A history teacher I had Freshman year in HS taught my class that at the same time the British were getting involved with the Suez Canal, North Korea invaded South Korea. His point was that the world was distracted and the allies couldn’t be in two places at once.
If that was a true analogy, US foreign policy could be in a tricky chess position: if we concentrate 100% on Poland militarily, Xi might try to capitalize on the opportunity to over-run Taiwan.
It’s a useful point. I think the simultaneous crises must have been the war in Suez and the Hungarian Revolution.
My bad.
This is why the U.S. has historically maintained a ‘two war’ strategy, where it could fight two peers or near-peers at once without losing strategic or tactical ability on either front. This was adopted precisely to prevent the kind of opportunism that leads to war whenever you are tied up with one threat.
Unfortunately, under budget pressure the U.S. military has been moving away from that doctrine since about 2010. And China has been building up its military capacity much faster than was anticipated. This makes the current time even more dangerous.
It’s also not lost on me that China has recently modified multiple rail cars to look like ( and approximate the speed / size of ) aircraft carriers and have been running their planes by the moving rail cars on near constant training sorties. While I’m confident NATO can hold off an invasion of Poland, think about the chain of events if we lose Taiwan:
South Korea and Japan would be surrounded and cut off from almost every nearby major land mass. The Philippines might step up, but they are a long way around to the south …
and there’s nothing but ocean and a long swim to the East.
I think that China and Russia are both trying to stretch the US to the breaking point, but I also don’t think China is ready to invade Taiwan…yet…and that Russia would rather bluff wrt any sort of actual adventure where they commit troops, even in the Ukraine. However, the sort of thing we are discussing in the OP is a way to put pressure on the Europeans, especially since they are pretty obviously split on how to respond and what to do. That sort of contention just plays into Putin and Xi’s plans, and both China and Russia are putting pressure on the EU in different ways, stressing them and straining them. I think both have different goals, but I think both are trying to strain them, and also, perhaps, separate them from the US or vice versa. The general relationship between the US and EU, even officially has been strained in the past decade or so in different ways, but I think it’s at an all time low, even wrt the American (and European) people.
I agree that China taking Taiwan would be an existential threat to both South Korea and Japan, and I think at least in Japan’s case they are aware of this at the government/national level at least. I’m not sure about South Korea as they are always hard to read on what they are thinking at the official level, and they seem to want to engage with China more fully and they want peace or whatever with North Korea. But a Chinese adventure into Taiwan would certainly strain the US’s ability to react anywhere else…meaning it would probably be the perfect time for Putin et al to go on a little adventure into the Ukraine. I doubt Poland would be something even Putin would want to attempt even with a very distracted US, but who knows?
It’s a hell of a day to be in the cruise missile business…
The future is so bright, I have to wear shades. Or, to paraphrase from Airplane, I picked a hell of a time to quit the hard drugs…
The reason it looks hypocritical is because it is hypocritical. It’s easy to lecture from on high when insulated from the consequences of advocated policy.
What if China and Russia start working together to ensure that events transpire instead of hoping they transpire?
Already happening. It’s just that their end goals are different.
The messages that have been sent by the US over the past five years are not those of a strong, assertive superpower.
The chaotic Trump years and the January insurrection in the heart of the US government. The poorly planned withdrawal from Afghanistan after so many years. The message is that the US may not be committed to alliances as firmly as it has in the past. It seems uninterested in providing the leadership that would be expected of a superpower with the worlds biggest economy.
It is no surprise that in the east Xi in China is testing the US support for Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the pressing it’s claims to the South China Sea. In the Europe, Putin in Russia is probing for weaknesses on NATO’s eastern flank in Ukraine and now through Belarus with Poland and the Baltic states.
However, both China and Russia depend on global trade. If trade stops, their economies will tank and cause political instability. The developed economies are bound by a mutual dependency on supply chains and huge volumes of trade in goods and services. That will always act as a restraint on the use of force.
This probing of weaknesses can be addressed by constructive US diplomacy and joint military exercises with NATO members in Europe and the alliances in the Far East.
The EU can exert considerable soft power to counter Russian influence. This has had positive stabilising affect in most of the Balkan states except Serbia. It is using its influence now to stop airlines from flying refugees to Belarus.
I do wonder whether Xi and Putin are more interested in maintaining their own grip on power than seriously contemplating a military adventure. These leaders must always be wary of their internal politics and confronting external threats is one way for a leader to consolidate support.
If the US has taught the world anything over the past couple of decades it is how damaging and expensive military interventions can be, for very little benefit.
Of course, until it no longer works. Like Muammar al-Gaddafi or Ceaucescu. Or they die of old age in bed, like Franco (yes, he is still dead). You can watch the video on You Tube of the speech Ceaucescu was holding when the tide suddenly turned against him and the people started to yell against him: he was quite surprised (see 1.25 - but his surprise did not last for long, the next day he was dead).
