There is some good news to report. Responding to the changing nature of the Taiwan-China-US trilateral relationship, US Admiral Phillip Davidson, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services on Tuesday last week: “I worry that they’re [China] accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order.”
“Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before that. And I think the threat is manifest during this decade. In fact, in the next six years,” he said, adding that the US’ long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan “should be reconsidered routinely.”
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, also known as the “Quad,” between Australia, India, Japan and the US could be said to be the core of US President Joe Biden’s administration’s Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific.
The Quad, and related regional institutions, are closely bound up in US-China and Taiwan-China relations, as well as the security and continued survival of Taiwan.
Davidson’s deduction that China might try to invade Taiwan within the next six years moves the timetable forward by two years compared with an article entitled “A crucial decade for Taiwan,” published on Jan. 12 in the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper), in which I forecast that the opportune moment for the Chinese People’s Liberation Arm to attempt an invasion and annexation of Taiwan would be between 2028 and 2030.
As a result, I would strongly suggest that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration redouble its efforts and also compress its timetable. Within the next six years, the government should transform Taiwan into an economic, military and legal fortress of comprehensive and robust national security legislation. The only way to deter China is to make an invasion too difficult to contemplate.
With the leader of the US Indo-Pacific Command sounding the alarm and China’s digital dictatorship, Taiwanese must take the threat seriously and take appropriate actions.
The Biden administration must build a multilateral alliance of nations to contain an avaricious and expansionist China. In another article, also published in the Liberty Times on Dec. 20 last year, titled “One planet, two worlds,” I argued that if the US were to provide robust leadership to a willing coalition of free democracies — whose core members would include Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the UK and the US — the bloc’s combined GDP would amount to about US$32 trillion. This is without including the EU, India, the Philippines and South Korea.
The Chinese-led “digital dictatorships bloc” would, at its core, comprise Bangladesh, China, Pakistan and Russia, and its combined GDP would be about US$17 trillion. One can clearly see that the club of democracies would hold decisive market advantage.
If the free democracies bloc were to press home their advantage by winning over the EU and India, its economic scale would expand to a combined GDP of about US$55 trillion, or 62 percent of the global economy. Comprising only 19 percent of the global economy, the digital dictatorships bloc would be further marginalized. Deprived of the markets that have nurtured its rapid economic growth, China’s economy would stall and follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union, which disintegrated in 1991.
The good news is that Davidson and others in Washington are reading the tea leaves correctly and taking pre-emptive measures to meet the challenge posed by an authoritarian and increasingly militaristic China.
Davidson’s stark warning that Taiwan has only six years to head off an invasion would perhaps be the wake-up call needed to stir Pentagon policymakers into action. With the right support from the US military, Taiwan can absolutely become an impregnable fortress within the next six years.
As Sun Tzu (孫子) wrote in The Art of War: “Do not count on the likelihood of the enemy not coming; instead ensure you are ready to receive him.”
Biden has been in office for two months, and his administration’s policy of forming a multilateral alliance to contain and resist China appears to be proceeding to plan.
Intense speculation over a proposed UK-Japan security alliance and an Asian version of NATO based on the Quad shows that the US and other democratic nations are expanding and strengthening military and economic cooperation, and in doing so tipping the scales in favor of Taiwan.
The pursuit of freedom is a universal value and the goal of all humanity.
Huang Tien-lin is a former advisory member of the National Security Council and a national policy adviser to the president.
Translated by Edward Jones
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