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\u003ch5 style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn your new book, \u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003ci\u003eDangerous Decade: Taiwan’s Security and Crisis Management\u003c/i\u003e, you argue that the prospects for a conflict over Taiwan are real and intensifying. Why has the situation deteriorated and why should policymakers be worried about it?\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/h5\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe situation has deteriorated for many reasons, but it is fundamentally down to shifts in the military balance between China and Taiwan and, increasingly, between China and the US. Ever since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces retreated to the island of Taiwan in the late 1940s following their defeat to the Communists in the Chinese Civil War, America has been able to use its overwhelming military advantage to steer this flashpoint. It has deterred Beijing from using force by suggesting that it might intervene on Taiwan’s behalf, as it did during two strategic crises during the 1950s and again in the mid-1990s. But the US has also dissuaded Taiwan from formally declaring independence, by indicating that its support might not be forthcoming in the event that Taipei were to provoke Beijing unduly.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThat equation is now changing due to the significant advances that China’s military has made since the mid-1990s. There is literally no military balance now left to speak of between China and Taiwan. The gap between China and the US is also narrowing, as Beijing develops the wherewithal – through, for instance, its significantly more powerful and accurate anti-shipping missiles – to challenge America’s ability to come to Taiwan’s defence. Indeed, based on current trends, and barring an as yet unanticipated technological breakthrough, America will probably have lost the ability to defend Taiwan within the decade.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePolicymakers should be worried about the growing risk of strategic crisis during this window, as Washington’s ability to play its traditional stabilising role erodes, as Beijing’s capacity to forcibly resolve this longstanding dispute increases, and as the threat to Taiwan’s very existence looms larger. Against this backdrop, the risk of strategic miscalculation or a destabilising act of military misadventure will very likely increase.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch5 style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eChina is commonly blamed for exacerbating cross-strait tensions, but does some responsibility lie with Washington too?\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/h5\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe tendency to lay blame with China is understandable. There is no doubt that Xi Jinping has made Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland a central goal of the so-called ‘China Dream’ – Xi’s vision for making the Middle Kingdom wealthy and powerful again. Beijing’s coercive tactics against the island have ramped up accordingly. We saw this most recently when two of Taiwan’s so-called ‘diplomatic allies’, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati, switched their allegiances to Beijing within the space of a week.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBut Washington is equally guilty of pushing the envelope, as indeed is Taipei. US President Donald Trump has torn up the traditional diplomatic playbook on Taiwan. In late 2016, for instance, he became the first president or president-elect to speak with Taiwan’s leaders since US–China normalisation in the 1970s, when he accepted a congratulatory phone call from President Tsai Ing-wen. In early 2018, he signed the ‘Taiwan Travel Act’ into law, which for the first time enables US officials at any level of government to meet with their Taiwanese counterparts.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe US Department of Defense’s June 2019 ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy Report’ then took the unprecedented step of labelling Taiwan a country. The US has also moved to regularise its arms sales to the island and its military transits of the Taiwan Strait, much to China’s chagrin. Ties between America and Taiwan are closer now than at any time since normalisation. That all of this is occurring against the backdrop of what some commentators are branding a new US–China Cold War only adds to the potential flammability of this flashpoint.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch5 style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhat is Taipei’s view of recent events in Hong Kong? Are there lessons from the unrest that Taiwan’s leaders should take on board?\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/h5\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBeijing has long seen Taiwan and Hong Kong as inter-connected. Indeed, when Deng Xiaoping proposed the ‘one country, two systems’ formula that is currently applied to Hong Kong, he actually had Taiwan in mind. ‘One country, two systems’ was never popular in Taiwan. But Beijing’s increasingly heavy-handed application of this approach in Hong Kong has made the Taiwanese even warier. The formula is now formally rejected by both sides of Taiwanese politics. All this has played particularly well for Tsai, whose political fortunes were waning as recently as a year ago, but whose popularity has since surged as Taiwan’s voters look more and more nervously across the Strait. In July 2019, Tsai even went so far as to state publicly that Taipei would consider granting asylum to Hong Kong protesters ‘on humanitarian grounds’, further infuriating Beijing.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch5 style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhat needs to happen now to ease tensions and mitigate the risk of a major strategic crisis?\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/h5\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNobody wants a cross-strait conflict, which would be extremely costly for all concerned. The biggest risk to peace thus remains some inadvertent act of miscalculation or misadventure that spirals out of control. Unlike in other parts of Asia, where modest progress is being made towards the development of more robust crisis avoidance and management mechanisms, however, there remains a worrying lack of such machinery in this case. The crisis hotline that Xi and then-Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou agreed to during their historic September 2015 meeting in Singapore, for example, is not being utilised. The Chinese side refuses to answer it as part of its freezing of relations with Taiwan following the January 2016 election victory of Tsai and her independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cspan\u003eGreater diplomatic pressure needs to be brought to bear to encourage Beijing to redress this situation and to work on developing even more robust cross-strait mechanisms that can be employed during a major strategic crisis. On a more positive note, modest progress has already been made on developing crisis avoidance mechanisms between the Chinese and American militaries, such as a November 2014 memorandum of understanding stipulating rules of behaviour for air and maritime encounters. Late last year, the two sides also agreed to develop a new ‘\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003emilitary-to-military Crisis Deconfliction and Communication Framework’. \u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBut much more extensive measures for managing civilian and civil–military interactions between China and America during a major Taiwan crisis are still urgently needed.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022text-align: left;\u0022\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003ca href=\u0022/publications/adelphi/2019/dangerous-decade\u0022\u003eDangerous Decade: Taiwan\u0027s security and crisis management\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is out now.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","className":"richtext reading--content font-secondary"}), document.getElementById("react_TLJOnMeg0kK8z6L3JOe3xw"))});
Brendan Taylor, author of a new IISS book on Taiwan’s security, explains why, amid shifts in the military balance between China and the US, there is an increasing risk of a cross-strait conflict flaring up and why policymakers should be worried about it.
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