War Chariots

The number​ of Trump administration officials who could be called ‘very competent’ is small, but the former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger is one of them. At private school and university in Massachusetts he learned to speak excellent Mandarin, and in the early 2000s worked as the Wall Street Journal’s correspondent in China (where he was once punched in the face in a café by someone he described as a ‘government goon’). He was in New York on 9/11 and, in 2005, joined the US Marines as an intelligence officer after watching a video of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida leader, beheading the American hostage Nicholas Berg. Between tours in Iraq and Afghanistan he studied ways of refining intelligence and counterinsurgency techniques, the old tools of imperial management.

Perhaps inevitably, Pottinger ascended to more comfortable and prestigious perches within the intellectual world of the US right. He is chair of the China programme at the neoconservative Foundation for Defence of Democracies, and a fellow at the right-wing Hoover Institution. He is also an old associate of the far-right Christian nationalist and QAnon supporter Mike Flynn, with whom he worked in Afghanistan when Flynn was head of J2, the intelligence directorate of the Joint Staff, and about whom he continues to speak with affection. After Trump was elected, Pottinger joined the National Security Council as director for Asia. At the height of the Covid pandemic he delivered a twenty-minute address from the White House in near perfect Mandarin. Admittedly, Pottinger was never a true MAGA devotee (he resigned as deputy national security adviser on 6 January 2021 over the Capitol riots). But he says he was proud of Trump’s ‘foreign policy accomplishments’.

Out of government, Pottinger has devoted himself to agitating for a confrontation between the US and China, often in the pages of Foreign Affairs. He recently published an edited volume, The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan (Hoover Institution, £22.95), pushing the argument that the US should prepare for war with China. The book’s main recommendation is that the US immediately stockpile large quantities of munitions, especially LRASM air-launched anti-ship missiles, and prepare to fight ‘China’s Wehrmacht’ with a view to making the Taiwan Strait a graveyard for the Chinese navy. Taipei should abandon its plan to acquire more submarines (leave that to the US) and focus on coastal defence, conscription and interoperability with US forces. Japan, Australia, Britain and France should be prepared to help. If all this sounds daunting, Pottinger notes: ‘There is evidence already that US support for Ukraine has in some respects improved US procurement for a war with China.’

Pottinger argues that China is the major ‘propaganda and diplomatic supporter’ of Russia and Iran, and he portrays Xi Jinping as a nefarious totalitarian leader who must be defeated at all costs. The American right has been infatuated with such thinking for some time, though it has rarely had such qualified champions. Still, the democrats under Biden have adopted many of their ideas. Rush Doshi, the former head of China strategy on Biden’s National Security Council, recently responded to an article by Pottinger and a co-author in Foreign Affairs by curtly stating that ‘they propose steps that the administration is already taking.’ Biden has extended the logic of the Trump-era trade war with China. And it was Biden, not Trump, who overturned the decades-long US policy of strategic ambiguity on whether the US would defend Taiwan militarily in the event of an attack from China by publicly stating, four times, that it would.

Should Trump be re-elected in November, there’s every chance that Pottinger and other thinkers who favour military confrontation with China – Elbridge Colby, the main author of Trump’s 2018 National Defence Strategy; the former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who describes China as part of an ‘axis of anti-American autocracies’; and Robert Lighthizer, the leading Republican trade warrior who speaks of China as a totalitarian state – will return to government. Even in opposition they have influence. And within the US national security establishment, the prospect of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan has become something close to an obsession. In the spring of 2021, the former US commander in the Indo-Pacific, Admiral Philip Davidson, started a fashion among US military figures for predicting when China would invade. Davidson’s guess was 2027. He was outdone by the head of the Air Mobility Command, General Mike Minihan, who said his ‘gut’ told him it would be 2025; Minihan was outdone in turn by the former chief of naval operations Admiral Mike Gilday, who talked of an invasion in 2023. The news sometimes seems to provide support for their position. On 23 May, China began major military exercises around Taiwan that it described as ‘punishment’ for comments made by the new president in Taipei, Lai Ching-te, in his inauguration speech.

Why must the war be over Taiwan, which since 1972 the US has officially acknowledged is viewed by ‘Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait’ as a part of China? For advocates of a Sino-American war over Taiwan, the logic is explicitly that the US global empire must be maintained. Taiwan’s democracy is mentioned in passing, and there is some Cold War-style blather about China ‘propelling autocracy ahead in the contest of global systems’. But the main argument is that Taiwan is a strategic asset to the US. In the popular press, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s fabs are described as irreplaceable magic factories at risk of destruction or capture by China. Taiwan accounts for a very large share of global semiconductor production, and TSMC is one of very few companies, along with Samsung, that can make the most advanced three-nanometre chips. But for the most part Pottinger emphasises other reasons for Taiwan’s importance. He often brings up General MacArthur’s assertion, in 1950, that ‘the domination of Formosa’ – Taiwan’s main island – by an ‘unfriendly power’ would be a disaster for American strategic interests. If China were to annex Taiwan, they say, it would somehow allow it to ‘project power throughout the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic’. How that would be the case, given that the US has a huge naval advantage, is never explained. The stakes, for the advocates of war, are ultimately the US strategic position in East Asia, not chips (which can be made elsewhere) or democracy (in which the US is uninterested).

To invade Taiwan, China’s navy would have to make a 180-kilometre crossing of the strait – maybe twelve hours – and then mount an amphibious landing. Taiwan’s shallow waters and narrow beaches do not make for easy terrain and surface ships would be vulnerable to missiles, artillery and aircraft on the journey. Taiwan’s population and infrastructure is overwhelmingly concentrated on the west of the island. The east of Formosa is a densely forested mountain range – impractical for invading and resupplying. There are no east-west rail tracks and relatively few roads through the mountains. It’s not clear that China has enough landing craft to carry hundreds of thousands of soldiers, though it is possible that Chinese military forces could requisition civilian trawlers and roll-on roll-off ferries to help.

