The US-China war is coming
Every day, new signs emerge that war between the United States and China is becoming more likely.
Every day, new signs emerge that war between the United States and China is becoming more likely – and sooner than even pessimistic observers imagine. We do not want to think about this, because it seems far too Black Swannish. Even if such a war did not go nuclear, it would still be economically catastrophic and played for the highest geopolitical stakes imaginable. However, it might well degenerate into a nuclear exchange, at which point all bets would be off.
Therefore, we subconsciously instruct our brains to view the possibility of such a war as remote. However, like the recent Covid pandemic, it is entirely predictable, and therefore would not be a Black Swan event at all. Just a black event.
We must be careful when assessing China’s aims. The British press often gives the impression that China wants to supplant the US as the dominant global power. It does not – or at least knows it cannot. The US is invulnerable to invasion, and has unparalleled economic breadth and depth. In extremis, it could be entirely self-sufficient in natural resources, energy production, technology, manufacturing and food supply. No other country in the world has this degree of security. Any war would be fought in China’s backyard, and, at any time, the US could retreat back to Hawaii, and still maintain a position as a leading global power.
And that is what Beijing wants: not global dominance, but parity. At present, China’s ‘natural’ sphere of influence is contested by the US. China wants to push the US back, out of the Western Pacific, and beyond the Second Island Chain. In doing so, Beijing could, in the decades after, manoeuvre to become a regional hegemon like the US is now, and thus gain the complete security at home it would need to challenge the US globally on an equal footing. Washington, of course, would prefer not to have to deal with a peer competitor. Further, its national pride will not easily give up its present status.
Harvard University holds a file of the sixteen times in the last 500 years in which a rising power starts rivalling a ruling power. In most of the cases neither power wanted war, but in twelve of the sixteen war happened, and mainly because of competing interests in relation to a third party. Taiwan is the likely trigger for war between the US and China. China cannot let Taiwan go, because if it does, the Communist Party would lose legitimacy. The US cannot let Taiwan go, because if it does, its entire position in the Western Pacific unravels, and it would be forced back at least to the Second Island Chain. China must act; the US must defend.
Ominously, the strategic window for China to act to integrate Taiwan is open now, but is probably closing. On each occasion the US has sensed another power might be close to securing the regional hegemony it enjoys, Washington has marshalled the entirety of its awesome power to prevent this from happening (against Germany twice, and Japan and the USSR). There are signs it is doing so again. It is already building new alliances and tightening existing ones with China’s natural rivals in the Western Pacific, and bringing to bear its soft power against China. Arms deals, technology transfers and sweetheart trade arrangements will probably follow. Soft power efforts might develop into stirring up trouble in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet. However, it will at least seek to foment anti-Chinese sentiment in Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Australia and Japan.
At home, the US will start raising military spending (focussed on the Navy and Space Force) and military technology research, especially in cyber and AI. This will be made easier as President Biden runs the US economy hot, just as President Reagan did during his military build-up in the early 1980s. Finally, the US will use its control of the global financial system to squeeze China out, and cut off access to key components of a modern economy, as it is already doing with semiconductors.
Meanwhile, India, China’s main rival on its Western flank, is rapidly growing in power. It seems likely that China’s provocations in the Himalayas are not so much about grabbing territory there, but about keeping India occupied on land so it cannot attend to developing a blue water navy of its own, and especially so it cannot make the Andaman Islands an impenetrable gate at the far end of the Straits of Malacca.
Beijing is also facing the possibility of finding itself stuck in the middle income trap. A rapidly aging population and communist micromanagement may prevent it becoming a fully developed modern economy, like Japan (which developed before its own population started greying).
The Chinese Communist Party might well conclude that it is better to act now, before these trends progress much farther. Certainly, since the Covid crisis, it has acted far more aggressively abroad, poking at India and bringing Hong Kong to heel.
However, will it go farther and attempt to retake Taiwan? Beyond PLA Navy ships and landing craft massing on the Fujian coast, there are signs we could look for to suggest war was likely. A faster tempo of satellite launches, especially without the usual warnings to air traffic. Heightened nationalistic rhetoric at home, and a ramp up of belligerent diplomatic rhetoric abroad, especially directed toward Taiwan. Aggressive probing of Taiwan’s airspace and maritime territory. All would be signs that China is moving close to a war footing. Frighteningly, this has already happened in the last six months.
The mobilisation of national industry would be next. Perhaps coincidentally, China is presently cracking down on its technology sector. Alibaba, Ant, Tencent, Didi and the entire, hitherto blossoming, Chinese tech sector have been broken up or passed to the control of state cronies in the last few months. China watchers seem to have concluded that this is a naked power grab by a leader in Xi Jinping who is too Maoist to understand that he is killing an industry that will be crucial for the 21st Century. Or perhaps he knows he has an imminent date with the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet and needs the technology sector – with its logistics, production, and data analysis – under full state control, like the rest of China’s economy?
China has also started building hundreds of new ICBM silos. This would help protect second-strike capacity in the event of an all-out US counterforce nuclear attack, and raise the stakes for any sort of nuclear exchange the US might be tempted to initiate if it looks like losing a conventional war.
Given the steps that have already taken place, any civil unrest in Taiwan, discoveries of weapons smuggling (for pre-positioned special forces or provocateurs), assassination or abductions of key Taiwanese political, administrative, or military personnel, and acts of sabotage would surely suggest that war would be more likely than not. If Taiwan’s telecommunications are cut, or if any of its outlying islands are occupied, the war would have already started.
2049 is the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It is central to Beijing’s ambitions that Taiwan be an integrated part of China by then, and that the world shares in the glory of the celebrations. It is thought that it takes the world twenty-five years – a generation – to forgive a war of aggression. By that logic, China has two years, starting from today.
