The dangerous myopia of the US playing the Taiwan card
- Washington seems to forget that while it can make trouble across the Taiwan Strait, Beijing can mess up the Korean peninsula just as badly
Nowadays, people are always referencing Taiwan with Ukraine. This Western-centric perspective applies to both its propagandists and critics.
Sadly, it is not only self-serving for the Western allies but ultimately self-defeating. That’s because so far as China is concerned, the real reference is not Ukraine, but Korea.
Unless you appreciate that, you won’t understand why the Chinese, so far from being rattled, still think time is on their side when it comes to unification.
For Western propagandists, China is just Russia times 10, so what is happening in Ukraine today will happen to Taiwan tomorrow. That’s why the West must arm it to the teeth, and be ready to defend it if necessary.
Then, there are the critics, many of them well-meaning Westerners themselves. They too draw an analogy between Russia and China. But for them, it has to do with the West, led by the United States, goading Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine with Nato’s eastern expansion up to the Russian borders over the past two decades.
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In the same way, the West, led by the US, is now goading China to invade Taiwan by encouraging its secessionist forces. What’s worse is that Nato – a North Atlantic military alliance – now wants to expand eastward, all the way into the Pacific!
US and other Western hawks think they are clever by exploiting secessionist sentiments in Taiwan. For them, it’s just another card up their sleeve in the new cold war to contain China, along with myriad other strategies. They think Ukraine has given them the perfect optic to play fast and loose with “one China” and cast Beijing in an aggressive light.
They don’t know what they are doing. The more they play up the Taiwan card, the more they endanger South Korea. That is, if I am not mistaken, the meaning of a brilliant new column by Italian sinologist Francesco Sisci, who is also a researcher at the Renmin University of China in Beijing.
Titled “You say Taiwan; I say Korea”, Sisci points out that it’s far easier and much less costly for Beijing to manipulate an armed conflict on the Korean peninsula than for the West to do the same across the Taiwan Strait.
Virtually all the potential conflicts that China could currently get sucked into, say, a war over Taiwan; another big fight with India in the Himalayas; and conflicts in the South China Sea with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, or Indonesia, or any combination thereof, the least costly and most strategic is another Korean conflict in which it can pretend neutrality.
“It is impossible to assess Chinese intentions on all these borders,” Sisci wrote. “However, a war in the Korean peninsula could be less risky and more advantageous to Beijing in the present situation.
“If North Korean forces were to start a bombardment of Seoul and move infantry and tanks over the ceasefire line, it could procure the most significant damage to the Western world with the least pain to China.”
To be sure, a war over Korea or Taiwan will be equally bad for the entire global economy but short of triggering world war three, the former conflict will be much less costly to the Chinese.
“Such a move would put the Pyongyang regime at risk, but North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might be tempted to action if goaded by Beijing or in a moment of total miscalculated madness,” Sisci warned.
The point is that China has been underplaying its hand while the US has been overplaying its own.
If backed into a corner, Beijing doesn’t necessarily have to invade Taiwan; it only needs to start destabilising Korea. To be sure, the US is capable of preventing Chinese unification, at least for now, but so does China in “promoting” Korean unification.
The West or the US doesn’t have the upper hand, however much its hawks and armchair strategists may delude themselves. All they are risking is turning South Korea and Taiwan into sacrificial pawns.
