Two Books on Taiwan

choi

Tunku Varadarajan, The Pacific's Island Crucible; The future of Taiwan's political control is a matter of great importance to multiple world powers, and to the Taiwanese themselves. Wall Street Journal, Feb 22, 2025, at page C9 (every Saturday, section C is Review).
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... ger-island-43c9865b

Note:
(a) This is a review on two books:
(i) Kerry Brown, Why Taiwan Matters; A short history of a small island that will dictate our future. St Martin's Press, Jan 28, 2025;
(ii) Matt Pottinger, The Boiling Moat; Urgent steps to defend Taiwan. Hoover Institution Press, July 1, 2024.
(b) "Mr Pottinger, a reporter in China for this newspaper in the early 2000s, was a US deputy national-security advisor from 2019 to  2021 and the architect of US China policy in the latter stages of Donald Trump's first presidential term."

Matt Pottinger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Pottinger
("served as the United States deputy national security advisor from September 22, 2019 to January 7, 2021. Previously Asia director on the National Security Council since 2017 * * * Pottinger resigned in the afternoon of January 6, in response to the 2021 United States Capitol attack. He left the White House the following morning.[7]")

(c) "One of the book’s contributors, Ivan Kanapathy—a former instructor at the US Navy Fighter Weapons School (known as Top Gun), who served as the deputy senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council—gets impressively granular [meaning 'detailed']."
(i) United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un ... _Instructor_program
(1969- )
(ii) Top Gun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gun
(a 1986 film/ "train at the United States Navy's Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun) at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego, California")

(d) " 'The Boiling Moat'—a phrase taken from the Book of Han, an early history of China"
(i)
(A) 《漢書 [又名《前漢書》，東漢班固所著]．卷四五．蒯伍江息夫傳．蒯通》: 「邊城之地，必將嬰 [倚仗] 城固守，皆為金城湯池，不可攻也」 -- hence 成語 固若金湯.
(B) from the Web: "班固这卷题目里面包括四个人——蒯通、伍被、江充、息夫躬 [复姓 息夫]。司马迁在《史记》里面，把蒯通附在《淮阴侯 [韩信] 传》里面，把伍被附在《淮南王 [刘长(刘邦之子)] 传》里面"
(ii) Three days ago, the book was published in Taiwan in traditional Chinese:
博明 (譯者：余宗基/ 簡妙娟沸騰的護城河: 保衛台灣的緊迫行動. 今周刊出版社股份有限公司, Feb 19, 2025.
(iii) The book's (English) title alludes to Taiwan Strait as the Boiling Moat against China's invasion.

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Taiwan this month was in the headlines, an event remarkable for its infrequency. In truth, there should never be a moment when we don’t fixate on this disputed island—independent in every way save for the absence of formal, de jure sovereignty—that’s separated by no more than a narrow strait from a snarling, revanchist China.

Speaking at the Honolulu Defense Forum on Feb. 13, Adm. Samuel Paparo, the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, sounded a chilling warning. China’s “aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now,” he said, “are not exercises as they call them, they are rehearsals. They are rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland.”

In “Why Taiwan Matters” Kerry Brown, a former British diplomat who is currently a professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College, London, tells us that this proudly renegade island is “at the heart of arguably the greatest geopolitical challenge of the twenty-first century.”

The conquest of democratic Taiwan by Communist China would not only snuff out the freedom of 23.4 million people, it would “wreak havoc,” as Mr. Brown puts it, on the global economy in a manner that exceeds the depredations of the Covid-19 pandemic or the 2008-09 financial crisis. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, for instance, produces more than 90% of the semiconductors that reside in the hearts of our computers. If TSMC’s plants were to be shut down or destroyed or sabotaged in war, much of the world would grind to a halt. (Let’s also shudder at the possibility of the plants falling, intact and functioning, into Xi Jinping’s hands.)

And then, of course, there’s the small matter of a possible World War III, with the U.S. and its allies coming to Taiwan’s defense and China responding with all the self-righteous nationalist fury it can muster.

Until the 1990s, writes Mr. Brown, China could “express its claims for reunification forcefully but had limited capacity to do anything about them.” The country was neither rich nor mighty. Today, it is both. The world’s second-largest economy with the world’s second-largest military expenditure—after its much-resented superior, the U.S., in both cases—China can now “think about doing things that were never an option in the past.” The question for many, says Mr. Brown, “is no longer whether China can actually do anything, but when it will act.”

