Things do not look good for the home team."
These were the words of a recently retired senior US military officer when asked about Taiwan's ability to defend itself against an attack by China.
When pressed, the officer -- a specialist in cross-strait security -- was even more blunt.
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Could China successfully invade Taiwan?
"Yes," he said. "Absolutely."
He did add a caveat to this pronouncement: "That is, barring third party intervention -- and if China was willing to accept the high cost of using force."
China has never renounced the use of force to unify -- or annex, depending on your politics -- Taiwan. And as recently as last Saturday, former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) promised that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) would invade Taiwan by or around the year 2020, according to the Hong Kong daily Wen Wei Po.
This is hardly the first time that Beijing has threatened to make war on Taiwan, but in light of Beijing's rapid military modernization, most analysts say Taipei cannot afford to write off such comments.
"It is not Beijing's capabilities, per se, that make the situation dangerous," said Richard Bush, the director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and former chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan. "It is the possibility that the PRC [People's Republic of China] will choose to use them."
In a monograph written for the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute entitled China and strategic culture, Andrew Scobell -- an expert in East Asian security affairs -- wrote: "National unification is a core value in China's national security calculus on which no compromise is possible ...
It is also an emotional and unwavering public stand precisely because the leadership of the PRC seems to lack any other inviolable principles."
There appears to be one major obstacle preventing Beijing from attacking Taiwan: "The United States," the US officer said.
The Pentagon's annual report on the cross-strait strategic climate agrees with this assessment.
"Beijing sees Washington as the principal hurdle to any attempt to use military force to regain Taiwan," said the US Department of Defense's Fiscal Year 2004 Report to Congress on PRC Military Power.
China is therefore attempting to acquire sufficient military capabilities
to prevent US intervention and defeat armed resistance in Taiwan before the country's allies can respond.
"The cross-strait balance of power is steadily shifting in China's favor," the report said. "PLA modernization will threaten [Taiwan's] autonomy by enabling Beijing to launch a devastating standoff attack with insufficient warning time for foreign forces to mobilize and deploy to aid Taiwan."
Another long-time US observer noted that it is no longer useful to think in terms of "balance of power."
"It is more accurate to think in terms of time and cost: How long would it take Beijing to incur sufficient pain on Taiwan to force a political and military capitulation?" he said. "And how costly, in terms of economic costs, personnel and equipment, as well as in terms of international costs, including political and economic sanctions," would such an adventure be?
In tactical terms, the force China used "would need to be capable of achieving a rapid collapse of Taiwan's national will and thereby preclude US intervention," the report said. "The PLA could also adopt a decapitation strategy [directly attacking command and control facilities and attempting to assassinate senior officials], seeking to neutralize Taiwan's political and military leadership on the assumption that their successors would accede to Beijing."
But if Taiwan's military situation is becoming so desperate, why do US officials continue to talk about maintaining the "status quo"? Does China's rapid military modernization program not render any talk of "status quo" nonsensical?
"The reference to the `status quo' in the Taiwan Strait is to the political balance and Taiwan refraining from moves toward independence," said Larry Wortzel, the director of the Heritage Foundation's Davis Institute for International Studies.
Wortzel is also a retired US Army colonel who specializes in cross-strait affairs, among other areas.
However, Wortzel said, "the US government realizes that the consensus on `Taiwan
as part of China,' as opposed to an independent nation, is changing on Taiwan."
Bush agreed that the status quo did not merely refer to the cross-strait military balance.
"In a real sense, how I define status quo is immaterial," he said. "What is important is how the US government defines it at any point in time to both Beijing and Taipei -- and Washington may only convey those definitions privately."
"For what it is worth, the key elements of the status quo for me are preservation of peace and stability," Bush said.
According to defense analyst Wendell Minnick, writing in the June 30 Taiwan country briefing for Jane's Defence Weekly, "What Washington has
failed to realize ... is that Taiwan has evolved politically.
"Taiwan is experiencing a shift in national identity," Minnick wrote. "Today, far more people identify themselves as Taiwanese than Chinese.
"A Taiwanese identity is reshaping the political landscape. This is something both Beijing and Washington failed to plan for in 1979 [when the US shifted diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing]," he wrote.
In light of Beijing's animosity to President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and his plan to formulate a new constitution by 2008, the three countries must make a proactive effort to preserve peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.
For Taiwan's part, that effort must be a combination of political and military initiatives, US experts say.
According to Bush, there are four specific steps the nation must take.
First, Taiwan must "continue its efforts to strengthen itself militarily," both to "improve its deterrent against PRC coercion" and to "be able, should deterrence fail, to hold on until US aid arrives," he said.
"The second is that Taiwan avoids steps that Beijing perceives as
foreclosing forever its goals and objectives," he continued. "The third is that all sides [Beijing, Taipei and Washington] maintain good communication to reduce the possibility of misperception and miscalculation."
Finally, Bush said, Taiwan must "preserve a good relationship with the United States, since Washington is the ultimate guarantor of Taiwan's security.
"All four steps are within Taiwan's ability. None undermine its fundamental interests," he said.
Wortzel agreed with the necessity of improving communication.
"The US should maintain a good arms-sales program to Taiwan, work for improved military-to-military contacts and encourage each side of the Taiwan Strait to reach some way of maintaining contact discreetly," Wortzel said.
In purely military terms, the US officer said, there was one relatively simple thing that Taiwan could do to prove that it takes its defense seriously: buy munitions.
"It doesn't take a professional strategist to realize that Taiwan has only enough munitions to last a few days in a high-intensity conflict, even if that long," he said.
Advanced munitions, such as AMRAAMs (a type of air-to-air missile), were relatively inexpensive, but their importance could not be overstated, the officer said.
"An F-16 isn't much use without any missiles," he said.
Unfortunately, most experts admit that even these efforts might not deter Beijing from embarking on a military adventure in the Taiwan Strait.
"There likely remains some concern in Washington that Beijing will misinterpret the meaning of [Chen's proposed] constitutional revision and overreact," Bush said.
"To avoid this, good communication will be necessary in the months to come. Channels of communication exist between Taipei and Washington, and Beijing and Washington. Unfortunately, Beijing has been unwilling to resume unconditional dialogue with Taipei," he said.
And besides, Scobell notes that
"virtually all of the 3,700 to 4,000 wars China has fought in more than 4,000 years of dynasties have been civil wars or wars to unify the country."
Beijing has also fought eight "military actions" since the founding of the PRC in 1949, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
China, as with most other modern powers, hardly has a pacifist history. So if Beijing is determined to conquer Taiwan, the US will likely involve itself in a war
of potentially devastating magnitude to defend the democratic state.
The reasons for doing so would derive more from realpolitik than the rhetoric would suggest. According to Minnick, "Taiwan's location in the waters between Japan and Hong Kong makes it strategically important to the US."
Scobell points out that most Chinese analysts agree that the recent -- some would say recently discarded -- US policy of "strategic ambiguity" regarding its response to a Taiwan Strait conflict "does not refer to doubts about whether the United States is committed to Taiwan's security; rather, the ambiguity refers to what precisely would trigger US intervention and what the nature of that intervention would be."
So would the US come to Taiwan's aid?
"Probably," was the US officer's terse reply.
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