Wiliam Hague in the Times makes some good points. Trump is clearly floundering: lost in a disastrously mismanaged war in Iran, and cosying up to Putin over Ukraine. Putin, of course, will be very much aware of Trump’s desperation, and rubbing his hands with glee. A Yalta-style trilateral summit – the US , Russia, China – has meanwhile been mooted, with the seeming aim of carving up Ukraine. This, then, could be a very good moment for China’s President Xi to finally make his move on Taiwan:
On June 6 this year, little noticed globally during the conflict in the Gulf, a significant development occurred in the western Pacific Ocean. China announced a “special maritime traffic law enforcement operation” to the east of Taiwan. For four days, Chinese ships radioed all commercial ships in the area demanding details of their origins, destinations and crews. There was a strong protest from western nations and from Taiwan itself at this interference with lawful maritime activity. But another building block of Chinese jurisdiction over the waters around Taiwan had been tested and rehearsed.
The June incident is a warning of how a Taiwan crisis could develop, not through a full-on invasion by China but by the accumulation and normalisation of intrusion and coercion. Steadily, more measures have been taken by Beijing that could one day, with no warning, be turned into a blockade or quarantine of the island it is determined to repossess. Over the past few years, China has repeatedly sent aircraft across the median line of the Taiwan Strait, simulated blockades, expanded naval patrols in waters administered by Taiwan, asserted judicial authority over Taiwanese citizens and conducted influence campaigns to undermine their confidence in the US as an ally.
Stepping forward obligingly to illustrate the point has come President Trump. He has stalled the latest arms package for Taiwan and said it would be a “very good negotiating chip”, while also referring to the problems of the US being “supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war”. President Xi emphasised at the recent Washington summit that Taiwan was the crucial issue for US-China relations, but there is no sign Trump pushed back with emphatic American support for this small but strategically vital democracy. In an important speech in Singapore in May, Pete Hegseth, the US war secretary, omitted all mention of Taiwan. Beijing will have taken that as seriously as its omission of the word “peaceful” from the annual statements calling for the reunification of Taiwan with the People’s Republic of China.
All this would be ominous by itself, but the mishandling of other geopolitical events by Trump is sharply increasing the risk of a crisis over Taiwan erupting while he is in office. The US military has used up a huge proportion — half to two thirds in some cases — of its most sophisticated precision weapons in an unnecessary war against Iran. For some years to come, this seriously reduces its ability to deter China from a move on Taiwan.
Not so much an unnecessary war – the overthrow of the theocracy in Iran would be a huge win for peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, and not least for the Iranian people – but an incompetently prosecuted war. It’s not going to happen without boots on the ground.
Misguided attempts to resolve the Ukraine war by appeasing Russia don’t help either. If Trump takes up Putin’s latest idea of negotiating to end the war at the forthcoming Asia-Pacific summit with Xi on hand to help, it will only take him deeper into trying to please the Chinese leader. This is on top of the US and western dependence on China for rare earths, critical minerals and active pharmaceutical ingredients. To complete a picture in which America dare not go to war to break a sudden quarantine of Taiwan, all that is needed is a completely dysfunctional government in Washington. That might soon be provided by the midterm elections and the constitutional battles that could follow.
We already have a dysfunctional government in Washington. But yes, it could get worse.
The US foreign policy experts Richard Haass and David Sacks have recently argued that Xi will now think “the surest path to securing control of Taiwan without a war runs through Trump”. The Pentagon has assessed that China is not planning to invade the island during 2027. But Xi, who will begin his fourth five-year term next year, will be alert to any chance to complete the work of Mao and reunify Taiwan with China in his lifetime. It is inconceivable that it has not occurred to him that the best such chance might come before Trump leaves office at the beginning of 2029 — not through invasion, but by the escalation of restrictions around Taiwan into a stranglehold the US is unwilling to break with war. No wonder such restrictions are being practised.
Trump would have no moral qualms about selling out Taiwan. He’s a man who doesn’t do moral qualms.
But what about those special computer chips that only Taiwan can make? There, surely, is a matter of economic concern – of money. Wouldn’t that concern Trump?
Further insouciance about the risk comes from the thought that new semiconductor foundries are being built, such as in Arizona by the Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC itself. Yet while capacity outside Taiwan is growing, it is a small fraction of leading-edge semiconductor output. Chris Miller, the author of Chip War, is very clear that “there’s no world in which the US tech sector is independent of Taiwan for the next decade”. Any crisis over Taiwan would be utterly devastating for AI, cloud computing and the manufacturing of smartphones, PCs, cars, medical devices, and telecoms and defence equipment. The impact on the world economy would be greater than the global financial crisis or Covid-19.
So wouldn’t the Chinese just run the semiconductor industry in Taiwan and keep the world economy going? Leave aside that China would have comprehensively won the technology struggle with the West. They would not actually be able to maintain an industry that requires Taiwan’s deep expertise, capital equipment only available from the Netherlands and chip designs sourced in California. The production of about 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors would stop.
At no time in economic history has the world been so exposed to a single point of failure. It must be worth taking note that the point of failure is under stress. It might hold, but the risk it will give way is growing. There is, of course, a way of preventing such a catastrophe, which is for the US to be resolute in its intentions, generous in its provision of defences for Taiwan, sharp in reacting to encroachments on the island, firm in maintaining its alliances and careful to avoid exhausting its power on distractions elsewhere. Yet the disturbing thought is that this is all obvious now, and much of it isn’t happening. It might be best to prepare for the crisis for which we’re not ready.
Just what we need.
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