The United States, China, And Taiwan—A Strategy To Prevent War

[Music] uh good morning i'm larry diamond a senior fellow at the hoover institution and i'd like to welcome you to this special joint event of the hoover project on taiwan and the indo-pacific region and the hoover project on china's global sharp power few topics and international affairs are timelier and more important to the future of democracy globally and to u.s national security than the theme of our discussion today the united states china and taiwan a strategy to prevent war in the wake of china's tragic slow motion strangulation of hong kong's freedom and autonomy and its increasingly assertive projection of military economic and geopolitical power throughout the indo-pacific region the threat that china poses to taiwan's security has taken on decided new urgency of course this issue isn't new it came to a head quite some time ago and some think some think he came closer to military conflict than is generally recognized in 1996 when in the face of threats and military intimidation by china around the time of taiwan's first direct presidential election president clinton sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to either end of the taiwan's trades our stanford and hoover colleague then secretary of defense william perry was critical to the decision-making that led to that forthright deployment and one of our panelists today our hoover colleague admiral james ellis commanded one of those two aircraft carrier battle groups that led the contingency response operations in 1996 china backed down from its belligerence and taiwan complete successfully completed its transition to democracy by reelecting the president china despised lee dong wei in the quarter century since then taiwan has thrived to become a leading economic and technology innovator and one of the world's uh most important producers of advanced semiconductors as one of asia's most spirited and liberal democracies but with china's extraordinary pace of military expansion and modernization the threat it poses to taiwan has markedly increased foreign policy and national security specialists in the u.s and in asia are now debating could the u.s compel china to back down from a future course of military intimidation and potentially coercion the way it did in 1996 should it even attempt to do so what is at stake for the u.s and if i may use a quaint phrase for the free world in the conflict between china and taiwan and how can we prevent that conflict from becoming a war in the current context when china has become a near-peer competitor of the u.s globally with rising ambitions for regional hegemony in asia these are uncomfortable but unavoidable questions in their report released in february by the council on foreign relations with the same title as today's event our two speakers robert blackwell and philip zeliko have performed a great service in clarifying the risks and potential scenarios with extraordinary honesty and lucidity so now let me introduce the two of them and our two commentators and then they will uh present robert blackwell is the henry a kissinger senior fellow for u.s foreign policy at the council on foreign relations and the dillard von furstenberg family foundation distinguished scholar at the henry kissinger center for global affairs at the johns hopkins school of advanced international studies among his many foreign policy roles in his distinguished career of government service were u.s ambassador to india and deputy national security adviser to president george bush he also taught foreign policy and defense policy for 14 years at the kennedy school of government philip zeliko is the white burkett miller professor of history and miller center wilson newman professor of governance at the university of virginia following a career in the foreign service he taught and directed research programs at harvard and the university of virginia he directed the 911 commission and he served as counselor of the state department under secretary of state condoleezza rice with whom he has co-authored two books general jim mattis served during 2017 and 2018 as the 26th u.s secretary of defense during his more than four decades in uniform secretary mattis commanded marines at all levels from an infantry rifle platoon to a marine expeditionary force he led an infantry battalion in iraq in 1991 in expeditionary brigade in afghanistan after the 9 11 attacks a marine division in the initial attack and subsequent stability operations in iraq in 2003. from 2010 to 2013 he served as commander of u.s central command directing military operations of more than two hundred thousand american and allied forces across the middle east he is now the davies family distinguished visiting fellow at the hoover institution admiral james ellis served for 39 years in the united states navy his service as a navy fighter pilot included two tours with carrier-based uh fighter squadrons and assignment as commanding officer of an fa-18 strike fighter squadron in 1991 he assumed command of the uss abraham lincoln a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier as i noted earlier he served as a carrier battle group commander in 1996 leading contingency response operations in the taiwan straits he also served as commander-in-chief u.s naval force forces europe and commander in chief allied forces southern europe during the time of historic nato expansion and he led u.s and nato forces in combat and humanitarian operations during the 1999 kosovo crisis he is now the annenberg distinguished visiting fellow at hoover and co-chair of the national security task force and i'm pleased to announce that he's agreed to also chair the hoover project on taiwan in the indo-pacific region which will become part of the national security task force i look forward to partnering with him as his co-chair and fma say so jim maybe co-pilot in any case we're so delighted to have robert blackwell and philip zeliko with us to present their extremely influential and important paper and now i turn it over to them thank you chairman and thanks to hoover for having us and thanks to everybody for tuning in philip and i wrote this report because we were as many in the u.s and elsewhere increasingly worried about developments with respect to taiwan and china and the u.s role therein indeed in the last 72 hours we've had the largest challenge by pla aircraft of taiwan in years and of course i think as we speak we have two distinguished former deputy secretaries of state who've been sent to taiwan by president biden to reinforce his view of the importance of taiwan so this is a subject that uh is hot and getting hotter and we wrote this because we were worried about it uh i want to just say as we start that the report and you can get it on cfr.org if you haven't seen it has 18 specific policy prescriptions uh with respect to u.s policy toward taiwan most of which we won't discuss today just because of limits of time but you might want to have a look i want to go over three slides with you before i turn it over to philip first is the issue which our chairman mentioned which is how important is taiwan to the united states and uh folks who have strong views of this and either suggest that we should have a stronger commitment to taiwan or a weaker one often don't address whether taiwan is a vital u.s national interest so we've looked at that and can we have the first slide please so what we have here are vital us national interests we've tried to be rigorous about this so we describe them as necessary to safeguard and america's survival in a free and secure nation which is a very restrictive and high threshold to meet