Part 3:
Japan would be in a far weaker position to defend its territory were Taiwan under Beijing’s control. Japan’s defensive strategy relies on the ability to threaten People’s Liberation Army forces that approach, penetrate, or venture beyond the “first island chain,” the long string of Pacific archipelagoes that includes Japan and Taiwan. To ensure Japan’s security, the entire chain must remain in friendly hands. If Taiwan hosted PLA bases—the “unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender” MacArthur warned of—Japan would become acutely insecure. PLA doctrine stresses precisely this point. As one air force textbook emphasizes, “As soon as Taiwan is reunified with mainland China, Japan’s maritime lines of communication will fall completely within the striking ranges of China’s fighters and bombers.” China made its capabilities clear during extensive PLA exercises in August 2022, when one of several ballistic missiles it fired landed in the water near Japan’s Yonaguni Island, only 68 miles from Taiwan.
The fall of Taiwan would be even worse for the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. Beijing would have the power to complicate U.S. access to East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean—the littoral of the most populous, economically active part of the world. The United States could begin to resemble, as the diplomat Henry Kissinger once put it to one of us (Pottinger), “an island off the coast of the world.”
Worse, by establishing an indisputably dominant position in East Asia, Xi could pursue preeminence globally. The military resources, planning, and training that have long been concentrated on taking Taiwan could, following a successful annexation, be used for projecting power throughout continental Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. China could even attempt to make inroads in the Atlantic Ocean, where the PLA already operates tracking, telemetry, and command stations in Argentina and Namibia. Angola, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon are among the 19-odd countries with which Beijing has been pursuing military facilities beyond the ones it already has in Djibouti and Cambodia. America’s own history shows how achieving regional preeminence facilitates global power projection. Only by dominating the Western Hemisphere in the nineteenth century was the United States able to become a global superpower in the twentieth.
Members of Taiwan’s navy participating in a drill, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, January 2024
Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters
It is impossible to predict precisely how China might act as a global power, but decades of data suggest it would take a far less benign approach than the United States. At an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Vietnam in 2010, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, foreshadowed future bullying when he announced, “China is a big country and you are small countries, and that is a fact.” Beijing followed suit with the de facto annexation and outright construction of territory throughout the South China Sea and a massive military buildup. China has declared its goal to become a “world-class” military and to use its armed forces to defend its interests wherever it defines them around the world. And those interests are set to expand, with Beijing having unveiled a “global security initiative,” a “global development initiative,” and a “global civilization initiative.” These sprawling programs promote Chinese-led alternatives to Western alliances and Western economic and political models. As a 2023 State Council document explains, they “showcase the global vision of the Communist Party of China.”
Herein lies a danger similar to the one U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt warned of in 1939: “So soon as one nation dominates Europe, that nation will be able to turn to the world sphere.” Today, Asia has replaced Europe as the world’s center of economic and technological gravity. The region’s domination by a hostile power today would be equally dangerous to U.S. interests. Asian countries would not eagerly accept Beijing’s diktats, but absent Washington’s intervention, their options would be limited. China alone commands an economy meaningfully larger than that of all its Asian neighbors combined, India included. China’s navy, meanwhile, boasts firepower second only to that of the U.S. Navy. And it is relatively concentrated: imagine if the entire U.S. naval fleet primarily operated in an arc from New York to New Orleans.
With a U.S. counterbalancer committed to freedom of navigation and economic access, all Asian countries can prosper—including China, as decades of economic growth demonstrate. But were China to annex Taiwan and proceed to push the United States out of Asia, even the most powerful countries would see their economic sovereignty and long-term national autonomy compromised.
THE PROLIFERATION PROBLEM
At that point, another problem would arise: having lost faith in the United States’ security commitments, U.S. allies would face great incentives to develop their own nuclear weapons. Ever since China’s first nuclear test, in 1964, Washington has been able to dissuade most East and Southeast Asian countries from going nuclear. But an Asia reeling from the annexation of Taiwan would present very different circumstances and might send leaders scrambling to acquire nuclear armaments to protect themselves.
Japan has the shortest path to developing nuclear weapons, boasting both its own facilities for processing nuclear fuel and what is likely the world’s largest plutonium stockpile. In February 2022, months before he was assassinated, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe raised the idea of Japan engaging in “nuclear sharing,” proposing something similar to the arrangements Washington has with a number of NATO allies, whereby nuclear weapons are stored on bases in the host country but under U.S. control. But Japan could go further and develop its own independent capability. In the words of Vipin Narang, a political scientist now serving as an official in the Pentagon, Japan has “a very real, and potentially swift, pathway to a nuclear weapons arsenal in the event of a rapid deterioration of Japan’s security environment.”
South Korea, for its part, has a world-class civilian nuclear program, with 26 reactors in service. Although the country currently lacks the domestic enrichment or reprocessing facilities required to build nuclear weapons, its politicians openly debate the question of whether to develop a nuclear arsenal. And given South Korea’s world-class scientific expertise and industrial base, Seoul could doubtless fashion deployable fission devices within a handful of years if it so chose.