If the Chinese Communist Party elites have a psycho-political obsession, it is to achieve “complete national unification.” Hong Kong and Macau returned to Chinese sovereignty in the late 20th century; Tibet and East Turkestan (Xinjiang in the jargon of Beijing) were swallowed by China several decades earlier. Taiwan is now the final piece of the puzzle that Mr. Xi craves in order to bring about, in his words, “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

In “The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan,” Matt Pottinger has edited a collection of 13 essays that offer “practical and feasible steps” the free world should take “to deter Xi from triggering a catastrophic war.”

Mr. Xi has reiterated his adamant unificationist goal on numerous occasions, restating the mainland policy toward Taiwan that has remained unchanged since Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists set up an alternative Chinese government on the island after their defeat by the Communists in 1949.

Yet in Mr. Xi’s meeting with President Biden in November 2023, the Chinese “commander-in-chief-of-everything”—as he is accurately described in one of the essays in “The Boiling Moat”—demanded not only that the U.S. stop arming Taiwan but also that it “support China’s peaceful reunification.”

In his introductory essay, Mr. Pottinger writes that this was the first time Mr. Xi called for American collusion or participation in reunifying China and Taiwan. It’s “a fundamental revision” of Beijing’s longstanding but relatively limited demand that the U.S. “refrain from supporting Taiwan independence.” In other words, says Mr. Pottinger, Mr. Xi’s “moves aren’t aimed at maintaining the decades-old status quo in the Taiwan Strait but at ending it.”

Mr. Pottinger, a reporter in China for this newspaper in the early 2000s, was a U.S. deputy national-security advisor from 2019 to 2021 and the architect of U.S. China policy in the latter stages of Donald Trump’s first presidential term. He has assembled a lively and erudite cast of strategic experts, ranging from, among others, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College to a former U.S. Navy nuclear-trained officer, a Japanese admiral, a decorated veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, a former U.S. Marine who helped set up Japan’s amphibious force, and a former secretary-general of NATO.

Convinced that the time for effective economic and diplomatic methods may have passed, Mr. Pottinger and his contributors focus wisely—and unabashedly—on the military dimension of the Taiwan challenge. The only way to prevent war, they argue, is to deter it militarily. Deterrence was what kept the Cold War cold. The U.S. and its allies must therefore waste no time in expanding their capacity for the making and acquisition of munitions.

One of the book’s contributors, Ivan Kanapathy—a former instructor at the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School (known as Top Gun), who served as the deputy senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council—gets impressively granular. He provides a shopping list of exactly what munitions Taiwan should acquire. These include “4000+ man-portable air defense missiles,” “200+ mobile short-range air defense vehicles” and—wait for this—“enough rifles, pistols, and ammunition such that each member of the military, reserves, and civil defense force has emergency access to a personal weapon.”

China is a hegemonic one-man show. And so Mr. Pottinger’s book “singles out Xi Jinping personally as the object of deterrence,” the Chinese strongman having consolidated more power in his domestically unassailable person than any leader since the colossus Mao Zedong. “No other decision maker counts nearly so much as Xi,” writes Mr. Pottinger, “when it comes to questions of war and peace.”

“The Boiling Moat”—a phrase taken from the Book of Han, an early history of China—is a compelling “how to” compendium that tells us how to sink China’s navy (a whole chapter reveals the best way); to counter a Chinese quarantine or blockade of Taiwan; to ensure that Japan embraces publicly “the near inevitability that it would be compelled to fight in the event China attacks Taiwan”; and to make the best use of Australia as a stalwart ally of freedom. One compelling chapter argues that Taiwan must “adopt a new military culture” akin to that of Israel, turning itself into a warrior-state—or “a porcupine, making itself unappetizing or, if that fails, fatal to a hungry predator.”

Mr. Brown’s “Why Taiwan Matters” has a different focus. It is, in part, a lively and accessible history of Taiwan, explaining the island’s evolution from military dictatorship under Chiang Kai-shek to its current political condition as the most vigorous and healthy democracy in Asia. Credit for this is due to a succession of presidents from both the Nationalist Party, historically more conciliatory to China, and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), more assertive at all times of Taiwan’s separateness from China.

While the DPP has flirted with sovereignty and self-determination, it has always been careful to stop short of provoking China with any outright declaration of independence. It is this “strategic ambiguity”—embraced also by the U.S.—that has kept Taiwan and China from falling into war. Mr. Brown urges us to persevere with the “unglamorous task” of keeping ambiguity alive. As he says, a strenuous defense of the stalemate “is all that we can meaningfully do. Anything else is insanity.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.