uh and then we've got five of them here and these will be familiar to many of you the first is to prevent the use of wmd against the us or its allies the second is to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems the third is maintaining balance of power both regionally and globally the fourth is to prevent failed states on u.s borders and the fifth is to ensure the viability and stability of major global systems if you look at those five and you think of taiwan it's pretty clear that one two four and five uh do not connect to taiwan i won't go over it but i think if you look at it you'll see so that leads us to number three which has to do with u.s alliance systems and there the question which arises in the debate is what will happen to the u.s alliance system in asia and indeed in europe too under various scenarios where the u.s either does or does not act to defend taiwan and the only thing i point out here is that the argument that taiwan does qualify as a vital national interest because of number three depends on domino theories not intrinsically taiwan but what would happen as dominoes fall across asia in our alliance system and we all know the weakness of domino theories vietnam reminds us and other examples uh second is we look at is how do the we think the chinese look at trends in taiwan can i have a second slide please and the trends are exceedingly bad for china uh if you look at these uh china has worked on various strategies to try to bring taiwan closer to what they call the motherland and it's produced no movement toward unification hong kong and the oppression in hong kong has killed the one country two systems concept uh all the trends the public uh polling in taiwan are towards separation for the reasons that are indicated there uh taiwan's uh successful mitigation of of the virus has strengthened its international standing support for taiwan is stronger in the u.s than in many decades there's uh legislation being introduced very virtually every week in the congress to strengthen ties with uh taiwan uh the biden administration and i mentioned uh rich armitage and jim steinberg who are now in taiwan but uh they have called our uh policy their policy toward taiwan as rock solid and then finally uh if we have these trends uh what is the chinese leadership concluding from them and it's hard to uh at least for philip and i to think that there's an option for them if these trends continue which are likely uh beyond force to uh to try to deal with their objective of unifying taiwan so finally uh the uh general sentiment i think it's fair to say among experts about uh the danger of uh china using military force against taiwan is no that for a variety of very good reasons despite their increasing concern about it they will not use force against taiwan in the foreseeable future however if we can see the third slide please this is just to remind us how often such expert opinion is wrong so you can see in 1950 with the director korean war 56 suez 62 cuban missile crisis 73 yom kippur war afghanistan in 79 iraq in 90 russia and ukraine in 2014 and it the last tick is in 2020 x most experts dismiss the possibility that china would use force against taiwan we're not predicting it but we think we ought to be ready the united states ought to be ready if it were to occur over to you phillip just to transition from what bob was saying uh we uh we don't know whether or not uh china plans to invade taiwan we can run a theory where they might and we can run the theory uh where they won't we since we don't know what we can know is what we can see what we can see is that china is in a pre-war condition by pre-war condition we don't mean that they have decided on war we mean that they are doing two things that countries do when they when they get ready the first is they start conditioning their population politically and rhetorically for the possibility of a conflict and its necessity the chinese government has been doing that the second thing they do is they start raising the readiness and exercise tempo of their forces to widen and deepen the readiness of their forces which then creates some challenges on the intelligence side because you get more and more signals and it gets more and more difficult to interpret the significance of those so we do think both of those things are happening and it's hard to know what they mean but bob and i therefore think that we need to take these possibilities very seriously indeed so when people appreciate a situation in international affairs they mix together three kinds of judgments the first is a judgment of value do we care about this the second is a judgment of reality what's going on and the third is a judgment about action what can we do and these judgments influence each other because you tend not to worry too much about actions for things you don't care about and so on bob has already talked a little bit about the value judgments that go uh into this crisis and we've mentioned our our careful and worried uh judgment about the reality of what we can see going on uh what i'm going to focus in my part of the presentation are on some of the action judgments the action uh a lot of people can easily debate do we care about taiwan do we not care about taiwan looking at history oftentimes the action judgments are the most important variable yet are often the most dynamic and least well understood so let's just look at some of the uh action just starting with the different scenarios by which china might take military action against taiwan let's put up the first slide so we basically break it down into three different scenarios in the first scenario um china takes action on taiwan's periphery uh perhaps against say offshore islands could we move forward and take a look at a map so when people talk about offshore islands they mainly talk about um there's an island that's south off this map deep in the south china sea taiping which uh taiwan claims and to which the chinese pay some attention a lot of the recent military exercises and drone flights by the chinese have focused on this place here the pradas atoll which as you can see is about midway between sort of hong kong and the big chinese bases of hainan and the luzon strait and the bashi channel which are one of the great outlets into the deep pacific from the south china sea a protest is basically uninhabited except by taiwan's defenders noticing the chinese attention last year to pradas taiwan rushed hundreds of soldiers and marines to defend protests who were there now on this atoll out in the ocean another possibility would be an attack on populated offshore islands like uh pengu sometimes called the pescadores or kinmen and matsu the form of the moy and matsu islands right off the coast of mainland china the big question go back to the first slide before this one the big question we had about um this scenario of china invading taiwan's periphery is the question of what exactly would china accomplish by doing this the answer could be oh it will terrify taiwan and intimidate them yes perhaps but everything china has done so far to try to intimidate taiwan has actually been counterproductive it tends to further delegitimize china and taiwan's politics make any peaceful reconciliation with china less likely and it actually weakens the pro-chinese political parties in taiwan so you come back to the question what will this accomplish it will certainly it will frighten taiwan but that fear and anxiety may not work in china's benefit and will also frighten the rest of the world and basically help create a lot of the things china might want to avoid without actually having addressed the main question but the chinese