The way China is huffing and puffing these days about blowing Taiwan away is raising alarms. Here is how The New York Times reported on Monday on its latest outburst:
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China will not flinch from war if Taiwan takes a decisive step toward independence, and it does not trust the United States’ assertions that it opposes that course for the island, the Chinese defense minister warned on Sunday, a day after Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III accused Beijing of increasingly bellicose activity near Taiwan.
The defense minister, Gen. Wei Fenghe, spoke on the last day of the Shangri-La Dialogue, a regional security forum in Singapore that Mr. Austin also attended. In their exchanges over the weekend, the two men have played out in miniature the tensions between Beijing and Washington over disputes across Asia, particularly over Taiwan.
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Except the Chinese doth protest too much, me thinks.
After all, the whole world knows China wouldn’t dare go to war against Taiwan. This not least because of the inhibiting precedent Russia set with its invasion of Ukraine.
Because the economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation it’s suffering are bad enough. But the humiliation it’s suffering at the hands of Ukraine alone is enough to give China pause.
Granted, it must be cursing its fate. Because, just last August, China and Russia were leading the chorus of authoritarian regimes in expressing unbridled schadenfreude over America’s humiliating and tragic retreat from Afghanistan.
This clearly emboldened not only Russia to begin preparations to invade Ukraine, but China to begin goading Taiwan about America abandoning it the way it abandoned Afghanistan. But here is how I called China’s bluff even back then in “Afghanistan Today, Taiwan Tomorrow. China Fuels Doubts About US as Ally,” August 31, 2021:
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Taiwan is no Afghanistan. This is why I have also warned China that attempting to take Taiwan by force would be tantamount to America fighting the Vietnam War on the island of Cuba. After all, the United States has been arming and training Taiwan’s far more capable, cohesive, and committed military for years.
Therefore, China has to consider the cost of having a Vietnam-like conflict on its own doorstep. Because there’s no chance in hell this army is going to fold like a cheap suit for it to take over the way the Afghan army did for the Taliban. In other words, China would be willfully launching a war in its own backyard that will prove every bit as pyrrhic as America’s war in Afghanistan has proven, at best.
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Put another way, if the slapdash Ukrainian army is bedeviling the Russian army, imagine what the long-established Taiwanese army would do to the Chinese army.
So China can huff and puff, but it’s not blowing anyone away with these hollow threats…
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Taiwan tomorrow…