphatic in their message of support for Taiwan, as Campbell’s boss made clear last week.
“What we would like to see is stability in cross-strait relations and no effort to unilaterally change the ‘status quo,’” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told the Aspen Institute in remarks that attracted attention in Taiwanese media. “That is how we are going to continue to approach the Taiwan issue going forward, with steadiness, clarity, and resolve with respect to our view that there should be no unilateral changes to the ‘status quo.'”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned China on Tuesday that “it would be a very serious mistake” to change the status quo — a multi-decade situation in which Beijing has refused to relinquish its claim to sovereignty over the island, but likewise refused to try to bring the island under the mainland regime’s control by force. Chinese communist officials have never renounced the possible use of force, but they have prioritized “peaceful reunification” nonetheless.
Blinken’s statement dovetailed with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s pledge in October that “whether it’s Taiwan or the challenge presented to Japan, the United States will be a good partner for security in every dimension.”
Hodges, speaking to the United Kingdom-based Council on Geostrategy, suggested that the Western failure to make Chinese officials regret their crackdown on Hong Kong over the last year has emboldened Beijing to risk a military conflict.
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“I just think the language coming out of Beijing about Taiwan, the fact that nobody did anything, truthfully, about what the Chinese have done in Hong Kong, to include the U.K. surprisingly, how little the response has been, and then the increasing aggression, aggressiveness, by the Chinese in the South China Sea — it seems to me it’s just about inevitable,” Hodges said. “I don’t want to say inevitable, but it’s very close to it.”