might not see it that way a second scenario is china could quarantine taiwan in this scenario we don't mean a blockade of food and energy the quarantine we have in mind is one where they see that the united states is helping taiwan uh build up its defenses and china says we're not going to tolerate that anymore so we are simply going to uh control international access to taiwan and we are going to screen incoming shipping air or sea and the shipping that we think is suspicious uh we will divert for customs clearance on the mainland erc uh china uh in january passed coast guard law that expands the authorities to do just this sort of scenario in a way of course those who familiar with history will recognize this is a kind of a cuban missile crisis scenario in reverse uh the chinese would instead of the americans saying we're not going to let you soviets put these missiles in cuba the chinese were going to be saying we're not going to let you americans keep sending harpoon missiles to taiwan and we're going to interdict shipping and screen it we're not going to interfere with the daily ferries and so on we'll just check out what we want to check out so it's a kind of a denial of access strategy that's a scenario and then one has to work through uh the practical responses to that by america or its allies and in the third scenario china could of course just invade taiwan uh the invasion scenarios tend to have two uh um kind of two uh sub-scenarios if you will there is a one is a quick decapitation invasion that relies heavily on airborne and heliborne assaults it relies on special operations forces to quickly decapitate government to then open up airfields and harbors for the landing of larger chinese forces there's then the then there's the more traditional siege in amphibious assault the point to make about the invasion scenarios is that intrinsically from a military point of view these sorts of assaults are just a very difficult military problem so the situation for taiwan is not hopeless and then people have analyzed taiwan's defenses and the usual conclusion is that theoretically taiwan might be able to offer robust defense to these scenarios at least for a time but taiwan has not yet built up its defenses in a way that um maximizes the likelihood of realizing that theoretical potential of self-defense they are not building up say the way in israel or even a switzerland built up its armed forces instead they have ended conscription and traditionally spent a lot of their money on big ticket items and we have been counseling for a long time that they should instead pursue things we call asymmetric defense that emphasizes these theoretical possibilities but a few analysts believe that taiwan is really there yet but they could get there perhaps now let me now turn to the options that the united states has in scenarios like these next slide so we see bob and i see four basic approaches the first approach is the the united states should not plan on the direct us defense of taiwan this is straightforward uh various academics and others have said you know what this is china's sphere of influence not ours this is uh not our vital interests um we should just not plan on the direct us defense period and that is not the position bob and i have taken in our report but there are people who hold this view second approach in this approach the united states would not commit in advance to the direct u.s defense of taiwan yet it would plan as if the united states might do that it would therefore be unclear whether the united states would provide direct defense of taiwan it would also be unclear what role japan or other allies would play in these defensive plans because those roles are not being rehearsed and so on further it would be unclear about whether the u.s defense plans involve attacks into the chinese mainland and open the door to general war with china the second approach is what we believe is the current status quo policy of the united states uh this uh this series of mysteries um uh we can we comment on that approach just with this that anyone analyzing alternative us military strategies for taiwan like this in this status quo approach is are people who are now studying a fog in that fog some analysts assert that current defense plans are adequate though this readiness may not be evident to the public others assert that the current strategy is a potemkin village wishful assurances from a country that has already displayed this trait so often in recent years from iraq to afghanistan in pandemics or in texan winters on the other hand reacting to our report some current and former insiders think our worries are dead right that if the emperor is not naked the emperor's garb is at least threadbare on the other hand others claim that we're wrong that we just can't see the clothes the emperor is wearing nor are we seeing the tailors who are so hard at working in fabricating the garment well this is the challenge of debating war plans and defense preparedness in this environment um bob and i do not just assume the worst instead humbled by uncertainty and what is at stake we just do are reluctant to trust such mysteries and vague assurances so that brings us to an alternative third approach the third approach is that the united states could commit plan and prepare to share responsibility for direct defense of taiwan straight up these scenarios usually assume that the united states would plan on hitting the targets in the chinese mainland that are involved in the military actions against taiwan the only comment one can make about this third option um there are many comments one can make about it but one comment one can make is that these do these do have a little bit of a whiff about them of douglas macarthur in 1950 and 1951. um in these two respects uh first there is a danger of radical underestimation of the chinese which macarthur exhibited in his march to the owl uh a wishful defense plan which did not hedge against adequately against the dangers and second macarthur in late 50 and early 51 was somewhat casual in his approach to planning for general war against china and the strikes and blockades against the chinese mainland that he advocated to the president and which were among the reasons for his eventual dismissal in april of 1951 but this third approach is being seriously advocated by people now in the united states and by members of the u.s congress for instance in the taiwan defense act that was proposed by senator hawley last year there isn't then a fourth approach that's possible this is the one that bob and i advocate in the fourth approach in addition to the second status quo approach the united states would prepare and rehearse a parallel allied plan a parallel ally plan that could challenge chinese denial of access and ship defense supplies to taiwan now let's go to the next slide because i want to we want to delve a little bit more deeply into this option when you break down this option i want to call attention to three aspects that bob and i think are very important first note that in this option the plan places the burden very clearly on china to widen any war beyond type beyond taiwan rather than the united states starting to attack chinese forces in its efforts to help taiwan defend itself and thereby the united states is initiating war against china in this in this scenario the burden would be on china to attack american and we hope allied above all japanese forces that are involved in trying to help taiwan defend itself second aspect second variable to notice even if china attacks united states and japan near taiwan this plan does not assume automatically that such a war should extend to the