The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan

by Matt Pottinger

But there is good reason to believe that in the coming decade, the greatest threat will come from Asia and the world’s most powerful autocracy, the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

This is not simply a general military buildup to buttress China’s rise as a global superpower. It is quite specifically designed to achieve coercively—through military invasion, strangulation by blockade, or some sequence of the two—what the Communist leaders in Beijing term “unification of Taiwan with the motherland.”

Now it is Taiwan that is in the crosshairs of totalitarian aggressive ambition. And what today’s powerful democracies do or fail to do to deter the potential aggressor, China, will be every bit as consequential for the future of world peace and order. It is not merely that Taiwan—like Czechoslovakia in the 1930s—is a democracy in a difficult neighborhood.

Larry Diamond William L. Clayton Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Stanford University

If just one lesson could be drawn from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it must be that deterrence would have been a lot cheaper than war.

Beijing intensified its long-standing campaign to impose Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea, home to some of the world’s most important international sea-lanes and fishing grounds. China is using its coast guard to block and ram Philippine vessels tasked with sustaining or regaining Manila’s administrative control of offshore islets that Beijing claims for itself, in defiance of international norms and court rulings.

In a 2017 address to the 19th Party Congress in Beijing, Xi said that “complete national unification is an inevitable requirement for realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”6 In 2019 in Beijing, at the Meeting Marking the 40th Anniversary of the Issuance of the Message to Compatriots in Taiwan, he said: “The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and reunification of our country are a surging popular trend.

The implication is hard to miss: Xi is equating a failure to subsume Taiwan with a failure to enact his overarching goals as China’s leader.

This and similar statements by Xi are a far cry from then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s famous line, in 1984, that China could wait “1,000 years” to unify with Taiwan if necessary.

When Biden responded by “assuring Xi that Washington was determined to maintain peace in the region,” Xi’s response was blunt. Per the US official: President Xi responded: “Look, peace is . . . all well and good, but at some point we need to move toward resolution more generally.”11

His tough signaling extended to China’s official readout of the meeting, which quoted Xi as follows: The United States should embody its stance of not supporting “Taiwan independence” in concrete actions, stop arming Taiwan, and support China’s peaceful reunification. China will eventually be reunified and will inevitably be reunified.12

“In the face of major risks and strong opponents, to always want to live in peace and never want struggle is unrealistic,” Xi said in his November 2021 speech to the Sixth Plenum of the 19th Party Congress in Beijing.13 “All kinds of hostile forces will absolutely never let us smoothly achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Based on this, I have repeatedly stressed to the entire Party that we must carry out a great struggle.”

Xi praised then paramount leader Mao Zedong’s decision to enter the Korean War in 1950. “Facing the threat and provocation of the United States,” Mao and his comrades made the brave decision to go to war, Xi said. As he put it:

The language shows Xi framing Mao’s move as a preemptive attack to avoid what Xi called “the dangerous situation of ‘invaders camping at the gates.’”

Xi’s choice of words was surely meant to signal his own preparedness to wage war under analogous circumstances and, chillingly, his tolerance for risking national “ruin” as the price of victory over China’s enemies.

“Western countries headed by the United States have implemented containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” Xi said in a March 2023 address.17

In the fourth speech, on March 13, Xi announced that the “unification of the motherland” was the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign—a

These statements, it is important to understand, weren’t propaganda meant for Western ears. They were authoritative instructions delivered by Xi to the Chinese Communist Party. They are taken seriously by the country’s governing apparatus. We should give them at least the same weight that analysts ascribe to leaked Oval Office conversations about war and peace.22

This book offers practical and feasible steps that democracies should pursue urgently to deter Xi from triggering a catastrophic war over Taiwan. The book focuses mainly on the military dimension.

This isn’t because economic, financial, informational, and diplomatic tools are unimportant when trying to dissuade adversaries; it’s because they have little chance of succeeding in the absence of credible hard power—the sine qua non for effective deterrence.

Ross Babbage reminds us in chapter 12, “deterrence involves using one’s actions to deliver the strongest possible psychological impact on the opposing decision-making elite so as to persuade them to desist, delay, or otherwise alter their operations to one’s advantage.”

The biggest challenges are insufficient stockpiles of munitions, such as antiship missiles, and the means to produce more of them rapidly; and insufficient planning, training, rehearsals, and coordination within and between the United States, Taiwan, and other threatened democracies. The coauthors believe that

“kinetic effects are what determine results . . . and the majority of kinetic effects are from legacy systems. So don’t ‘sunset’ legacy systems prematurely while awaiting the ‘sunrise’ of next-generation capabilities. Otherwise, we’ll be left stranded at midnight.”24

This means democracies must increase their defense spending sharply to keep key legacy systems working and to scale up the production of munitions while we research and develop new systems.

