Ukraine Is Not Taiwan. Stop It Already.
Reporters need to question the foreign policy conventional wisdom rather than continuously amplifying it.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
Fanning The Flames
(You can listen to today’s newsletter here)
Yesterday, the New York Times took a deep dive look at how the Ukraine crisis is playing out with observers in China and Taiwan. In the process, the paper of record provides one of the most egregious examples of how incurious reporting shapes bad foreign policy narratives.
The article is headlined, “Both Sides of Taiwan Strait Are Closely Watching Ukraine’s Crisis,” and it tries to shoehorn the Ukraine crisis into a broader foreign policy discussion — and, in particular, China’s policy toward Taiwan.
With Russia massing troops along Ukraine’s borders, President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan felt compelled to act.
She ordered the creation of a task force to study how the confrontation thousands of miles away in Europe could affect Taiwan’s longstanding conflict with its larger, vastly more powerful neighbor.
“Taiwan has faced military threats and intimidation from China for a long time,” Ms. Tsai told a gathering of her national security advisers late last month, according to a statement by her office.
Perhaps more than people in any other place in the world, Taiwanese know what it is like to live in the shadow of an overbearing power, with China claiming the island as its own. Ms. Tsai added, “we empathize with Ukraine’s situation.”
While the correlation is not exact, the confrontation between Russia and the United States over Ukraine’s fate has resonated on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, highlighting the strategic calculus China and Taiwan have made about the possibility of armed conflict.
I have highlighted the key phrase in this opening section — “while the correlation is not exact.”
Not only is the correlation not exact — it’s not remotely similar. As the authors, Steven Lee Myers and Amy Qin, note later in the article, Ukraine has no military alliance with the United States, and as President Biden has made clear, he has no intention of setting US forces to defend the country. When it comes to Taiwan, the United States has maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” as to whether it would protect the island from a Chinese invasion. That creates an entirely different strategic calculus for Chinese leaders when deciding to go to war against Taiwan. Russia doesn’t have to worry about getting in a shooting war with the world’s most powerful military. China does.
Second, Ukraine is a relatively poor nation with a substandard military that shares a major border with Russia and a key Moscow ally, Belarus.
Taiwan is an island.
Invading an island is extremely difficult and hasn’t been done successfully in more than 75 years (arguably, the last successful amphibious invasion was the US landing at Inchon during the Korean War). Moreover, Taiwan is a heavily defended island that would be exceedingly difficult to invade, and, in fact, according to the most recent Pentagon report on the Chinese military, Beijing currently lacks the resources and military hardware to complete such a task.
Large-scale amphibious invasion is one of the most complicated and difficult military operations, requiring air and maritime superiority, the rapid buildup and sustainment of supplies onshore, and uninterrupted support. An attempt to invade Taiwan would likely strain PRC’s armed forces and invite international intervention. These stresses, combined with the PRC’s combat force attrition and the complexity of urban warfare and counterinsurgency, even assuming a successful landing and breakout, make an amphibious invasion of Taiwan a significant political and military risk.
Yet, later in the Times piece, the authors quote a Chinese "independent political analyst” who argues “that in some ways Taiwan is even more vulnerable than Ukraine because of its ambiguous diplomatic status.” Actually, in zero, zilch, nada ways, is Taiwan more vulnerable than Ukraine.
Finally, there are reams of political science literature that suggest leaders rarely make strategic calculations based on the actions of a key military rival in another theater. So, for example, China has maintained a policy of reunification with Taiwan for more than 70 years, and yet, even after US withdrawals from Vietnam, Iraq, Lebanon, and Somalia did not invade Taiwan. Why is this situation different? The Times does not say.
But instead, they quote Taiwanese officials who think this is a critical moment:
“If the Western powers fail to respond to Russia, they do embolden the Chinese thinking regarding action on Taiwan,” said Lai I-chung, the president of the Prospect Foundation in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and former director of the China Affairs department for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
Hmm, could there be another reason why a prominent Taiwanese foreign policy thinker with close ties to the current government thinks this is a critical moment for Taiwan? Could it be that he and his friends in the government want the US to be less ambiguous in their pledges to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion?
But here’s the part that practically blew my mind — these two sentences, which came in the 30th paragraph of the piece.
Since the crisis over Ukraine began, there have been no signs of China bolstering its already sizable forces arrayed against Taiwan. Military and political analysts said that, so far, the events are not likely to alter China’s assessment on conquering the island in the near future.
This graf contradicts everything I’ve read up to this point. Actually, “contradicts” is too mild — it completely undermines it. It begs the question of why the Times didn’t bother interviewing the military and political analysis who are making this argument.
Indeed, a far more interesting piece for the Times to publish would interrogate the widely held view that China is closely watching the Ukraine crisis for clues as to what the US might do if Beijing attacked Taiwan.
Question Your Assumptions
But the frame of this particular piece speaks to the omnipresent flaws in foreign policy reporting: it all too often starts from a conventional wisdom premise rather than questioning it. The assumption, implicit, in the argument, is that what happens in Ukraine matters to China, and since you can point to public statements from Chinese and Taiwanese leaders … well, voila, there’s your argument. But good foreign policy reporting means reading between the lines and recognizing that those on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have a vested interest in making Ukraine (and the US response to the crisis) more important than it really is. The Chinese would like to push the idea that the US is at risk of getting bogged down in Ukraine and thus can’t pay attention to Taiwan, which could make Taipei more susceptible to Chinese pressure. Conversely, Taiwan wants to remind American policymakers of their plight and encourage the belief that Chinese aggression toward their island is increasing. Others in the pundit class are using “signals sent to China” to argue why the US should do more in Ukraine. Weakness in the latter will impact the former, or so the argument goes.
But, if you end up with a conclusion that “events are not likely to alter China’s assessment on conquering the island in the near future” or if you look closely at the possibility that China could actually invade Taiwan, it makes all the rhetoric about the connection between Ukraine and Taiwan … look like talk and not much else. The fact is, the crisis in Ukraine is, first and foremost, about Ukraine and Russia. It’s not about China and Taiwan. It’s about the United States, but in a very limited manner, and there aren’t many conclusions to draw from what we do there to what we will do elsewhere. Countries are not monolithic. Because they react one way in one area of the world doesn’t mean they will do the same thing elsewhere, and, I can assure you, China knows that.
What’s Going On
Samuel Charap’s piece in Foreign Affairs on how to break the cycle of conflict with Russia is an absolute must-read.
Gerrymandering is ensuring that this year’s midterm election will be the least competitive in decades.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is destroying the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Even worse, in a case that fatally undermines the voting strength of Black Americans, the Court used the so-called “shadow docket,” which means it didn’t bother to issue an opinion justifying its decision. Perhaps, most amazing of all, Chief Justice John Roberts, who penned the majority opinion in Shelby County, which began the evisceration of the VRA, voted with the Court’s liberal bloc. It is increasingly clear that the conservative bloc of the Court is a lawless majority that has become yet another outpost of the Republican Party.
On Friday, the Republican National Committee characterized the January 6 riots as “legitimate political discourse.”
Musical Interlude
On Sunday night, I saw bluegrass musician Billy Strings in concert. He’s pretty talented.
All the news that’s fit to print my sweet Fanny Adams.