The Taiwan Fallacy
American Power Does Not Hinge on a Single Island
By Jonathan D. Caverley
August 7, 2024To hear many tell it, the future of the United States’ security—and, indeed, the world’s—rides on Taiwan. “A self-governing Taiwan anchors Japan’s defense and denies China a springboard from which it could threaten U.S. allies in the western Pacific,” wrote a collection of authors in Foreign Affairs, including Matt Pottinger, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s deputy national security adviser. Speaking before Congress in 2021, Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, described Taiwan as “critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests.” Ratner also testified that defense of Taiwan is his department’s “pacing scenario,” or the primary guide for U.S. military planning and operations. On the topic of Taiwan, contemporary analysts often invoke General Douglas MacArthur’s description of the island as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” and “submarine tender.” Others have cited Admiral Ernest King—the World War II U.S. chief of naval operations, who said Taiwan was a “cork in the bottle”—to suggest that it geographically contains China’s ambitions.
There are many reasons to help defend Taiwan: its significant economy, its microelectronics prowess, its mature democracy, the effect its seizure might have on U.S. credibility. But keeping China’s military in check is not one of them. Taiwan is a small, 90-mile-wide island just off China’s vast coast. If it became a fully armed Chinese province, the difference in military power between Beijing and Washington would barely shift.
China already possesses formidable space, land, air, sea, and cyber systems designed to detect and destroy U.S. and allied naval and air platforms far from the mainland. It does not need the island to menace the United States. Taiwan would give China a new place to base its systems, but the advantages that come from putting its weapons on the island versus the mainland are marginal.
Beijing, however, could derive one major military benefit from invading Taiwan. The wrong U.S. military response would provide Beijing with the chance to destroy many American ships, planes, and troops in terrain favorable to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The U.S. military would likely come away greatly weakened, even if it ultimately prevailed. The wrong defense of Taiwan, in other words, would be a cure worse than the disease.
If, as many hawks suggest, China’s ultimate aim is to become the world’s dominant country, then Washington should prepare to wage and win a wider and lengthier conflict, rather than obsessively structuring the U.S. military to directly counter China in the Taiwan Strait. A conflict starting with a Chinese invasion would almost certainly grow protracted and expand. U.S. forces, therefore, need to focus on protecting regional allies—Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea—and, indeed, the rest of the world from Chinese coercion.
That is not to say the United States should abandon the island. A properly calibrated defense of Taiwan would force Beijing to continue concentrating more of its resources on a very challenging objective and away from missions that more directly threaten American global interests. It is helpful for Washington if China is preoccupied with Taiwan: in other words, to keep the island as Beijing’s pacing scenario. Washington should continue loading the country up with drones, mines, and other relatively inexpensive defensive weapons, turning it into what military planners call a “porcupine” that China would struggle to digest. American officials could also employ some U.S. jets, ships, and submarines to help the country directly in the event of an attack. But positioning significant, vulnerable U.S. forces near the island in the name of deterrence risks too much military power for too little military gain. Taiwan is not the be all and end all of the Indo-Pacific, and so the U.S. armed forces cannot make the island its primary focus.
STRONG ENOUGH
Not long ago, China’s military was vastly inferior to the United States’. In 2012, at the beginning of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s tenure, the PLA was dominated by its ground forces and focused on local and internal conflicts. Beijing lacked a serious navy, a strong air force, or a powerful array of missiles. It did not have an expansive satellite system to help it identify and strike targets. As a result, Beijing could barely project power beyond its own coastline, much less pretend to track and attack bases and ships deep in the Pacific.
This is no longer true. Today’s PLA appears more formidable and focused. A 2014 change to China’s official strategy document exhorted the military to focus on “informatized” wars beyond its borders, with a large emphasis on “preparations for maritime military struggle.” Today, the PLA boasts the world’s largest navy (by most metrics) and is producing fifth-generation fighter jets and upgraded bomber aircraft.
But its most important capability is a weapon that was unavailable to MacArthur and King: the long-range missile. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, China has quadrupled its missile inventory over the past five years and now possesses hundreds of mobile launchers. They are equipped with more than 1,000 medium-range and 500 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, capable of traveling up to 1,800 miles and 3,400 miles, respectively. These weapons can threaten bases and ships in every part of Japan, the Philippines, and the Philippine Sea. According to publicly available Defense Department maps, they can reach most places in the Indian Ocean, any part of the Arabian and Red Seas, and even the eastern Mediterranean.
The wrong defense of Taiwan would be a cure worse than the disease.
