Opinion Sur
Geopolitics is tense to the maximum
The world is immersed in a nuclear and conventional rearmament, as if leaders of different calibers smell even more blood. Russia and China are getting closer — Xi Jinping spent three days in Moscow last month with Putin — united by mutual interest and horror of the common adversary advancing on remote continents. In Central Europe, the US and partners are encircling Russia: Finland’s recent entry into NATO added 1340 kilometers of border between the Western alliance and Russia, deepening the latter’s clumsy claim to its security.
The other region through which the US slides by boosting military bases in Japan and the Philippines – here it will go from four to nine – is the sphere of influence of its defiant: it is encircling China in the Asia-Pacific seas where a fuse would blow, if Xi invaded Taiwan. Both parallel lines grow on the geopolitical world map straining on two sides a planet that would not withstand a Third World War.
For the US, there are two critical points: one is Ukraine, where the defeated power in the Cold War fights indirectly with NATO. The other is the island of Taiwan, where last week the Chinese armed forces showed muscle by land, air, sea, and cyberspace, pretending to “create a repressive situation in which the island is surrounded in all four directions”: it mobilized PHL-191 missile launch systems, a 052-C destroyer ship and J-10C fighters. In the coastal province of Fujian, it made live-fire water exercises and moved the aircraft carrier Shandong.
The centenarian Henry Kissinger suggested in his book China to avoid the “Thucydides trap” – which led Athens and Sparta to war for the rise of the first by undermining the hegemony of the other –, the same one that led the United Kingdom and the emerging Germany to the First World War. Today’s two great powers – interdependent, for now – are far from war, although relations are strained and have Taiwan as their explosive fuse. If China or the U.S. were looking for an excuse, this island would be perfect.
The nodes of Ukraine and Taiwan
The US is the power in economic decline in the face of the Chinese resurgence, but in frank military expansion: on the Japanese island of Okinawa, it is expanding its 32 bases near Taiwan. Its two adversaries, China and Russia, have distinct traits and interests. But the flashpoints of Ukraine and Taiwan are connected: what happens in the current war in Eastern Europe is a laboratory for the future if China invades Taiwan, whose armed forces are in unfavorable asymmetry, relativized if the US were to intervene with soldiers, something it did not do in Ukraine by the Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. It also prevented the Cold War from erupting. The question is: if Americans fear Russia for its nuclear weapons, will they stand back before Xi Jinping?
A parallel logic would say yes. But U.S. presidents have always said they would get directly involved, while maintaining a policy of strategic ambiguity. The big question is how much is Taiwan worth to the U.S.? Would a war with possible atomic outcome be justified by US interests? China is an economic and technological challenge for the US – not yet military – but it is not a major political threat: where Mao exported communism, Xi Xinping ignites pockets of capitalism.
Between the two countries there is competition – less and less free –, but no irreconcilable contradiction: China and the US need each other, even if they bother. No one is certain to what extent the U.S. would defend Taiwan. But its mere word of deterrence already generates an effect on the Chinese government that, if it invaded, could not rule out a war very harmful to its interests.
The overreaction of China nine months ago to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and last week to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s trip to the United States to meet with Kevin McCarthy, leader of the House of Representatives, is a simulation, a war game: nothing suggests a concrete intention to invade in the short or medium term. Upon assuming his third term, Xi Jinping said, “we must resolve the situation in Taiwan… and to advance unswervingly in the reunification of the motherland.” Ending de facto autonomy on the island would be for Xi a “personal legacy”, a way to “inscribe” his name in history crowning the ascent to the economic and technological summit with the conquest of the moon and Mars. The issue is how.
Putin – a leader with rational European thinking – invaded by considering his vital interest threatened. But Xi – in the context of a Taoist worldview – is likely to act differently.
The Art of War
The Chinese government has been applying in Taiwan, almost like a manual, Sun Tzu’s classic, The Art of War. The sinologist Francois Jullien studied this book and deduces two conceptions of efficacy: the Greek and the Chinese. For the Greeks, before the battle a plan is drawn up towards the objective, delimiting a field of maneuvers. A general was a good geometer, ensuring perfect modeling with angles of attack and siege shapes.