chinese mainland it is not casual in developing a plan that opens the door to general war with china which is an idea that at the very least needs to be thought through all the way and that includes by the way the parallel actions russians north koreans and iranians would take in that scenario the third variable that we call out is that instead the united states and its allies should prepare visibly and in advance what they would do politically and economically if there was a limited war this is quite realistic we believe that there was a limited war in which americans and japanese were being killed in a conflict that china had triggered we believe that overnight overnight the united states would break economic relations of all kinds with china and ideally japan would do that too if its citizens had been killed and further that japan and the united states would embark on programs of mobilization and re-militarization of a kind that would need to be reckoned with in which for japan would be a fundamental historic shift from its position since 1945. since we believe it is realistic to expect that these things would happen after the outbreak of a limited war we think it is vital to begin planning for that scenario now visibly in advance so that the chinese leadership can reckon with this possibility as clearly as possible before a crisis occurs in order to deter a war from breaking out at all wonderful thank you so much uh you've really laid a lot on the table and beautifully distilled uh the architecture of your paper i'd like to turn now to uh jim mattis thank you uh larry thanks uh both of you uh robert and philip for this very worthy effort uh i think it is probably the most specific and the clearest paper i've seen on this issue that i've read i would point out that the national defense strategy that still seems to be operant adopted four years ago and still apparently embraced by the uh the new administration talked about great power competition foremost of course being china as the great power that we're we're most concerned with but the policy goal of great power competition is great power peace and you need a strategy to get the peace you can't just say this is our policy and then move on so this this is filling in in a very worthy way from its very first sentence in the forward uh because we have to note that relations between uh prc and the us uh will largely define determine the character of our time and i would add the character of our children's time on this planet and the gravity of the situation should be accepted not just in beijing and washington but in every capital where concern for the people uh is foremost and i want to talk to that in just a moment but i think robert and phil you've done yeoman's work reducing the chance for miscalculation and that is really what is coming through here i think there have been a lot of reason why we could assume that the ccp and president xi could miscalculate based on the lack of clarity uh out of the democracies and so you've done a great service i think here the the it goes to the heart of how our two nuclear-armed superpowers going to manage their differences when we step on each other's toes as we certainly will step on each other's toes and this is critical i would point out right now that we talked about cooperation competition and confrontation doing each where we can where we must uh that's one thing but it must be accepted right now that cooperation activities are not dominant they're not dominating the relationship at all they're far from it and taiwan is the is a spark especially with what we've seen recently to open conflict and that's a very real concern i don't think i share your your the author's views that this is not in the offing right now partly just because of the difficulty of a military strike against taiwan but what are we doing with the time we have now to push off any such misadventure uh so that the world is not thrust into this position that uh any chinese adventurism would would bring maintaining our one china policy i think it's the right thing to do but that is not that is not a strategy to achieve the end state that we're looking for here i think this strategy is very timely in its recognition uh that there is too much left unsaid and undone right now to try to maintain a degree of stability uh i think there's excellent use of history throughout this and history won't give us the answers they will tell how others have successfully or unsuccessfully dealt with such issues or similar issues in the past and that allows us to ask the right questions and that's where i thought the use of history here is very very informative um i think that when we look at the scenarios that are put forward i think they're very realistic uh and i think also that when we look at how to deter ourselves finding ourselves in some of those dangerous uh situations the options are the kind that the president can consider these are not uh theoretical these are not um you know if this then that these are very clear-cut and they allow you in in the hegel's finest dialectic to start there and then move up uh as far as how we're actually going to embrace them one thing that comes through loud and clear uh on the options uh or is expanding the competitive space and here i think it's critical that that part of this paper be considered the prc if they were to engage in some of the activities we're concerned with in this paper would find themselves vulnerable diplomatically economically and militarily and those vulnerabilities need to be highlighted to the people in beijing remember they do not answer to the will of their people so they are not primarily interested with the chinese people the ccp is interested in staying in power if we don't look at the role of ideology here then we are missing a fundamental because we can think in mirror image terms of of course the chinese people don't want this war uh well that may very well be true it is also irrelevant uh we have to recognize that we are dealing with a decision body in beijing that has a much narrower interest and cannot understand how chinese people be they on on the mainland or on taiwan can love china but not love the ccp and so long as that colors china's strategy uh that they can't understand that then the danger goes up and our ability to anticipate is not at all like our ability to anticipate another type of nation state i think in uh whether it be deterrence or conflict if it goes to that the role of allies is critical uh for all of the uh you know the quad some people are criticizing the quad as this and that uh basically irrelevant and we hear this out of beijing just the fact that they're so strident in dismissing it shows that the quad is not irrelevant to them and that gives a very clear view of what they are most concerned with i think they import most of their energy supplies from the middle east they knows what that means if they go to a conflict with the united states and the us fifth fleet and seventh fleet are in between the middle east and and the mainland ports they know their vulnerabilities they face diplomatically in terms of isolation and economically when a country like the czech republic can go in with their senate to visit taiwan czechoslovakia is condemned but czechoslovakia says remember we were a small country in a tough neighborhood in 1939 and we understand what's going on here i bring this up because the alliance partners whatever you want to call it those kind of issues will be critical to giving this any strategy but certainly some of these options i think traction i would also point out that the vulnerabilities that they face could drive china to move more quickly