The PLA has worked hard to ensure that if it decides to launch these missiles, they will hit their targets. China now has a huge network of satellites designed to detect and track American platforms with great precision. These satellites could target aircraft carriers, which are visually distinct from other ships, have high heat signatures, emit lots of radar and communications energy, and leave a distinctive wake. The satellites can sweep across the entire Pacific and Indian Oceans around the clock. For example, the recently launched Yaogan-41’s high-resolution optical system and Ludi Tance-4’s synthetic aperture radar—which works at night and in cloudy conditions—can each continuously survey a third of the earth’s surface from their geosynchronous orbits. And as with the U.S. Space Force, China’s military satellites are complemented by commercial ones (although Chinese commercial satellites are often government-owned). China’s Chang Guang Satellite Technology Company alone has more than 100 satellites in orbit and plans to triple that number by 2025. According to the firm, it will soon be able to take photos of any place on earth at high resolution within ten minutes of a request.
The United States has ways to counteract China’s space capabilities. Its ships, for example, could curtail their communications and radar use, making it harder for satellites to detect what they are doing. Washington also has various ways of degrading China’s satellite capabilities, not all of which require direct force. But these options come with drawbacks. Curtailing ship communications, for instance, makes fighting far more difficult. Destroying satellites in orbit creates space junk, which has global implications. Furthermore, if the United States disabled or destroyed Chinese satellites, China could retaliate against U.S. ones. And even if the United States eliminates China’s satellites, Beijing has other ways to track U.S. assets. The country is upgrading its bomber planes, which could help guide cruise missiles launched from distant areas. China has a large portfolio of long-range surveillance drones. And it could use its expanding navy, coast guard, and maritime militia, as well as its 187,000-vessel fishing fleet, to spot U.S. carriers. Although none of these systems is invulnerable, the United States would struggle to eliminate all or even a substantial proportion of them without burning through enormous amounts of ammunition. In fact, the United States is already running low on important munitions as it tries to protect global shipping from Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.
China, in other words, is already a dangerous adversary. It does not need more territory to challenge U.S. forces.
LITTLE TO NOTHING
At first glance, it seems likely that absorbing Taiwan would further bolster China’s impressive armed forces. With control over the island, China’s stockpile of shorter-range missiles—cheaper and more plentiful than its medium- and long-range arsenals—would be able to reach more of Japan and the Philippines as well as each country’s waters. And, as MacArthur suggested, Taiwan could host Chinese ships, jets, and submarines. Possessing Taiwan, then, might increase Beijing’s capabilities.
But on inspection, these claims fall flat. Taiwan, it turns out, is not a cork containing China’s ability to project power into the Pacific and beyond. The military benefits to taking it would be modest.
Consider, for example, what the island would actually do for Chinese short-range missiles. These rockets can already hit Okinawa and Luzon from the mainland. The extra 190 miles that Taiwan would afford them would not be enough to reach any more large military bases. Instead, it would mostly extend these missiles’ ranges to encompass a small swath of the vast western Pacific, one that is relatively easy for naval ships to avoid while executing their missions.
Some experts, such as Pottinger, have suggested that possessing Taiwan would empower China’s other military systems by affording Beijing a large naval outpost on the so-called first island chain: the ring of countries that surrounds the Chinese mainland’s eastern seaboard. After all, every state in this chain is currently either neutral or aligned with the United States. But even here, the island would be of little benefit. The vast majority of the chain’s island links belong to Japan or the Philippines. These countries bookend Taiwan, and they have growing missile capabilities themselves. They also have bases that can host U.S. forces. Two of the four new bases included in the 2023 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement between the United States and the Philippines essentially face Taiwan. Beijing could seize the island, and its troops, jets, and ships would be no safer than they are right now.
Taiwan is not a cork containing China’s power.
Even Chinese submarines would be no more useful on Taiwan than on the mainland. Yes, locating them on the island’s east coast would shorten the distance they would have to travel to their hunting grounds in the Philippine Sea. This would reduce transit times and allow for longer and stealthier operations. A RAND Corporation model, for example, suggests China would be able to shoot roughly 15 more cruise missiles in the Philippine Sea per week than it can right now. But a salvo of 12 DF-26 missiles, stationed on the mainland, can deliver the same payload to the same places within minutes. And to shoot 15 more missiles a week, China’s submarines would have to remain unscathed—and they may well not. Taiwan’s ports are easier for U.S. and allied submarines to surveil and mine than China’s existing submarine pens.
Controlling Taiwan would do little to make China’s submarines more effective. But perhaps it would help Beijing threaten Washington’s own undersea fleet. Taiwan’s east coast, after all, looks out into the deep, expansive waters of the Pacific, where U.S. submarines often hide. The island could host an acoustic surveillance system—akin to one the United States used in both the Atlantic and the Pacific during the Cold War—in order to hunt them.
