Let’s Be Honest About Taiwan

For some years, the main division among self-described foreign policy realists is over what to do about China, and, specifically, what to do about Taiwan. The group led by Elbridge Colby, lately foreign policy advisor for the former President Donald Trump, believes that Chinese hegemony in Asia, the first step towards which will be reunification with Taiwan, will cause the eclipse of American economic power; America must be willing then at least to consider armed support for the Republic of China, if other deterrents fail. A variety of critics, including our own Doug Bandow, suggest the overarching threat is overblown, or, at any rate, not worth risking war between nuclear-armed powers. So things stand in our world.

There are merits to each line of argument, but the dispute looks increasingly irrelevant. Irrespective of what ought to be done, it is growing apparent that the United States simply will not be in a position to wage conventional war against China.

Consider last week’s news that the Navy plans to mothball 17 Military Sealift Command (MSC) ships because of an ongoing manpower shortage. MSC is exactly what it says in the name, the organ responsible for providing military transports and logistical support by sea. You may be aware that Taiwan is an island on the thither side of the world’s largest ocean, and any American plan to wage war in its environs will involve moving rather a lot of people and stuff there by ship. As we wrote at some length in the latest print issue of The American Conservative, MSC has been suffering a mariner shortage since at least 2017, and structural factors have prevented the supply of mariners from growing quickly enough both to cover turnover and to fill the gap.  Further, a premise of MSC is that in times of war it may call upon the American merchant fleet to aid its efforts. The Chinese merchant fleet outnumbers the American merchant fleet by roughly 50 to 1. Simply put, it is unlikely that we will get men and materiel to the front in anything like sufficient numbers to counter the Chinese, who are far better prepared to supply a front that is anyway much closer to them than it is to us.

Or consider the ongoing debacle of the Constellation-class frigate, the warship intended to do the yeoman’s work of any naval operations in coastal waters. The ships were commissioned and their construction begun without a finalized design, which, in the classic bizarro logic of our military–industrial complex, meant it was to be completed more quickly and with better specifications than otherwise. Instead, the real world intruded, and the development has been quagmired by basic design changes. A GAO report in May said the process is “at a standstill” and projected that the first ship will be delivered no earlier than April 2029, three years late.

China-watching is a game for fools and fortune-tellers, but the word on the street is that Xi Jinping means to take Taiwan by the end of the decade—2027 gets thrown about a fair bit, with some of our professional seers saying the blow will come as early as 2025. If we accept this broad five-year range as something like the truth, it doesn’t matter whether the United States wants to go to war or not; we simply will not be able to. It isn’t merely a matter of the certain decline that attends a power entering a war for which it is fundamentally unprepared, a la the British Empire in 1938. The invasion will be over by time we put sufficient assets in the neighborhood—or even by time we have assets to put in the neighborhood. To contest the matter on the field of battle, we would have had to begin serious preparations the better part of a decade ago, and we are simply out of time.

The question then is how to reduce the upside for China and the downside for the U.S. The American classics, sanctions and proxy war, will get trotted out. Sanctions do not have what you’d call a track record of success in accomplishing their stated policy goals, and, unlike Russia, China is in a position to levy actually painful countersanctions against the U.S. Proxy wars have their own risks, and the American arsenal is significantly thinner than it was in 2022. Nor does it look as if it will replenish meaningfully as we continue our escapades in Eastern Europe and the great, blood-drenched sandbox of the Middle East. 

The inertia and dysfunction of the American defense establishment have proven insurmountable; it is not clear that anyone in that establishment is especially interested in trying something new. At this writing, roughly a third of American naval assets are in the Middle East, and there is not a single aircraft carrier in the Western Pacific—a nice snapshot of existing priorities and readiness.

American policymakers should begin to consider policies to ameliorate the effects on the U.S. of a Taiwan invasion. Acting as if war is a viable policy is fantasy, nothing more or less.