the vulnerabilities are demographic the vulnerabilities are certainly economic as as their economy comes out of uh kovit very strong but so are others and i would just add uh i i know i'm to uh get over this uh phillip uh or excuse me uh larry very quickly let me close with this point there is a clear need for sustaining a disciplined rigorous philosophical strategic dialogue between beijing and washington this is every three months from one capital back and forth a sustained dialogue as we go forward and we should be doing that in full discussion with our own allies and partners so their ideas are incorporated so that the more we incorporate them the more compelling this will be but i think it's critical and i would just take one quote from the gathering storm that uh from philip and robert's work when they say that we believe credible options for a taiwan crisis can be readied they've presented them ones that the president could meaningfully consider they could seek to avoid a confrontation and strengthen deterrence uh i think that is really where this paper is so valuable right there back over to you larry thank you so much for these really powerful and insightful comments and now i'd like to go to admiral ellis oh thanks larry and uh i add my uh compliments uh to both robert and phillip for the for the great work they've done uh a paper that perhaps uniquely touches on all of the elements in play as we wrestle with defining a strategy for the indo-pacific and principally our relationship with and responsibilities and perhaps obligations to taiwan uh in addition to your concise summary of our nation's historical journey with regard to taiwan i especially appreciate your focus on the specifics of the scenarios that we might confront and more importantly a specific strategy for dealing with them my wife reminds me that charles de gaulle used to begin many of his speeches with the phrase things being what they are and then went on to postulate appropriate actions your willingness to do so is regrettably not as common as we might wish and it's and it's very welcome and again thanks to you both but before we leave the past there is a historical element that i'd like to probe a bit with you uh that of the oft-noted risk of our sleepwalking into a conflict with china over taiwan or less likely the south china sea i'm not sure sleepwalking is the right analogy these days the alarm clock seems to have gone off but uh in your paper you cite several times the czech crisis of 1938 jim mentioned it as well but you also mentioned poland in 39 and i'm reminded of the first lines of that auden poem september 1st 1939 which goes i sit in one of the dives on 52nd street uncertain and afraid as the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade i wonder in your collective view if the last 10 years have been our own low dishonest decade i mean how much of what we now confront as a result of failing to acknowledge the now obvious how much is due to distracted attention with uh due to other regional uh interests what can be attributed to excessive globalized optimism and what if any elements could be attributed to uh quite frankly diplomatic malpractice on the part of at least several administrations and nations just a point to uh to consider uh not trying to uh to cast blame or or ask who lost china but but i i do think it's worth worth some inquiry uh of all the potential uh friction points with china as you have uh alluded to both of you many of the the current defense strategists identify a conflict with taiwan as the key scenario with all others being what i call lesser included offensives uh pun intended they believe that the defense establishment should focus on preparing the military for a taiwan scenario above all others and they say we must be able to effectively defend taiwan because it's important to frustrating china's strategy to achieve hegemony in asia one of the most interesting points of your paper and i think everyone has noted is that you seem to specifically acknowledge that an effective military defense of taiwan by the u.s and possibly japan is quite frankly not realistically possible and instead proposed the creation of a campaign plan that while including what you term as a carefully orchestrated military challenge to a prc quarantine seizure assault postulates an allied response and resupply effort which could be calibrated to present the chinese with a choice of of uh acquiescence or or increased escalation and in that you believe lies some of the deterrent pressure you seek to bring to bear but arguably even to affect that more limited response we'll still need a major force reconstitution rebalance supply pre-positioning and major ally and partner contributions i mean studies as far back as the the 2015 rand study have documented dramatic improvement in chinese military capabilities and and while it's often noted that they haven't yet reconstituted or built i guess in this case an amphibious capability the fact of the matter is that every one of their large coastal ferries is built to military specifications and so i think we may be uh perhaps misled by uh by the lack of an amphibious capability but nonetheless things have changed and uh you know as when i was there in 1996 on the aptly named uss independence conducting uh two carrier battle group operations i could not do that today we could not safely operate with impunity where we were able to do two just 25 years ago and and i think uh you know our recent actions really while the rhetoric has been there i i'm not sure that the the reality of the foreign structure has been appropriately allocated either and on our side i think the much valley who pivot to the pacific has to be smell spelled with a very small p second point is i work once worked for a secretary of defense who had a pension for detailed but interestingly uh rarely questioned the details of an operational plan perhaps an unintentional effort to confound his briefers he never questioned the details of any plan instead he always focused on the assumptions on which the plan was based and with that in mind but an effort to understand and not confound i've got a couple of questions to consider first you appropriately define the u.s strategic objective regarding taiwan is to preserve its political and economic autonomy it's dynamism as a free society and u.s allied deterrence without triggering an attack on taiwan and you note that this is not a straightforward mechanical process but would depend on washington's accurate and enduring estimate of chinese of china's sufferance for such u.s policies towards taiwan and the strength of beijing's commitment to existing in future red lines you want to note that this effort will demand what in my words i call precision guided diplomacy and you term quality us decision making and policies one can define quality in a lot of ways but if it includes nuanced agile and flexible actions attentive and insightful listening which is not at all the same as not talking and a deep understanding if what you've already pointed out is the traditionally opaque chinese leadership and its goals personally culturally and societally then one can't help but wonder the assumption do we in this administration or any other have the skills to consistently get that balance exactly right to walk along that knife edge when the costs of miscalculation or misinterpretation loom so large and what's our margin of error if we get it just a little bit wrong my second question relates to uh the excellent portion of your report on uh the deterioration of u.s and china relations which you so ably chronicle you indicate that the critical variable uh whether china is