The greater problem for China remains the presence of the US navy in the region’s waters. US surface ships, like China’s, are vulnerable to missile attack. But China has no way to track US nuclear-powered submarines operating in the China seas, and no true equivalents of its own. During an invasion Chinese ships would have to go back and forth across the strait while under attack from undetectable submarines and anti-ship missiles fired by B-1 and B-52 bombers, along with P-8 Poseidon aircraft, which would be out of range of China’s air defence systems. Tactically, it is blind: a dispersed invasion fleet would be exposed to submarines; an escorted convoy might help defend against the submarines, but would be vulnerable to air-launched missiles. Pottinger’s argument is that the US military has too few advanced missiles and should get to work on mass production.

The idea that openly preparing to fight the Chinese military might increase the risk of a global crisis is dismissed by Pottinger and other advocates of war as a misconception. A Taiwan crisis can only be the result of China’s drive to ‘build an empire’. Chinese thinkers, unsurprisingly, tend to see things differently. After Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, visited Beijing last summer, the director of the Centre for American Studies at Fudan University, Wu Xinbo, who advises the Chinese foreign ministry, remarked that the US ‘deals with China through what it calls “strategic competition”, which is actually containment and suppression’. Chinese officials use stronger language still. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on 1 June, Lieutenant General Jing Jianfeng accused American leaders of ‘tying the region’s countries to the US war chariot’.

There is no question that China has contributed to the deterioration in relations with the US. Chinese diplomats have been promoting an idiosyncratic reading of General Assembly Resolution 2758, which restored the PRC’s seat at the UN’s tables in 1971, in order to cajole other countries into referring to Taiwan as a ‘province of China’. But to say that China alone has recklessly departed from the status quo is an inadequate account of recent history. It obfuscates fearful US attempts to restrict China’s industrial manufacturing economy, which has been the impetus behind much of the deterioration in Sino-US relations. In October 2022, the Biden administration elected to impose an embargo on the transfer of advanced semiconductors to China. Whether the embargo has been effective on its own terms is unclear (at the semiconductor fair Semicon Japan in December, Chinese manufacturers were very well represented). But it was certainly effective in souring the mood between Washington and Beijing.

Half of all US attack submarines are deployed in the Pacific theatre. Pottinger and his supporters want that share to increase and talk about using the submarines to ‘sink China’s navy’. The US and its allies regularly hold massive military exercises in the Pacific. In March, Taiwan’s then defence minister, Chiu Kuo-cheng, confirmed that small numbers of US troops had been sent to the Taiwan-controlled Kinmen Islands, three miles from China’s coast. In November 2023, Taiwan’s national security adviser, Wellington Koo, said the US was ‘using all possible ways to help’ Taiwan, including training military forces and ‘build-up of asymmetric fighting capabilities’. In February this year, the State Department approved the transfer to Taiwan of the Advanced Tactical Data Link System, a military communications network used by Nato which would allow Taiwanese armed forces to communicate more easily with the US military. Last July, the US announced it would provide Taiwan with $345 million of arms from its own stockpiles. Taiwan has $14 billion of US military equipment on order.

Apart from the pronouncements of American defence intellectuals, there is no demonstrable evidence that a Chinese attack on Taiwan is imminent. China hawks point to Beijing’s shipbuilding programme and increased military spending. In this they follow the traditional logic of official hypocrisy: their arms build-up is conclusive evidence of malign intentions; ours is a defensive measure designed to prevent war. China’s political system makes it very difficult to divine the thinking at the top. But so far, China’s political strategy towards Taiwan has been one of passive pressure. China has sought to foreclose the possibility that Taiwan will declare formal independence, but it has not sought to force unification. After Biden and Xi met in San Francisco in November 2023, a US official recounted that Xi was exasperated by talk on the American side of invasion plans for Taiwan, and had ‘basically said there are no such plans’. On 15 June, the Financial Times reported that at a meeting with Ursula von der Leyen last year, Xi had said the US was ‘trying to trick China into invading Taiwan, but that he would not take the bait’.

Xi may well be dissembling. But most Taiwan experts do not believe China is about to attempt an amphibious invasion. Many are doubtful that China could even pull off a more limited, and more likely, naval blockade to put pressure on Taipei. At the Future of Asia conference in Tokyo on 24 May, Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad said: ‘Unfortunately, America likes to see a confrontation between Taiwan and China … For us, there is no necessity.’ Chinese leaders may sometimes make obstreperous territorial claims, he said, ‘but they don’t do anything.’ David Daokui Li, the director of the Centre for China in the World Economy at Tsinghua University, has argued that, ‘facing the increasingly hawkish stance of the United States’, the consensus within China is ‘to respect and negotiate with the United States … but stand firm and not give in on issues of long-term interest to China’ – including Taiwan.

Pottinger’s former deputy on the National Security Council, Ivan Kanapathy, has pointed out that ‘avoiding war between the United States and China is relatively easy.’ The problem is to avoid war while also ‘protecting substantial US interests’. In a sane world, avoiding a Sino-US war would be an overriding priority. A global crisis over Taiwan would be a disaster for the world. Yet in their talk of Wehrmachts and victory, supporters of a war with China appear to yearn for that disaster. Perhaps it’s because their discussions and designs all seem to take place in an alternate dimension – one in which nuclear weapons don’t exist.