Tag: Taiwan

The Next Big One

On June 19, 2025

Several months ago, I wrote two essays on Russian grand strategy. (My apologies on never completing the nuclear one, an extremely necessary but far too grim subject for my taste.) In that series of essays, I made a few assertions I want to bring to your attention again in a more contemporary context. First, that wars’ result tends to confirm the strengths of the coalition arrayed against the main combatants before the war has even started. This is, in fact, not an assertion, but an iron law of warfare that still exists in chimpanzee warfare. See Strategy: A History, Chapter One, by Freedman if you disagree.

Second, that big global dustups tend to run in about 100 year cycles these days.

So, take a look around — got a big, hot war in the Ukraine slightly analogous to the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s. Next, you got weird, unresolved shenanigans in the Middle East that have a weird reverse-appeasement type feel.

We’re quite possibly looking at the two opening battles of WWIII, right now.

What Would Chinese Democracy Look Like?

By Ian Welsh

On December 1, 2021

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A few months ago I read a couple of books by the Singaporean intellectual Kishore Mahbubani. In Has China Already Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, Mahbubani discusses Taiwan.

The one exceptional trigger for a war involving China is Taiwan. Most of the time, the Chinese leaders have a lot of policy flexibility. There are no strong domestic lobbies to worry about. But the one issue where the Chinese leaders cannot bend and compromise is Taiwan. Any Chinese leader, including Xi Jinping (despite all his power), could be removed if he is perceived to be weak on Taiwan. Why is Taiwan so fundamental to China? There is a very simple explanation. Every Chinese knows the century of humiliation that China suffered from the Opium War to 1949. Nearly all the historical vestiges of this century of humiliation have been removed or resolved, including Hong Kong and Macau.

Only one remains: Taiwan. It was Chinese territory until China was forced to hand it to Japan after the humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895.

Mahbubani also discusses what sort of person would be elected if China was a democracy.

Think Theodore Roosevelt, who, if you aren’t aware, was a raging warmonger. Xi, and the CCP in general, are a moderating influence on Chinese foreign affairs. China’s population has far more aggressive feelings than China’s current rulers. They are still furious about the “century of humiliation,” and they want China to be the number one nation in the world — or certainly to be dominant in its sphere of influence, exactly as Americans did in through the late 19th century to the 20th century.

We have some really weird ideas about our own history, or about what is normal for rising or re-establishing great powers.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

They always take control of their near abroad if they can. This is why Russia is willing to fight a war for the Ukraine, if it comes to it: The Ukraine was part of Russia for centuries. China is actually being remarkably flexible about Taiwan for a rising power. The US bent every country near it to its will and took chunks of land out of both Mexico and Canada, while replacing governments in Latin and South America regularly. Britain brought Scotland and Ireland into its “union.” Germany grabbed everything near it that it could, until defeated in World War II. Japan went on one of the biggest empire building sprees in history.

Other countries, of course, will resist as best they can, and I personally think that Taiwan should stay free. But the price of its freedom is allowing Chinese leaders to save face with their own population: They are saying “Taiwan and China are part of one country.”

This isn’t the 90s, when the US had an easy veto over a Chinese conquest of Taiwan. American aircraft carriers, if they try to intervene, will be sunk by China’s massive arsenal of missiles. China has nuclear weapons and is de-facto allied with Russia, so escalation is extremely dangerous.

Taiwan and the Ukraine are not, fundamentally, the West’s business — except, of course, that the West’s semiconductor fabrication is concentrated in Taiwan due to idiotic Western trade and industrial policies.

Both China and the West are building semiconductor fab as fast as they can in their heartlands. Soon even this vulnerability will be gone, on both sides.

In the meantime, if China wants to say “Taiwan is part of China,” which is something the US agreed to as far back as Nixon, it’s a cheap way to keep a small democratic state going and avoid a potential world war.

What Can Taiwan Do to Protect Itself from China?