China may have a large arsenal of antiship ballistic missiles to keep US aircraft carriers at bay, but Washington has formidable allies in the region that could help thwart Beijing’s war aims if they joined an effort to defend Taiwan. This is why we argue, in chapter 10, for Tokyo to publicly embrace the near inevitability that it would be compelled to fight in the event China attacks Taiwan.

China may be physically close to Taiwan, but geography offers asymmetric advantages for the defender too. Taiwan’s mountainous coastline, poor landing beaches, and urban sprawl present foreboding challenges for an invader.

Some related themes run throughout this book.

1. The future of democracy, sovereignty, and prosperity in Taiwan matters for the future of democracy, sovereignty, and prosperity in Asia and beyond.

After all, there were dire predictions in the 1960s and 1970s about what a US loss in Vietnam would spell for the future of Asia and for American power in the region—predictions that never came to pass. “Domino theory” didn’t play out and communism didn’t spread from Indochina.

But this is the wrong analogy. A more apt precedent would be Imperial Japan’s aggression and brief domination of the Asia-Pacific in the first half of the 1940s as Tokyo foisted its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere upon hundreds of millions of unwilling subjects.

Xi Jinping, in a landmark speech in Shanghai in 2014, even declared, “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia”—a formulation eerily similar to the “Asia for Asians” slogan Tokyo adopted in 1940 when it set out to impose its concept of a self-contained, regional economic and security bloc controlled by Japan.27

Taipei’s fall would represent much more than a mere Vietnam-style unification; it would herald the dawn of a new empire—one that would suit Beijing’s brand of muscular authoritarianism and strongly disfavor the interests of the United States and its fellow democracies.

2. Long-term deterrence won’t be achieved haphazardly as a by-product of other defense objectives; it will be achieved when it is the primary goal.

As commander in chief, the president, along with his top aides, should participate in exercises covering a wide range of scenarios to test the consequences of various decisions so the president can be confident and swift in wartime. The elected leaders of Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and other democracies should follow suit.

3. The United States and its allies must urgently expand their capacity for making munitions.

One silver lining is that in war, time tends to be a better friend to the defender than to the aggressor.

Admiral Yoji Koda, author of chapter 11 and a former commander of the Japanese fleet, told me that Americans often consider the June 1942 Battle of Midway to be the decisive naval engagement of World War II. Japanese military historians don’t all see it that way, he said. Rather, it was the months of sea battles that followed, many of them without names, during which the US armed forces decisively wore down the Imperial Japanese Navy thanks to superior production of ships, munitions, aircraft, and incremental technologies, such as those that gave the Americans an edge in nighttime combat. This “War of the Destroyers,” as Koda calls it, was more costly to Japan than the Battle of Midway.

4. A Nation’s will to fight is the great “X factor” in war, and it can be strengthened by courageous leaders.

But the will to fight is less tangible than bombers and antiship missiles, submarines and torpedoes, sea mines and combat drones.

This book argues that Taiwan must adopt a new military culture.

Taiwan would do better transplanting cultural elements from other nations that, like itself, face steep odds. Think Estonia, Finland, Ukraine, and Israel.

Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the benefits of Israel’s warrior ethos have been on display again as Israelis have unified, despite bitter domestic political differences, to wage a war to destroy Hamas.

What the American people must sacrifice to win a Taiwan war will be far greater than the indirect support they have, to date, provided to Ukraine.

This makes preventing war all the more desirable and important. Yet the 1930s-style isolationism that has infected pockets of the political discourse in America and Europe bodes ill for deterrence.

Biden made no mention of China in the speech. Yet Beijing serves as a propaganda engine for, and the primary economic and diplomatic sponsor of, the revanchist autocracies that Biden did single out in his address: Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Whether Xi is acting opportunistically or according to a grand design (or, more likely, both), it is clear he sees advantage in the compounding crises on multiple continents—crises that run the risk of exhausting the United States and its allies and setting the table for a possible move on Taiwan.

“Since the most recent period, the most important characteristic of the world is, in a word, ‘chaos,’ and this trend appears likely to continue,” Xi told a seminar of high-level officials in January 2021.29

The world is now undergoing a transition so massive that nothing like it has ever been seen before. At its core, this transition is being driven by the following changes: The United States is becoming weak. China is becoming strong. Russia is becoming aggressive. And Europe is becoming chaotic. . . . The Chinese nation-state is rising and the Chinese ethnos is resurgent. This is an historic turning point.30

the preponderance of American military focus should be on acquiring the means to deter and, if necessary, defeat China in war.

But any strategy that underplays the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East risks inadvertently deepening those crises and inviting aggression elsewhere.