successful in its purposes the domestic economic military and diplomatic strength and resolve of the united states and its allies and not emphasis added chinese actions and in this context you note that there's a huge challenge for the president but then you uh follow with some somber sounding statements that the u.s and china are well on the way to confrontation which could eventually lead to war and the past few years we seem uninterested in using diplomacy there seems to be a dichotomy here i guess uh that this that the dye is not yet cast but you know it seems like we're trying to acknowledge the view of scott fitzgerald that the the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function uh or maybe it's divided at the uh at the level perhaps is it the strategic level where we can have optimism when we dispassionately consider the economic linkages the growing global trends of dissatisfaction with chinese norms of behavior or the oft-noted litany of purported problems societal economic and demographic that will ultimately curb china's ambitions and and hopefully you hope a shared aversion for conflict at the same time be congenitally pessimistic at the tactical and practical level where the military realities dominate the risks of miscalculation or low-level human error are high and the lack of a clear american commitment much less that of allies all combined to risk providing the spark that jim talked about that ignites the the wildfire in that vein it was interesting i was preparing for today i read an article on an accidental war published by thomas shelling in 1960 and given the amount of fiction recently published on a possible conflict with china from ghost fleet to the more recent 2034 i was amused to see that the opening line penned by shelling 61 years ago if war is too important to leave to the generals accidental war should not be left to novelists uh he's right of course but the genre will always have some appeal uh to prevent an accidental war deter intentional conflict your paper offers as we've already noticed some interesting concepts including the forced assistance and confrontation effort that i've already noted you also advocate very powerfully for a very public crisis contingency political military planning effort involving us's allies interestingly far from being secret he seemed to implied that the plan's deterrent character would rely on the chinese understanding precisely or nearly so the expected consequences of their action he also implied that such a detailed and public planning would also be a necessary element in convincing the american japanese and even taiwanese societies of the importance of the effort this seems to align with the old military maxim that he revealed to deter and conceal the wind but there's is there a risk that such a fulsome disclosure of our collective intent the timeline for its execution and the involved forces might be a significant drawback if deterrence fails and conflict follows in summary thanks for this great work and having the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom which in my view sometimes is far too conventional and not merely wise enough i do believe that an understanding of how we got here is essential uh though i'm not in favor of the blame game i appreciate your pragmatism and your candor in assessing the military risks and realities even as you articulate the fact that the active defense of taiwan may be problematic there will be important military economic and geopolitical elements of your new deterrence concept i would only offer that the skills to carefully balance all of this and execution may have atrophied or retired or more likely not have been exercised or practiced for a long time as we all know in time of crisis even with the best of talent signals get missed or miss sent the first report is often wrong as we say no plan survives first contact with the enemy exquisiteness may be beautiful but it is often robustness resilience and and leadership that uh that carry the day finally since we all see a need for both of the elements he describes in charting a course to taiwan i conclude with a quote from george cannon delivered at the national war college in 1947. you have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a quiet little armed force in the background people who are otherwise very insulting and very violent become just as pleasant why they couldn't be nicer if they were belonging to the same golf club and played golf together every sunday morning having once played golf in the shadow of the great wall we should all hope for such an outcome thank you uh thank you so much jim and i i'd like now uh to give uh bob blackwell and philip zeliko a chance to offer any additional thoughts or reactions they have in response to these two sets of comments maybe i'll go first quickly and just say i agree entirely with jim that this is a extraordinary diplomatic challenge for the united states because if we look at even post-world war ii history we've had some high moments of terrific american diplomacy but i don't think any of us would describe that as the routine u.s response to external affairs and so what we're proposing is uh dependent at least to some degree on exactly the quality where you were mentioning i have to say and this is not in the report but uh uh this specific point i'm about to make and i'll turn it over to philip i think that the encounter in alaska made u.s china relations worse not better and i don't think it was an example of quality u.s diplomacy of the kind that we all would like to see and so the notion is that one has to do both at the same time both prepare the united states uh to uh react to these contingencies before they occur uh and secondly uh to uh engage china in a serious diplomatic discussion uh uh uh to try to strengthen deterrence and in that regard uh just to conclude uh yes uh jim we do think that the strategy we described should be public it should be as well known to uh the chinese as our response to a soviet invasion of germany was to the soviets that was no mystery and what we want china uh to uh consider is all of the comprehensive damage it would do to it even if the pla says we have military superiority and we can do this we want others in the room to say yes but here are a variety of other things that would happen which would be disastrous for china thanks i'd like to uh start with one of admiral ellis's observations where he guessed that we were optimistic at the grand strategic level but perhaps were pessimistic on at some of the operational level and i actually think he read our report about right on that point i think we're trying to basically say america doesn't have to be existentially pessimistic about the situation with china this is a doable problem at the grand level but we are worried about the challenges in managing this particular issue above all others um for the reasons that bob just summarized a minute ago um i also um want to agree with something else admiral ellis called out which was he he noted that the option we advocated that fourth option on the slide would call for a significant reconstitution and adjustment of american forces and the level of allied cooperation that isn't there yet he's right about um this is one of the reasons we're calling for work on that we have people have responded to our report saying oh if we wanted to do the black will zelico stuff we're doing all that now uh we've uh we can handle all that now these are mostly people who want option three um in fact i we don't think we're at all ready at this point to do option four we think we should there's a ton of things we can do to get option four in shape our view