Two Different Worlds: The False Linkage of Ukraine and Taiwan
China has its own longterm timetable for its ‘renegade province’
With Russian forces continuing to mass on Ukraine’s borders, hawkish officials and analysts are pushing a variation of the domino theory from the Cold War, claiming that a weak American response to the Kremlin in one theater will tempt another adversary, China, to take advantage of the U.S. a half a world away.
In the updated version, the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, coupled with a successful Russian invasion of Ukraine, will embolden China to seize Taiwan. But linking the fate of Ukraine with that of Taiwan is almost certainly wrong: It misreads their respective strategic importance to Washington, as well as China’s strategy to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s control.
President Joe Biden has threatened Vladimir Putin with crippling economic sanctions if he orders the 100,000-plus Russian troops, tanks and self-propelled artillery on Ukraine’s borders to invade. But Biden has made it clear that U.S. support for Ukraine will be confined to defensive military assistance and that U.S. forces will not fight to defend it. The U.S. troops Biden is sending to Europe will bolster NATO countries on the alliance's eastern flank, not Ukraine, which is not a NATO member.
While a recent Morning Consult-Politico poll shows that a majority of Americans support Biden’s efforts to resolve the Ukraine crisis diplomatically, Russia hawks have been calling for a much more aggressive administration response. Last month, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the second-highest ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on Biden not to exclude any military options in response to the Russian military buildup, including cruise missile attacks from U.S. ships in Black Sea, U.S. ground troops, and even nuclear weapons.
“Military action could mean that we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea, and we rain destruction on Russian military capability,” Wicker told Fox News. “I would not rule out American troops on the ground. We don’t rule out first use nuclear action.”
Some influential Democrats are rattling sabers as well. Evelyn Farkas, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia in the Obama administration and as a senior advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, also has urged Biden to “do more than issue ultimatums about sanctions and economic penalties,” including “marshaling an international coalition of the willing, readying military forces to deter Putin and, if necessary, prepare for war.”
In a commentary last month, Farkas wrote: “If Russia prevails again, we will remain stuck in a crisis not just over Ukraine but about the future of the global order far beyond that country’s borders…”
By “the global order,” Farkas and other establishment critics mean the international rules and norms that the United States put in place after its victory in World War II, which virtually awarded itself primacy in Western Europe and Asia. Central to that order is the prohibition against the acquisition of territory by force, although both Russia and China have accused the U.S. of hypocrisy with its invasions and overthrowing of regimes in Iraq and Libya.
Now, with its explosive economic and military growth in recent decades, China is challenging U.S. dominance over Asia while Putin is flexing his muscles to regain Soviet dominace in Eastern Europe. And now hardline critics have linked the two, warning that Putin could ride out U.S. sanctions if he invades Ukraine, emboldening Xi to seize Taiwan. Beijing has branded the island a renegade province since 1949, when U.S.-backed nationalists retreated there after losing to the communists in China’s civil war.
Beijing’s Watchful Waiting
“China will be watching what kind of blow is dealt to the Russian army and to the Russian economy should this invasion move forward,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, said earlier this week. “There's no doubt that the Chinese have designs to reclaim Taiwan, and the playbook that the world will witness over the course of the next several months will be very instructive to the Chinese.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has taken the new domino theory a step further, warning of a “new dark age” of global authoritarian aggression as a result of an inadequate U.S. and allied response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“If Putin is able to move into Ukraine, take on a few sanctions and some international condemnation, but ultimately, not pay a terrible price, it doesn’t just impact Ukraine, that becomes the model that China, Iran, North Korea and the other rogue governments around the world will follow,” Rubio said in a video he tweeted.
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has even warned—without evidence—that Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping may have agreed to launch simultaneous invasions, creating a two-front crisis that would overwhelm the war-weary Biden administration, discredit American security guarantees and undermine faith in U.S. resolve.
“I don’t think we can rule that out [because] Russia is working more closely with China than it ever has,” British Foreign Minister Truss told Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.
Last week, the two leaders met in Beijing ahead of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic games. They issued a lengthy joint statement in which they accused the United States of fomenting pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, urging Taiwanese independence and destabilizing Ukraine.
“Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions,” the statement said. Later, China voiced its support for Russia’s stand against any further eastward expansion of NATO.
