That’s the argument being made by an anonymous writer of an advocacy piece just published (read it here) by the Atlantic Council, a private think tank that promotes U.S.-European alliances (read about it here).
Rather than try to describe the paper, and the real-world background behind it, I’ll direct you to the excellent CNBC article here that does a far better job of that than I can. If you find access blocked, I describe how to get past it here.
The CNBC article briefly sums up the dilemma as follows:
“It may seem a simple exercise in logic that when a country over time grows more authoritarian, with power invested increasingly in one individual, that any strategy to manage that country would need to begin at the top. Experts have been approaching Putin’s Russia through that lens for some time.
“However, the initial debate this week that followed the publication of “The Longer Telegram” ranged from one former senior U.S. official who welcomed the paper because of its clear and lucid focus on Xi, to another who worried that such a U.S. approach would be considered as an endorsement for regime change that could only sharpen tensions.”
There’s no doubt that China is a complex policy problem, and many people steeped in foreign affairs believe it will be the biggest foreign policy challenge America faces in the 21st century. I’m not expert, but I tend to agree. Moreover, I think China’s assertiveness under Xi, in a variety of spheres, combined with its rapid military potential, has the potential to produce a crisis during Biden’s presidency, although that’s not a certainty by any means.
One of the “red lines” the author of the paper would draw in the sand is, “Any Chinese military attack against Taiwan or its offshore islands.” I’m inclined to believe the readership of this blog is mostly a University crowd, so I don’t think I need to go much into the history of that long-simmering standoff. Taiwan is where the remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek’s defeated Nationalist Army fled to after Mao’s communists won China’s civil war in 1949, and China insists Taiwan is part of its sovereign territory, but Taiwan in fact is a capitalist democracy free of Beijing’s rule, with about 100 miles of rough seas between it and the mainland. The worry is that China may try to seize Taiwan by force.
This raises a number of questions: Can they? And what would America do to defend its ally if they tried? There seems to be a dearth of objective, scholarly-quality writing on this subject. The best recent military analysis I’ve found so far is Ian Easton’s The Chinese Invasion Threat: Taiwan’s Defense and American Strategy in Asia (2019; 428 pages). This book is advocacy; Easton isn’t an academic; he works for, and his research is funded by, a “Taiwan lobby” think tank, and the book is published by Taiwan’s largest English-language publisher, obviously with a view to making a pitch for Taiwan’s defense — and perhaps beefed-up arms sales — to an American audience. But it contains detailed facts about Taiwan’s defenses as well as information about Chinese thinking that could contribute substantially to understanding the problem and the policy choices America might face in the future, so I bought the book (from Amazon here) and I’ve started reading it.
For what it’s worth, Easton — who lived in Taiwan for several years, learned Chinese, and reads Chinese military papers and official state pronouncements as part of his research — thinks a Chinese invasion of Taiwan attempted today (as of 2019) would fail. But he also notes that China’s military doctrine and training focuses on invading Taiwan, and China’s military buildup is concentrated on capabilities for that purpose. It’s probably not wrong to conclude that seizing Taiwan by force is very much on the table in Beijing, and it will take strong and credible deterrence, and possibly a war, to keep Taiwan free.
Is that worth American lives? Perhaps a lot of them? If Biden doesn’t have to face that question, some future president might.