is that it is more realistic to prep option four than to prep option three um and that's that's just a and that's in fact that the prep of option three would require things that is likely to set off the war that you're trying to deter so uh the final point where i'll close actually in in this response is on the arresting quote of w h auden's poem uh 1939 and the challenge is to whether we look back in regard what's happened as a low dishonest decade at the higher you know there is a and i want to combat you all of you will have your own views about the obama administration or the trump administration and need no education on that from us there is caricature out there that over the last 10 years until the trump administration the united states policies towards china was naive and foolishly trusting but then the trump administration came in tore off those rose-colored blinders and saw things clear i think that caricature and i think bob may agree that caricature is overdrawn in mistake i think an accurate portrait of what happened over the last 20 years you can get from books like tom christensen's book the china challenge which actually goes in the detail of exactly what transactions and what things we were working on with the chinese including areas where we had some success it's just it doesn't fit the caricature very easily but on taiwan specifically taiwan specifically um i think in a variety of ways we and taiwan and japan have been distracted and complacent and it's that distraction and complacency that our report is now trying to overcome great uh thank you both so much i've got several questions i'd like to pose now that uh come from the audience and from myself let me begin by merging a question that our taiwan program project manager karis templeman posed and merge it with my own phillip and bob and it's a question about time one could argue that the situation in taiwan in china's eyes politically can't get any worse in this sense that politically psychologically taiwan is gone there's never going to be a popular sentiment for quote reunification end quote so it's not going to be worse five or ten years from now and so the time problem then creates this dilemma if china thinks that it has it can afford to be patient because it can't get any worse but if we start taking affirmative efforts to arm taiwan and if taiwan takes some of the efforts uh i i think you will agree it needs to take uh in terms of becoming um [Music] you know maybe uh more like israel and switzerland in terms of its uh mobilization of uh a complete societal readiness uh then uh and we start building overtly the alliance structure to deter might that have the perverse effect of signaling to china that they can't wait because strategically in terms of taiwan readiness and allied readiness the situation for china will be worse in five years than it is now uh it's a great question larry and you're right that that's a danger so um here's the choice you have is you can uh shrug your shoulders and give up on doing anything that helps taiwan better defend itself in order to avoid just the scenario you outlined avoid provoking china uh we don't advocate that but you can one can make that case then you've got well if you don't make that argument then you've got okay i've got two ways to help taiwan defend itself one is i quietly and without ostentatious bluster try to help taiwan build up its defense capabilities second option is i will uh noisily and by the way the noise will be inevitable if you do it this way i'm gonna build up a lot of american capabilities in this part of the world that don't exist now i'm going to put marine many bases in the ryuku islands do all the political flack with japan to get that done i'm going to pre-position a lot more stuff and i'm going to make it clear that we are exercising and readying the capability for the forward defense of the taiwan straits in a massive credible way and that's going to be like a five-year plan and we're going to start executing that five-year plan it seems to me if i've got a choice between those two scenarios for how to try to strengthen taiwan this scenario one is the one that has the lower chance of triggering a war then scenario two but there is of ten again the the the other choice but just say we're just not going to build up taiwan at all but for fear of of triggering the scenario triggering the war that's uh that's an alternative position that's just not the course we have good uh i just chime in with one thought which is uh that at least in my experience in government there's no serious policy prescription that doesn't have some downsides to it i was once in a meeting with george schultz in which he asked someone will you just prescribe something with great passion what are the downsides and the person said there are none and that person didn't get invited to any more meetings uh with secretary schultz so the downside that you describe exists and it's a matter of judgment and how one handles it tactically but as philip said uh the alternative of passivity doesn't seem to improve the situation and finally of course the way you began chairman which was well things can't get worse in taiwan for china yes they can they can get worse because the sentiment uh in in uh taiwan is hardening uh we can't say that independence uh is uh is gone uh forever the taiwan public and and uh we tried in the report to look at how much patience does china have and it's one thing to have patients when the status quo in taiwan is continuing it's quite another to have patients in beijing when every trend line is negative every trend line is bad and getting worse and so uh we deal with that by saying you may be right chairman uh in your uh implication of your question but let's prepare as if you're wrong um i agree and of course uh cyanguen the current president of taiwan has been remarkably restrained uh but she will leave office in 2024 and there's no guarantee that her successor will be equally restrained let's talk about technology we have a couple of interrelated questions from our hoover colleague marcos kunalakas one is about semiconductors the world economy in taiwan's role in it looks a little different now than maybe five or ten years because of taiwan's leadership role in the production of a crucial role in the production of advanced semiconductors that perhaps makes it uh even more of a uh a jewel in china's crown to be reunited but it also makes it more strategically important to the united states so question one in this pair should we be speaking to the american public more or should we be elevating more the central strategic importance of taiwan's role in the supply chain for this critical input to uh all of the advanced operations of a modern economy and two you've had relatively little to say about cyber both in terms of the possibility that the prc the edge of the prc spear of military coercion might be a cyber attack and what we could do in response uh in a cyber role that might uh deter uh prc aggression so if you could take those two questions let me start with cyber uh and then phillip can go on uh well uh cyber of course is a hot topic with respect to china and russia iran and so forth uh and we do mention it uh in the report but uh not in any detail and the reason and and uh our two colleagues certainly know this uh top to bottom it's very hard to talk about cyber uh in a non-compartment uh situation uh and so one can be very general about it well if there's a massive coercive cyber attack on taiwan the united states should certainly respond in some way but to be any more specific and you can even talk about offensive operations but the the the whole subject is so