Yet once again, such systems would do more for Beijing in theory than in practice. Hydrophones can detect vessels at very long distances, but they do so with scant accuracy. And the Australian, Japanese, and U.S. fleets are remarkably successful at masking their presence. The ability to detect them is far off for China, regardless of where its forces are based. As the political scientists Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Caitlin Talmadge wrote in Foreign Affairs in June 2022, such a system could give China a rough location for aircraft carriers. But given China’s extensive satellite detection network, hydrophones off Taiwan would be redundant.
HIGH RISK, LOW REWARD
There are many symbolic, psychological, economic, technological, and alliance-related reasons for the United States to defend Taiwan. But preserving a favorable military balance is not one of them. The United States and its allies should, therefore, focus less on Taiwan itself and more on how to fight a wider and longer conflict with Beijing—one that requires the United States to help protect the global commons and the territorial integrity of Japan and the Philippines.
To make this shift, Washington must first acknowledge that an all-out defense of Taiwan would likely come at a very high cost. If Beijing and Washington engaged in a full-blown war over the island’s autonomy, China would probably inflict severe losses on the United States’ Pacific forces. China’s military would also likely be devastated, of course; the U.S. Navy and Air Force are still more capable and vastly more experienced than their Chinese counterparts. But Beijing is better positioned to quickly reconstitute its regional forces, meaning it could press on more easily. As U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro pointed out in February 2023, China has 13 naval shipyards, at least one of which has more capacity than the entire U.S. shipbuilding base. Analysts concerned about U.S. credibility should ask whether Japan and the Philippines would prefer a Taiwan that remains unconquered or a Seventh Fleet that remains afloat.
Once they acknowledge the full costs and benefits, U.S. and allied officials must make hard decisions about what to devote to Taiwan’s defense. A clear first step is to double down on filling the island with deadly defensive weapons that threaten to turn the Taiwan Strait into what Admiral Samuel Paparo, the United States’ Indo-Pacific commander, called a “hellscape.” The United States should, in particular, send more mines, drones, and antiship missiles to Taiwan, in addition to supporting its indigenous capability to build such weapons itself. These systems may not be enough to stop a hell-bent Beijing from getting boots on Taiwan’s shores. But they would ensure that the process of doing so, taking the rest of the island, and then holding it would be nightmarish. Such a strategy would, therefore, flip the script. Instead of Taiwan becoming a burden on the United States’ resources, it would become a massive drain on China’s. A PLA fixated on invading Taiwan would be unable to do much else.
If China truly wants to eclipse the United States, it will need to be able to coerce Japan and the Philippines.
This approach may be the best way to deter Beijing. If Washington pledges to defend Taiwan with all its might, the message to China is that Taiwan’s conquest could provide the happy bonus of degrading U.S. combat power. But loading the island with unpleasant weapons while keeping valuable military assets out of the immediate area tells Beijing that attacking Taiwan would leave it, and it alone, much weaker. This weakness would come at an inopportune time. Regardless of how they start, major power wars rarely end quickly, so even if China successfully absorbed Taiwan, it would likely keep fighting against Washington elsewhere. That would mean battling in places unfavorable to Beijing. The United States may be disadvantaged in and around Taiwan, but it has vastly more capability and experience in the broader Pacific and around the world.
The U.S. Navy can help deliver this message—and underscore Washington’s advantage—by shifting away from deploying its surface fleet and aircraft in the immediate theater around Taiwan. The navy could instead concentrate more on its vital role in day-to-day operations around the world, such as its current mission against the Houthis in the Red Sea. In a conflict, it could pivot more to threatening Chinese interests in the Indo-Pacific outside of Taiwan, as well as in the Persian Gulf. China is the world’s largest trading state, and it imports most of its oil and gas by sea. If Beijing believes that invading Taiwan will be costly in and of itself, weaken it more broadly, and force it to immediately fight the United States in more hostile terrain farther from home, it may think twice about trying to seize its neighbor.
Or it may not. Chinese leaders have spent decades promising to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland. In recent years, the government appears to have become especially fixated on taking what it views as a renegade province. Xi has even said that the “great rejuvenation” of his nation will not be complete until Taiwan is under Beijing’s command.
But if China truly wants to eclipse the United States as the world’s most dominant country, it will need to be able to coerce Japan and the Philippines and project power worldwide. It will need to control, or at least contest, the global commons. China probably believes that the absorption of Taiwan is the necessary first step. Yet when push comes to shove, it may decide otherwise. And even if Beijing’s assessment is right, it does not mean that defending Taiwan is the most important way for the United States to stymie China’s larger agenda. Washington should invest in military tools that can defend Taiwan, but only if they also enable the American military to continue the fight elsewhere.