This is the big question. If PRC invades Taiwan, would the USA use nukes to stop them? If so, In a way that does not much damage but shows the next one could (i.e. nuke a small island between the two, or a flotilla?). How about if push comes to shove in the South China Sea?
Can the big powers do a Vietnam or Korea, where both sides are fighting in a limited theatre and there seems to be an unspoken agreement not to escalate beyond that locale? Remember, the big problem with nukes is not that some country might use them tactically; that would be self-defeating. No point in taking a battlefield that is a featureless radioactive crater with a lethal downwind. But, pushed to the point of full defeat, a country has nothing to lose by taking the opposition down with it. The unknown is whether severe loss of face by the Chinese in a conventional or limited theatre would constitute a defeat so humiliating it’s better to do a mutual suicide.
It’s the threat that has maintained the restraint among superpowers for 75 years.
Aside from the risk of WWIII (which is about the only time we get to just put this to one side), another risk is that a show of strength might have the opposite effect.
Nuclear weapons are old and (largely) not recently-tested tech. Almost the worst thing that could happen would be simulataneously showing an adversary that you’re crazy enough to go nuclear and that many of your current nukes, or ability to deliver them on target, is flawed. This might actually encourage a preemptive attack.
So I don’t see it happening.
A show of force is always going to be “Look how powerful our conventional weapons (and maybe also cyber attacks) are. Don’t make us go nuclear!”
Roughly twenty years ago, a U.S. defense analyst (trying to remember his name) wrote in an op-ed that it would be smartest for China to use nukes from the very beginning of a war for Taiwan, not near the end - as a warning to America, not an actual attack. He suggested that China would detonate a nuke a few dozen miles ahead of a U.S. carrier battle group (sailing westward in the Pacific) to send them an unmistakable message.
It may sound extreme but in many ways it makes perfect sense. If China must go nuclear, it is far more advantageous to do so from Day 1 outright, not waiting until Day 100 after its conventional military has suffered horrific losses and it is on the verge of conventional defeat, using the nukes only as a Hail Mary.
China will not invade Taiwan with troops. At least not any time soon.
Remember the effort it took the allies in WWII to invade France. That was a massive effort and they were only going 20 miles. Taiwan is 80+ miles away (at its closest…chances are ships would be coming from even further away). The sealift capacity needed would be massive. And you just do not drop troops off and leave, you need to setup supply lines…across that same 80 miles.
With modern tech there is no way China would be able to just appear on the beaches of Taiwan in a surprise move. With modern weapons Taiwan would probably have little trouble picking off transports as they puttered in towards the shore. I’m willing to bet Taiwan has thought about this.
The best China could do without a colossal effort on their part would be to fling missiles at Taiwan and hope they capitulate. China would, at the least, earn a lot of hate for doing that from the rest of the world (well, most of it).
Taiwan is well-situated to fend off an invasion, but poorly situated to cope against a blockade. It has only 2 modern submarines, compared to over 70 in China’s navy. It has very little in the way of fossil fuels at home, can’t grow enough food to feed its populace (some importation of food is necessary year in and year out,) and has no capacity to cope with China enforcing a sea and air cordon if that cordon is set hundreds of miles away from Taiwan (aside from a few Kidd-class destroyers, most of Taiwan’s navy lacks range.)
But with regards to an invasion, Taiwan has been amassing antiship missiles, various arty, attack helos, etc to cope with that. So it’s probably much likelier that China uses a blockade alone and thus gets a higher chance of success while risking fewer casualties and also inflicting less damage (the goal is to capture Taiwan as intact as possible.)
The main difference is that with a blockade, China can afford to keep its naval assets far out of Taiwan’s reach and there’s nothing Taiwan can do about it, but with an amphibious invasion, China would be forced to send hundreds of ships to Taiwan’s coast, sailing right into the range of defensive weaponry.
The CaspianReport is a great YouTube channel, with a large collection of interesting videos on geopolitical matters. Here’s one from just a couple of weeks ago on the question of China invading Taiwan, highly relevant:
Thanks for that video, Machine_Elf. Very interesting.
I hadn’t realized that it would be an eight-hour crossing for Chinese invasion forces, and also hadn’t thought of the likelihood of a grueling insurgency by the occupied Taiwanese people if the invasion did succeed (which the Chinese forces would doubtless try to brutally put down, suffering a huge PR defeat when footage inevitably got out). The political risk to the Chinese government if an invasion failed is also worth considering. And, although the video didn’t address it, I suspect most of the world would impose crippling economic sanctions against China if it flat-out invaded Taiwan, which China, with its export-driven economy, could ill afford.
The BBC report about the incident didn’t give Chinese casualties, but:
This incident occurred in January 2021. There was an incident last June. " The incident took place in north Sikkim last Wednesday. India’s army said there had been a “minor” incident that had been “resolved”.
Tensions are high along the world’s longest disputed border. Both sides claim large areas of territory.
At least 20 Indian soldiers died in a skirmish in the Ladakh area last June."
Found an AP story:
" BEIJING (AP) — China’s military said Friday that four of its soldiers were killed in a high-mountain border clash with Indian forces last year, the first time Beijing has publicly conceded its side suffered casualties in the deadliest incident between the Asian giants in nearly 45 years.
The announcement, coming more than six months after the bloody hand-to-hand fighting, should help global audiences “understand the truth and the right and wrong of the incident,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said.
Yet the delay also appeared to reflect China’s deep culture of military secrecy, as well as concerns over the potential domestic and international fallout from the bloodshed.