highly classified that the trial a informed discussion about it but one certainly could convey to the chinese that we would regard such a massive cyber attack with great seriousness and we would respond in ways that would seriously damage china and one could say that uh we uh haven't been willing so far and even in the last uh 72 hours to be that specific about chinese behavior we just express our concern and that a a chinese attack on taiwan would not go unanswered in such language perhaps we can be more pointed there's a cyber attack scenario against taiwan in that case the question is it's a little bit like the attacks on the periphery like what exactly is that supposed to accomplish if it's supposed to terrify and intimidate taiwan again it seems to me more likely that it ends up being counterproductive um if it's a cyber scenario against the united states bob has addressed some of that i'll just flag there are a whole series and we we call out this in the report a whole series of very difficult rules of engagement questions that will arise at the outset of all the scenarios we describe including what our navy does about chinese survey civilian surveillance vessels and the cyber cyber roe issues and the space roe issues are among this very complicated set of issues the only other aspect i want to comment on is the one you raised about how do we think of the strategic importance of the taiwan semiconductor industry in this analysis this was actually a factor in the czech crisis of 1938 czechoslovakia in 1938 had the fourth largest arms industry in europe and it and the german acquisition of that arms industry was an enormous military boost to german military preparedness so it was effective there are two things i'd call out are this one taiwan can do things to reduce the potential acquisition value of the taiwan semiconductor industry in a conflict scenario this kind of manufacturing is extremely sophisticated and highly vulnerable and there are things taiwan can do so that china doesn't easily acquire a capability that is entirely intact second though the united states needs to be a little bit careful as it tries to diversify its global supply chains for semiconductors there is a push underway right now to basically decouple ourselves from dependence on taiwan manufacture of semiconductors the strategic arguments for that are now obvious but you have to be a little bit careful of not doing that to the point where you've actually cut taiwan off and said goodbye uh which might then have some effects that are that is not what you want well uh and of course if taiwan semiconductor manufacturing continues to move some of its production to the united states uh that could be a very welcome thing uh both in terms of the relationship in terms of the dilemma you posed let me ask finally about uh allies we have just about a minute left um bob you've been uh ambassador to india i know you're both thinking about japan how realistic is it that our our three uh vital uh quad interlocutors um in the quadrilateral forum that is now taking place we dare not call it an alliance uh that is india japan and um australia would um [Music] in their different ways and to their different degrees rise to some sort of [Music] readiness to respond in the event of chinese aggression let me do india and perhaps philippines japan india uh the indians to quote a very uh senior indian minister a few years ago on taiwan will fight to the last american they are not going to get engaged in military uh even military planning with respect to uh uh taiwan what they will do is move very slowly incrementally uh to strengthen their their with taiwan and if china were to invade taiwan uh that would cause obviously a crisis india china relations but on the practical question of will they engage in planning with us of the kind that philip and i hope would happen with japan and australia and others no quickly i think australia will be very helpful but is not going to play the leading role but if if there's a coalition australia may well be part of it um note the absence of south korea in the discussion uh which is interesting and important given where it is in the region now japan um we're going to have this meeting with biden and the japanese prime minister tomorrow in which they are right now debating whether they can even mention taiwan in the communique all right what the level of the discussion right now is it's a big deal if we can even announce that we're going to walk to first base uh we are postulating options of course where we're walking way together visibly way past first base so in fact we're to try to deter a war and get it and avoid this situation we think that you need to start conditioning opinion with the kinds of planning in ways that will make sense to the japanese public because they won't seem too provocative but nonetheless advance pretty far down the road to start conditioning japanese opinion to this danger in ways that make sense to them we see the option of aggressively doing a direct defense of taiwan and enlisting the ryukus in that i think actually could be counterproductive for the united states in japanese opinion people should not assume that the japanese are just going to follow in lockstep with us on this stuff so we need to walk this through carefully but i think the kinds of things we're suggesting are things the japanese could accept but they're going to want to move through this very slowly and carefully one step at a time and as i say right now we're just trying to get to first base and our proposal is that the united states and japan needs to go a good deal past that great uh jim mattis jim ellis to either of you want to offer any closing thoughts i just uh this is an excellent discussion i would only point out we need more of these uh we have too long danced around issues looked the other way this brings a degree of fidelity to them that we need more of in this country right now and we're coming out of a strategy free time by and large we've got to embrace this kind of work it's going to be uncomfortable for some people well difficult is never an excuse that history is going to allow us so let's roll up our sleeves and get to work tear it apart uh what what uh robert and philip have done if you've got a better idea but it's uh it's a great start point yeah and i would i would echo that and and it has to begin here in other words as as philip just noted we want these expansive and extensive dialogues with allies and partners and the like and we're not ready for that conversation yet we haven't settled that issue fully at home and i think this is a hugely important first step and uh and as i said in my my remarks uh i commend them for it it's uh it's the kind of conversation that must be held uh domestically and politically within the united states uh before we can presume to define an outcome for uh for neighbors which is never the right answer in any case so thank you again well uh robert blackwell uh philip zeliko you have torn it apart intellectually uh in the best sense of the word i think your paper is not only immensely important right now to american foreign policy but is a model of national security thinking and analysis that students will be studying for a long time to come so i deeply thank both of you once again and my two colleagues admiral ellis general mattis and all of you who have joined with us thank you very much for uh joining us today for this important [Music] discussion

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 146,881

Keywords: United States, China, Taiwan, prevent war

Id: mGHallDVvOo

Length: 80min 56sec (4856 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021