East Asia Homework for the Trump Administration
The incoming Trump Administration will immediately contend with a world on fire upon taking office. In Europe, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in its third year, and in the Middle East, Israel invaded Lebanon for the third time.
The unimpressive Russian military performance in Ukraine and the risk that Israel’s increasingly wider war with Iran and its proxies would ensnare the United States should prompt the next administration to undertake a more rigorous assessment as to whether war in East Asia is inevitable.
Russia Underwhelms
Before February 2022, the West assumed Russia would rapidly defeat Ukraine. Successive administrations had identified Russia as a significant threat to American interests and multiple senior officials characterized Russia as a near peer adversary.
After February 2022, the West learned how wrong it had been. In a very short period of time, the Russian military exhibited significant shortcomings in maneuver, communications, and logistics, whereas Ukraine mounted a far more robust defense than expected. Two months later, the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged previous assessments had been mistaken.
Several factors contributed to the overestimate.
In 2008, Russia barely succeeded in invading Georgia. The inferior performance reassured the West, but it also prompted Russia to initiate a multi-year modernization program.
Six years later, Russia stealthily infiltrated Ukraine and annexed the Crimea. The Russian gambit prompted a reappraisal that, in retrospect, was an over-correction.
First, Western estimates focused on tangible elements — the number of personnel and weapon systems. To the extent the West focused on non-tangible features, estimates focused more on upper-level administrative and command reorganization and less on the quality of the non-commissioned officer corps or the degree to which corruption undermined procurement.
Second, the absence of qualitative measures permitted Western estimates to explore worst-case scenarios that overstated Russian capabilities.
Lastly, the West concurrently underestimated Ukraine. The West had been transferring weapons since 2014, but did not thoroughly evaluate the potential efficacy of its defense plans, which included territorial defense and local militia.
An inevitable question arises — has the United States also overestimated the PRC military?
PRC’s “Pacing Challenge”
In 2022, the National Defense Strategy identified the PRC as the “pacing challenge” for the Department of Defense.
Two years later, the Commission on National Defense Strategy concluded that “China is outpacing the US and has largely negated the US military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of forward military investment.”
More significantly, the Commission concurred with the increasingly prevalent prediction that the PRC aims to take Taiwan by 2027.
Possessing the capability, however, does not amount to intent.
Accepting the premise precipitates a false sense of security — the PRC could always act before 2027. Or equally hazardous — a false sense of inevitability; the PRC might wait another decade. Overall, accepting an arbitrary timeline undermines designing a force optimized to deterring or reversing PRC military action.
More broadly, elements of the Russian overestimate are similarly present in the PRC estimate.
The evaluation of PRC military capabilities also emphasizes quantitative over qualitative measures. The PRC possesses the largest navy in the world — whether its officer corps is capable of executing complex fleet operations is unknown.
The PRC is also an autocracy, one more bureaucratically pervasive than the personalist regime in Russia. Autocracies intrinsically suppress competition and innovation, and in few areas are such qualities integral to success as warfighting.
The corollary is pervasive corruption. In mid-2023, President Xi dismissed his ministers of foreign affairs and defense for corruption. The following winter, the National People’s Congress removed a number of generals and commanders from its membership for the same.
Even though corruption has been a systemic problem for some time, the scope of the purge was unprecedented, as it may underscore problematic civil-military relations. The party is undoubtedly in firm control, but the latter’s reliability in a crisis might be questionable.
Israel Entangles
According to the Department of State’s website, “Israel’s security is a long-standing cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.” Indeed, successive administrations have sought peace in the Middle East to help ensure Israel’s security.
On October 7, 2023, Israel experienced the deadliest attack since its founding. Thereafter, Israel began a series of retaliatory operations against Hamas. In the intervening twelve months, the war has widened to include Hamas’s fellow Iranian proxies – Hezbollah and the Houthis.
On October 25th, Israel undertook a long-anticipated attack on Iran, striking Teheran and military sites throughout the country.
