By most accounts the Chinese have developed and are now refining something resembling the Americans’ old Anaconda Plan, updated for Taiwan. That makes sense. Or more sense than storming the beaches alone. The response on the part of Taiwan’s supposed friends makes less sense. Will there be a Taipei airlift? Unlikely. Will the navies of Taiwan’s neighbours join with the USA and one or two others to break a blockade? Perhaps, but that would mean a big war that none of them say they want. Will the patience of the blockader (Chinese public opinion) be exhausted sooner than that of the blockaded (Taiwan’s government)? Perhaps, but also unlikely. That is, unless outsiders do something to alter the ‘psychological calculus’. That calculus, for better or worse, has already been typecast by Western planners. People who imagine Taiwan to be like Cuba, which an American long ago described as an overripe apple about to fall into the Yankee basket, have lost. That analogy, sadly for some, no longer suits. People who apply another Cuban analogy – that of the Cuban missile crisis – may have more of a point. Only now it’s Xi Jinping who is playing the role of John F Kennedy, and the Americans and their allies, sticking their porcupine quills into Taiwanese soil, who are playing the hapless Soviets. Somehow this analogy, particularly its nuclear aspect, does not bring much comfort. And finally, people who apply a third analogy – the one coupled with Cuba in the Cold War calculus, Berlin – make perhaps an even better point. West Berlin was an indefensible enclave that the Western powers nevertheless pledged to defend. But with the partial exception of the 1962 missile crisis, the West was never really tested there. To those three analogies can be added three overdrawn scenarios: Sarajevo 1914, Munich 1938, and again, Berlin 1948. But Taiwan is not Bosnia, not the Sudetenland, not even a modern-day Corcyra. A big war may happen over Taiwan but it probably won’t be a world war of conquest. It should be noted that few people in the West make much use of Chinese or even other Asian precedents in telling us how Chinese planners think. That may be an even bigger problem for would-be interventionists to recognise before this particular ‘impending crisis’ reaches its logical end. Cui bono? The answer is easy: NATO, Japan, and Russia; probably in that order. |