By Ian Welsh

On April 15, 2021

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Article by Mark Pontin

Lyle Goldstein, research professor and founding director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College, in a YouTube video, claims, in the words of commenter someofparts ‘One clear fact that emerges is that China will be taking Taiwan back. It’s a question of when not if … if they have to use force,’ Professor Goldstein says, ‘Taiwan will be able to hold out about two weeks.’

One big factor Professor Goldstein is leaving out regarding Taiwan — for reasons to do with long-standing U.S. policy — is that no country that ever had a serious program to build nuclear fission weapons — A-bombs — ever failed to do so. South Africa developed them, for instance, though in 1989 de Klerk ensured they were dismantled before the handover to Mandela.

In fact, A-bombs such as were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are far simpler and easier to construct than most people realize. It’s a technology developed by people who listened to Benny Goodman on vacuum tube radios, after all. (For all that the scientists at Los Alamos represented, sadly, probably the greatest number of the most intelligent people gathered together for one project in history.)

H-bombs — fusion bombs aka staged thermonuclear weapons — which emerged with Ivy Mike in 1952 are a very different, more complex deal. In 2021, they’re what a nation-state seeking deterrence wants because — while Ivy Mike was the size of a very large locomotive engine, 20 feet high and weighing 140,000-plus lbs., with an additional 24,000 lbs. for its refrigeration equipment — they can be physically miniaturized to be put atop missiles and designed so the resulting explosion can be almost any size, shape, or radiation yield. Ted Thomas, the U.S.’s most talented bomb designer, even built a thermonuclear device so small he lit a cigarette with it.

To return to Taiwan: Simple fission-style A-bombs do require bomber aircraft (which can be knocked down by missiles in 2021) to deliver them — although trucks or boats will do in a pinch. But Taiwan could still build such weapons as stationary “mini-doomsday” devices, so that if China invades, the whole island goes up and large radioactive clouds sweep over the mainland. That would definitely be a deterrent.

The hardest part of building simple fission devices is accumulating enough enriched uranium and/or plutonium. Taiwan has six reactors so it has the nuclear material to enrich, to start with.

Enrichment is usually dependent on massive chains of centrifuges — which is why Iran currently is vulnerable to sabotage — but there’s a new high-tech alternative called laser isotope separation, or LIS, which can be carried out in a plant the size of a small warehouse or your local high-end auto dealer’s garage. Taiwan is, in one sense, the most technologically sophisticated country in the world, in that it has more microprocessor chip fabs than any other. Indeed, that’s another reason why mainland China shouldn’t invade in the next decade, until it’s built up its own fab plants: Global technological civilization would stagger to a halt without the chips Taiwan supplies the rest of the world, including China.

In any case, if Taiwan wants to enrich radioactive material via LIS, it can probably manage “nuclear breakout” both covertly and quickly.

So the fact that Taiwan could relatively easily gain nuclear deterrence is one factor Professor Goldstein isn’t bringing up.

And that’s because Japan and a number of other nations could achieve nuclear breakout very quickly, too. During the Cold War, the US deliberately extended its “nuclear umbrella” to allies to discourage them from having their own nuclear deterrent program. That way, proliferation was discouraged and US hegemony was preserved, in that the US nuclear umbrella also provided cover for US conventional forces to go in and flatten whomever Washington deemed should be flattened. (As in Iraq.)

Professor Goldstein isn’t talking about all this because he’s invested in maintaining US hegemony. Also, he’s at the US Naval War College and a potential scenario where China invades Taiwan with conventional forces is good promotion for the idea of naval force projection, and the Navy always wants more ships. I bet he doesn’t bring up the uselessness of aircraft carrier groups in such a scenario, however. If so, he’s being disingenuous on two counts.

Ian – this is by Mark Pontin, not me. I lifted it from comments with his permission. We’ll be talking a bit more about Taiwan (and the Ukraine) in the future. Thanks to Mark for agreeing.