Sun Tzu’s war leaves these questions aside: its axis is “situational potential.” That strategist does not model: he studies the context in process. Like water, you must find the facilitating slope. The translations use the word “plan” for “ji”, but according to Jullien, that is the European view: in Chinese it means “to weigh” the factors favorable to both sides: quality and quantity of troops, their morale, competence of the Generals, relationship of the King with his people. So, they draw up a potential diagram without getting caught up in a plan that will expire in the heat of combat. The Tao cites the metaphor of water conforming to the object that enters it, just as martial arts use adversarial force: they do not stop it, they let it pass.
For Clausewitz – a nineteenth-century military theorist – circumstance is what can divert the course of the war outside the plan: the soldier must fulfill it without deviation, always through the shortest way by force of will. Sun Tzu theorizes another logic: in war victory “does not deviate”, it is the result of the potential situation adapted as it is renewed in the course of operations (a fixed objective would be an obstacle). If the enemy is fresh, tire him; if he has eaten, starve him; If it is compact, fragment it. All gradually along the long way, avoiding confrontation in an unfavorable situation. The great strategist identifies and detects among the multiplicity of factors, increasing those conducive to wear down the other, until he loses his axis. He attacks him when he is defeated. Reap the fruit if it has ripened: “Victorious troops win before they engage in combat; the vanquished, seek victory at the moment of combat.” Everything happens earlier, in the patient stage of weighing.
An uncertain future
Is it possible for China to invade Taiwan? Theoretically, yes. But unlikely in the short and medium term. Will Taiwan become part of China again? It’s a possibility, in the long run. China is piercing the ground on different flanks, not only the military: it works the general potential to make it propitious. Perhaps China hopes that one day, the situation will be so insurmountable for Taiwan – before it must ensure that the US will not intervene – that the government of the island opts for a negotiated exit, “a return home” under special conditions of autonomy, different from the Hong Kong case where there was a preliminary agreement with the United Kingdom: a “negotiation by force” without touching a hair.
The vast majority of Taiwanese reject such an agreement. The party closest to negotiation is the nationalist Kuomintang – that of General Chiang Kai-shek defeated in the civil war by Mao – now in opposition. The country’s former president, Ma Ying-jeou of that party, said, “We are aware of the need to have good relations with China.” Last month he made a historic visit to China — the first by a former Taiwanese leader — and said, “we are all Chinese.”
China pays for the growth of markets, the axis of its status quo: war would be a terrible business. The CCP tackles the adversary in the Chinese way, without haste and avoiding a clash. Taiwan preserves itself in the same way and avoids declaring its independence. This month, the Chinese Foreign Ministry took away one more vote at the UN, where the island claims to be recognized as a country: Honduras changed sides and opened an embassy in Beijing (the Chinese demand in return is to close the one in Taipei).
The Open History
Until 1971, Taiwan was the only China in the UN – sitting even on the Security Council – but Nixon made peace with Mao and the US reconfigured its “one China” policy with capital in Beijing, cutting its official link with Taipei. Taiwan inhabits a diplomatic limbo, recognized by only 13 countries: it does not exist legally, a situation it shares with Palestine and seems insurmountable.
Every historical process in progress has an uncertain end. Perhaps the century-old CCP – within a culture that thinks of itself as a civilization beyond ideology – is fertilizing the political terrain in Taiwan 100 years from now, tilting the plane economically and politically, until one day the propensity changes so much from the perspective of the Taiwanese, that most believe it beneficial to embrace their neighbors again, in whose mainland they have invested billions of dollars: the Taiwanese Foxconn is the main assembler of I-Phones for Apple in China. Or maybe Taiwan will succeed in exercising the right to self-determination and never reunite.
Mark Twain improved on a line from Marx by saying that “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” If so, the world would, in the long run, go into the “Thucydides trap.” In the last 500 years there were 16 bids for world hegemony and 12 ended in war. However, most likely in the case of the Taiwan fuse, the non-essentialist pragmatism of Chinese thought – similar on each side of the Taiwan Strait – knows how to adapt to the circumstance, turning opposites into complementary ones and avoid activating the fatal nuclear trap. It is necessary: a new “great war” would be the last, cutting the cycle of eternal return. There would be no more farce or tragedy. Or anyone.
Published on Pagina 12 on April 24, 2023
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