Immediately after the June 2020 clash atop a high ridge in the Ladakh region’s Galwan Valley, India announced it had lost 20 of its soldiers in a battle that saw fists, clubs, stones and other improvised weapons used to avoid a firefight.
China was believed to have also had casualties but did not provide any details, saying it didn’t want to further inflame tensions."
The Chinese are using interesting tactics in the South China Sea. On the theory that even the USA (let alone the Philippines or Vietnam) can’t be everywhere at once, they have things like a naval ship accompanying a collection of large-ish fishing boats, who then use assorted tactics to intimidate regular small fishing boats from other countries. It’s more like bully in the schoolyard - the teacher can’t be everywhere - rather than armed confrontation.
The trouble with attempting to use any force to capture Taiwan is that the USA does not need to be there. Blocking a carrier force - temporarily - does not stop cruise missiles or drones. The next logical step in any assault is the attempt to establish air superiority. Without it, any force is a sitting duck. But then, any airfields within attack range of Taiwan are already sitting ducks, and nuking nearby an approaching carrier fleet is likely sufficient escalation to encourage the USA to retaliate by hitting airfields near on the mainland - hopefully, with conventional weapons. (Remember the USA had no problem “accidentally” hitting the Chinese embassy in Belgrade when the Chinese were using their immunity status to provide a communications base for the Serbs.)
As for a blockade, as Kennedy and Khrushchev determined, a blockade is only as good as the resolve to use weapons if foreign ships cross the line, and the resolve of the other to cross - at which point it is beyond a simple blockade and becomes a shooting war, on the wrong side of Taiwan. If the USA is going to support Taiwan, they certainly don’t intend to respect any arbitrary Chinese blockade. I think the Chinese are better off doing what they have been doing - using their economic clout to isolate Taiwan as much as they can. The bigger the Chinese economy, the more clout.
I agree with this. And as a previous poster said missile technology is really big here. I honestly think we’re at a point where traditional surface ships and even airfields are more about asymmetrical conflicts and such, not about fighting I guess for lack of a better term I’ll steal the old school one–other “Great Powers.” It’s fairly similar for the United States, Russia and China–a lot of our naval force is useful in a lot of day to day activities, but probably isn’t geared around fighting each other for very long. Ships are easy targets for a modern missile force, and unlike WW2 where bombing was imprecise and difficult, hitting shipyards with missiles from quite a distance would be a thing if such a war went very long.
I think China has a “sphere of interest” concept. The bipolar Cold War of the 20th century saw two ideologically opposed superpowers both of which had global ambitions. I think China wants to be hegemon of its area of Asia and wants there to be a sphere of influence over which it is recognized as having exclusive “right of action”, such that other powers do not bother it. I think they also take an incredibly longer term view of attaining this than the West does. I think China (correctly) sees U.S. global leadership as the impediment to them being able to have their unmolested sphere of interest, which is a major motivation for why in many ways China is trying to create parallel global institutions and initiatives to those ran by the United States, and in areas where the United States has abandoned its commitments, China is quick to jump in. I don’t think China wants to be in a Soviet style Cold War with the United States, instead they want to out position the United States, or at least “diminish” the United States globally so that China can achieve its goals in its sphere of interest. I think they intuitively understand that unintuitively, being able to have the sort of unmolested sphere of interest they desire requires having global soft power approaching that of the United States. That’s one reason why they have been smart to entrench themselves with Europe through recent trading arrangements and with the developing world via the belt and road initiative.
FWIW I don’t think China much wants to take Taiwan. They know it’d be ugly and problematic. They just want to make sure Taiwan never attains widely accepted independence, because they figure in a long span of history as long as Taiwan isn’t able to be seen as a truly independent country it will eventually “accrue back to China.” Taiwan is small, China is big, and Taiwan is excluded from many international bodies. It’s not hard to imagine China eventually building enough economic leverage over Taiwan that it is able to gradually pull Taiwan closer and closer. The fact that there has always been a pro-China faction within Taiwan’s political apparatus serves this interest as well.
This is why I think China’s conception of how it takes Taiwan is more like a slow, big, non-consensual “hug.” I think China believes (and may very well be correct) that over time it can produce a series of carrot and stick realities onto Taiwan without having to launch a single missile, or even do something as drastic as a blockade, to pull Taiwan ever closer into its orbit. After a certain point it will be too close to resist the finality. I do think its crackdown on Hong Kong actually probably undermined this effort a little bit, as the Taiwanese now have clear proof if they were offered a “one country, two systems” deal it would not be worth the paper it was printed on.
The last 30 years have been a lesson to me in the fact that democracy is a sliding scale that is likely to go back and forth a lot for a lot of countries. Right now China is at a low point for having many democratic freedoms and Taiwan is at a historical high point from where it had been for most of its independent history, which I think makes peaceful unification difficult. But there’s no reason to assume these sliders stay where they are forever. Xi isn’t immortal, and while it looks like he wants to follow the Deng example of staying in power until he is too infirm to continue, he will eventually be replaced. Xi is particularly against reforms along the democratic front, but his successor may be more liberal. Likewise as America, Poland and Hungary (to name a few) have shown, you can backslide into more authoritarian forms of democracy, which could happen in Taiwan and make peaceful unification a little more likely. I really think China feels that unless Taiwan signals a “permanent break” by declaring true independence, on a long enough time scale conditions will arise that will bring Taiwan back into the fold. It is helped by the fact that there is a significant political coalition in Taiwan that does see this as an eventual goal, and the fact the Taiwanese are mostly ethnically Han Chinese and speak Mandarin Chinese.