Not necessarily: Economic integration and trade reached a peak just before WWI that has not been surpassed until recently and that did not stop the war. Fortunately, our current polititians are much more rational, sensible, intelligent, educated than ever before… </sarc
I was thinking of the integrated supply chains where components cross cross the world before they are assembled into products. That and the economies of scale that have led to some industries being serviced by a few huge factories supplying a global market for some products.
I think people like to imagine that their country is self sufficient and it is a small matter to put up the shutters, withdraw from doing business with all these troublesome countries and live by internal trading. For that you need a big country with diverse resources. But even then, there would be shortages and high costs to such isolationism.
Isolationism becomes official policy in some from time to time. The US, perhaps aided by its geography, is prone to that. The leaders of China and Russia are very sensitive to the messages coming out of Washington and are keen to replace US influence. Incidents like Belarus refugee border crisis are designed to test NATO and the mutual defense commitment behind it.
The sudden chaotic withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan and the question marks over US commitment to long term alliances. These messages encourage states that are keen to expand their influence by annexation and certainly China and Russia fall into that category.
Not unrelated:
If China did invade Taiwan you can bet that this domino will also fall thereafter.
That would lead to a dangerous confrontation between superpowers.
Would China gain more than they lose from annexing Taiwan?
I am sure there would be a lot of dancing around the flag and a huge number of casualties and the Taiwan military may be able to do some damage to Chinas inexperienced military. Eventually Taiwan would be overwhelmed, but China would then gain a broken country with a resentful population that will resist its occupation.
It will be a Pyrrhic victory, perhaps like the US invasion of Iraq. A plan for what happens after all the military deterring do is essential. China plays the long game and its policy is a long term diplomatic isolation of Taiwan. It may try a blockade at some point but it benefits a lot from Taiwanese expertise and investment. China watchers will know better whether the balance of power within China has shifted. Or, indeed, whether Xi and his faction are threatened. Russia watchers may show some light on Putins faction. He came to power on the back of an ‘emergency’ and has regularly created distractions by stirring up trouble in neighbouring countries. The Baltic states have significant Russian speaking populations that Putin has stirred up in the last. Ukraine is culturally very close to Russia, especially in the Russian speaking East. There are lots of strings to pull. Belarus has given him another move to play.
It is time for the US to underline its commitment to NATO and head off these threats with a show of solidarity. There is a playbook for this.
Sadly diplomacy in the US does not yet seem to have recovered from the Trump years.
Trying to analyze the behaviour of other countries based on what ‘makes sense’ to us is a good way to make category errors that leave you blindsided. Wars and orher crazy actions are often driven by things like internal power dynamics inside countries, fights between internal factions, miscommunication, cultural factors we don’t understand, etc.
This era is starting to feel a lot like the 1930’s, when bad actors were arming up like crazy and engaging in all kinds of sketchy activity that went unopposed and led to further escalation of sketchy activities which the world tried to ignore until it was too late.
Trying understand the internal dynamics of the US is quite a challenge. Few would have anticipated the sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan. What next?
^ This.
You are asking the wrong question here, IMHO. The real question is…does the CCP THINK they will gain more politically from invading Taiwan than it will cost them. And do they THINK that any backlash they get from The West™ and other regional rivals will be brief and will blow over because to paraphrase from Idiocracy, we like money? The thing is, their own assessment of risk verse reward is almost certainly different than your own…and almost certainly different than most other countries.
You are positing rational actions by an inherently irrational actor. And we don’t even have to be necessarily talking about China. How rational was it for the US to invade Iraq (since you brought this up)? How rational was it for the USSR to invade Afghanistan? Both of those SEEMED rational from the two nations and their leader’s perspectives, but they weren’t really. Invading Taiwan seems irrational from your perspective…and, frankly, my own as well…but the CCP is using a whole other set of scales to weigh the risk verse reward dynamic.
Maybe. I think it’s actually the time for Europe to step up and draw some lines and set some ground rules…and back them with their own military might, instead of relying on the US to be their shield. This isn’t to say the US shouldn’t underline our commitment to NATO…I do agree that’s important. But Europe needs to be perceived as being able to stand on its own, especially with problems that are in its own backyard…and also since this particular problem doesn’t actually involve NATO or the alliance or treaties. This is EUROPES problem to deal with, as long as no direct attack on a NATO member is happening. Basically, we wouldn’t expect our NATO allies to underscore their commitment to the alliance when various large bands of people are attempting to cross US borders. That is OUR problem, and they wouldn’t really get involved, even if other actors precipitated many of those people to start making their way towards our borders.