Alliances are a singularly elegant solution to multiple security problems — they enhance deterrence, prevent arms races, and simplify diplomacy during a crisis.
However, one major risk entails entanglement, or more perilously, entrapment.
Entanglement constitutes a situation in which the US enters a conflict because of a formal security commitment established on the basis of mutual interests. In contrast, entrapment entails the same, except the US enters a conflict in contravention of its national interest.
Entrapment is recurring concern in the US-Israel alliance. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the US only airlifted equipment to Israel. After the war, the retaliatory Arab oil embargo denoted one substantial risk among many arising from the alliance.
In the current crisis, the US has helped defend Israel against Iranian missiles and has transferred the THAAD missile defense system to Israel. American servicemembers will operate the system, putting them directly in harm’s way in the event of sustained Iranian attacks.
As of December, four Americans hostages remain in the hands of Hamas.
The death of thirteen Marines at the Kabul airport during the withdrawal from Afghanistan subjected the Biden Administration to substantial criticism.
The death of any hostage at the hands of Hamas or any American soldiers resulting from an Iranian strike would inflame an already combustible crisis.
Again, an inevitable question follows — does the commitment to Taiwan represent the same risk?
The Taiwan Tether
The US agreed to a formal treaty alliance with Taiwan in 1954 on the condition the latter would obtain American approval before proceeding with any military operation on the Chinese mainland. After the US established diplomatic relations with the PRC, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979 which only committed the US to ensuring Taiwan had sufficient defensive resources.
The ensuing “strategic ambiguity” has successfully deterred the PRC from using force against Taiwan ever since.
In 1979, ambiguity was sustainable though; neither the PRC nor Taiwan possessed the capability to re-unify China on its own terms.
Presently, however, the PRC is an economic and military power, and the concern entails Taiwan declaring its independence.
Consequently, the PRC has increased its intimidation of Taiwan; military aircraft routinely venture close to the island and exercises are increasingly coercive in nature.
Former Ambassador Richard Haass made the argument for strategic clarity by which the PRC patently understands using force against Taiwan will entail war with America.
Two Asia scholars, Nien-chung Chang-Liao and Chi Fang, have countered the shift would embolden pro-independence constituencies and ensure a war the shift is supposed to avert. Moreover, they asserted ambiguity restrains pro-independence forces and, more importantly, underscores that the commitment is conditional and that Taiwan needs the commitment more than the US.
However, ambiguity also introduces the following risk — if Taiwan fears abandonment, it might restart its abandoned nuclear weapon program.
Such “nuclear anxiety” is dangerous because, even if the security commitment is made clearer, Taiwan may conclude the optimal path still entails developing nuclear weapons.
Conclusion
A catastrophic war over Taiwan can be prevented, in part, by exhaustively assessing the risks.
Net assessments constitute a principal framework for analyzing the national security strategy of the United States and they were indispensable to Cold War strategic planning.
To inform strategic planning in the Western Pacific, President Trump should direct his National Security Council to undertake a comprehensive net assessment of both the PRC and Taiwan. All assumptions must be stress tested and all strategic interactions — economic, military, political — must be gamed out. The stakeholders should be subject matter experts from across the government.
And it must be iterative. Net assessment is a “practice” in which various stakeholders possessing particular perspectives and independent information will, on an ongoing basis, reveal a rich variety of advantageous courses of action.
Critical structural deficiencies are part of both Russia’s and China’s military DNA. And note, Israel did not believe war would occur until 1975.
Nearly every utterance and instance of American support prompts Chinese protests; yet, in seventy-five years, no invasion has ever been attempted. According to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, strategic clarity only imperiled Ukraine.
Ultimately, miscalculated military capabilities and untested commitments will only further conflate capabilities with intentions, misdirect scarce resources, and spawn strategies of desperation.
R. Jordan Prescott is a private contractor working in defense and national security since 2002. He has been published in The National Interest, Small Wars Journal, Modern War Institute, 19fortyfive, and RealClearDefense.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
