THE TAIWAN TANGLE

Can we deter belligerence in the strait without provoking it?

- IAN BURUMA

As Great Power tensions pose a threat to Taiwan, military strategists are hobbled by a simplistic, sloganeering sense of history.

Catastrophic wars can start in peripheral places: Sarajevo, for the First World War; Gleiwitz, on the German-Polish border, for the Second. The contributors to “The Boiling Moat” (Hoover Institution), a short book edited by Matt Pottinger, believe that Taiwan, the democratically governed island situated off the coast of southeast China between Japan and the Philippines, could spark a major war, possibly even a nuclear one, pitting the U.S. and its Asian allies against China. According to their estimates, more than ten thousand Americans could be killed in action in just three weeks of combat. The cost in Chinese and Taiwanese lives, both civilians and soldiers, would presumably be much higher. And that is assuming that a local war doesn’t spread to the rest of the world. Pottinger was the Asia director on the National Security Council under Donald Trump, and so his opinions are worth paying attention to.

This isn’t to say that Pottinger’s hawkish views on the need for U.S. intervention in East Asia would earn him a place in a second Trump Administration. MAGA isolationism has always been in tension with the former President’s tough-on-China rhetoric, which, in turn, is in tension with his penchant for making deals with dictators. The contributors to “The Boiling Moat” are not MAGA types, either; they’re a mixture of military mavens, including a Japanese admiral and a former contractor for U.S. Special Operations Command, and hawks for democracy, such as Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former NATO secretary-general.