But notably, the 5,300 word statement never mentions Ukraine by name, a signal of the limits of China’s support for Putin amid the current crisis. In addition to China’s long-stated support for the territorial integrity of all nations, Beijing also has important economic interests in Ukraine, viewing the country as a major transit hub for its Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure program that seeks to link Europe with China via road, bridge and railway projects.
“A war in Ukraine is not in China’s interest,” said Elizabeth Wishnick, an expert on Sino-Russian relations at the Center for Naval Analysis, a Navy-funded think-tank. “I think Xi Jinping hopes there’s a peaceful end to this crisis.”
At the same time, the new domino theory of Biden’s detractors conflates Ukraine’s strategic importance to the United States with that of Taiwan. In fact, there’s no contest when it comes to which country is more important strategically.
Taiwan is a longtime protectorate of America. Their relations are deep, long-standing, and emotional, tied to the American-backed Chinese Nationalists who fled there in 1949 with Mao Zedung’s communist forces on their heels. “Who lost China?” became a rallying cry for Republicans who blamed “communist agents” in the Truman administration for the Nationalists’ defeat.
For the next three decades, Washington officially recognized the island as the sole representative of the Chinese people, shunning the government of the billion mainland Chinese who lived under communist rule. And right from the start, Taiwan was a powderkeg. In 1955, the United States threatened to use nuclear weapons to defend it against a Chinese invasion. In the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates, the defense of Taiwan’s offshore islands Quemoy and Matsu became a major issue.
For more than seven decades now, the United States has been Taiwan’s principal security partner and supplier of military assistance. Even after Washington eventually established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979—and withdrew official recognition of Taipei as “China”—Congress has mandated the continued U.S. sale of defensive weapons to Taipei under their unofficial relationship.
Taiwan also has huge geostrategic importance for the United States, sitting astride busy commercial sea lanes in close proximity to Japan and the Philippines, two U.S. treaty allies. While the United States has no formal defense treaty with Taiwan, it is widely assumed it would come to the island’s defense in the event of a Chinese invasion, since its loss to Beijing would hobble America’s defense posture in the Western Pacific. There is also strong bipartisan support both in and outside of Congress for defending Taiwan against a Chinese attack.
New Kyiv on the Block
By contrast, U.S. relations with Ukraine are relatively recent, dating back to 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no U.S. law that commits Washington to Ukraine’s defense. And while some in NATO have left open the door for Ukraine’s membership, others have resisted such a move, viewing the country as within Russia’s sphere of influence. In 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, President Barack Obama refused to intervene militarily, later saying the crisis was “an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”
Despite all the hawk-y talk about defending Ukraine, Biden’s military moves to date—deploying F-15s in Estonia and small contingents of U.S. troops to Romania, Poland and Germany—demonstrate that the farthest extent of America’s line of defense remains at the eastern borders of NATO.
Biden’s hawkish critics also ignore China’s strategy for bringing Taiwan under its control. Taiwan initially represented China at the United Nations, enjoying widespread global recognition until it was expelled in 1971 and replaced by the communist People’s Republic of China. Since then, Beijing has waged a relentless diplomatic campaign to isolate Taiwan, wielding its formidable economic might to whittle down the number of countries that recognize Taipei today to just 14, plus the Holy See. China also uses its influence to exclude Taiwan from numerous international organizations.
But Beijing is hardly averse to flexing China’s military muscles with its formidable air and naval forces. One day just last month, in the latest of Beijing’s frequent military exercises near the island, 39 Chinese warplanes swept into Taiwan’s air defense zone before Taiwanese F-16s drove them away. Rather than foreshadow an invasion, however, the best informed China experts say the exercises are intended to intimidate the Taiwanese, like the snorts of an angry bull.
But that has no connection to Ukraine, half a world away.
“It’s a very American conceit to think of Chinese coercion of Taiwan as some kind of event, a single-day event, that X-Y-Z happens in Ukraine, and therefore there will be a single-day decision to do something as an event to coerce Taiwan,” Evan Feigenbaum, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said at a recent symposium. “For China, coercion of Taiwan is not an event; it’s a process.”
Moreover, said the Center for Naval Analysis’ Wishnick, “the reunification of Taiwan…is such an important interest for China, I don’t see it tying it to Putin’s more opaque plans for Ukraine.”
“China and Russia,” she added, “don’t always walk in lockstep on all the issues that concern them.”