Trump can deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan — if he has the will

Joseph Bosco

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Last week, the Brookings Institution held a security conference with Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander of United States Indo-Pacific Command — the U.S. military arm charged with confronting the hostile rise of the People’s Republic of China.

Here he addressed the growing danger of conflict with China, warning, “Over the summer I saw the [largest] rehearsal and the most joint exercises from the People’s Republic of China that I had ever seen … over an entire career of being an observer.”

Paparo recounted that 2027 is now the date by which Xi Jinping has said the People’s Liberation Army must be ready to seize Taiwan, eight years earlier than China’s original target date of 2035. He said Beijing has made it “a war of necessity” rather than a “war of choice” because of the working of China’s 2005 Anti-Secession Law, which declared that if Taiwan took too long to accept “peaceful” unification, China would be entitled to unify it by “non-peaceful means.” That enactment was China’s answer to America’s Taiwan Relations Act, which made Taiwan’s democratic security an official interest of the United States.

The U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity on whether it would defend Taiwan must finally be replaced by strategic clarity — that an attack on any U.S. asset or ally, even if less than “massive,” will be treated as the act of war it is and will bring down the full non-nuclear force of the U.S. military on China. There can be no question of incremental, tit-for-tat, “non-escalatory” targeting that would drain U.S. resources and will (and allow Beijing to re-arm and re-group). China must be made to understand the self-destructive stupidity and futility of starting a war with the United States.

It will soon fall on President-elect Trump to send that message to Beijing, and far more effectively than President Biden has. On four different occasions, he told journalists that the U.S. would use military force to defend Taiwan, only to have White House and State Department officials walk back the remarks. Presumably, Marco Rubio as secretary of State and Mike Waltz as national security adviser will ensure that a strong Trump message of resolve will be reinforced, not undermined, by the foreign policy establishment within the federal government, aided and abetted by business leaders more committed to corporate profits than America’s national security.