The Case for a Nuclear-Armed Taiwan

It is hardly a secret that the United States has a battered international credibility. From its blunders in Afghanistan, to its failure to retaliate against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s crossing of its chemical weapons “red line”, to its suggestion that it may not defend all of its NATO allies, the United States is no longer seen as the security guarantor it was 30 years ago.

Meanwhile, Communist China has become more bellicose. In the past year, they have used irredentist rhetoric, intensified military exercises, and built up their hard power presence across the Taiwan strait. In short: they are looking for an opportunity to invade Taiwan. With America’s credibility battered, Xi Jinping and his cabal in Zhongnanhai would be not unreasonable to assume that the United States would be unwilling to defend Taiwan in a war. After all, why would an increasingly war-adverse American populace sacrifice tens of thousands--or even more--of their sons and daughters on a tropical island halfway across the world? Would the United States really lose its largest trading and investment partner for an island of 30 million? If the United States is so unable to effectively retreat out of Afghanistan, and seemingly unwilling to listen to the advice of its military experts (Biden, Trump, Obama, and Bush are all guilty of this charge), it may seem a reasonable gamble--at least from a Chinese government predicated on revanchist dreams--to invade Taiwan and expect no serious American retaliation.

If a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is successful, the international system would be upended. In turn, we will see a reduction in economic growth, quality of life, and the rule of law across the world. This would be catastrophic for the United States, for the west, and for the global community. After all, such a war would make China’s military a credible backstop to its predatory international economic program, which seeks to place entire markets into the preferential orbit of the Chinese government. More countries--now lulled by the dual promises of economic growth and Chinese security--would involve themselves in that regime. And existing members of China’s economic and strategic orbit would have the additional reason of Chinese security guarantees to seek deeper entrenchment in the Chinese economic system. Furthermore, even if China may not believe so, many implicitly (or explicitly) view the United States as the security guarantor of the western Pacific. If America cannot or will not defend Taiwan, many countries would have a reduced incentive to continue economic ties with the United States, when they can find themselves a more reliable security guarantor in China.

In that world, say goodbye to open markets and fair adjudication in trade and investment disputes, for the Chinese government will call the shots. And once that happens, when the Chinese government decides who can trade and invest with its client states and on what terms, it is likely--as they have done in the past--that non-aligned countries’ firms will face greater barriers to entry and more discrimination. Indeed, the Chinese government has sought to have its client states subscribe to one body of trade and investment adjudication -- the Chinese International Commercial Court. The problem, however, is that the Chinese judiciary is characterized by arbitrariness and capriciousness, especially when state interests are at stake. With Xi Jinping seeking regional hegemony, it is hardly impossible to imagine the Chinese Communist Party using its dispute resolution mechanisms to deliver favorable ends for itself. This looks like privileges for its affiliated corporations, and disadvantages to western and non-aligned investors and exporters. It looks like arbitrary police raids in regional headquarters of foreign corporations, as we saw with the Beijing Police’s raid on the Uber China HQ. It looks like capricious government seizures of assets and corporations, as we saw with the Ant Group in 2021. It looks like the spirit of free enterprise choking for air at the jackboot of Chinese statism.

The consequences would be dire. Consumers in Chinese client states would have access to inferior quality goods and services, as states would also have their economic opportunities limited by the coercion of Chinese dependence and discrimination against foreign investment and trade. In turn, Chinese-government run/aligned firms would face limited competition, reducing their incentives to produce the best goods and services. Likewise, investor and business confidence in a larger Chinese economic sphere would see a precipitous decline: if China ultimately gears its putative rule of law institutions to serve its government’s ends, it will invariably be unpredictable, or at the very least hostile to investment and entrepreneurship incongruent with the Chinese government’s ends. Without clear rules or predictability, the higher risks of doing business would greatly chill investment and entrepreneurship. Ultimately, quality of life, incomes, and growth would be worse off in a significant swath of Afro-Eurasia than had they not been subject to Chinese hegemony. The west would face significant damage too. American and western firms, now deeply invested in many current and potential Chinese client states will see unprecedented discrimination. In turn, the west’s access to the markets of Asia and beyond will be significantly limited; the last thing China wants is another economic power having influence over states that they deem to be within their historical sphere of orbit. In short, the world would be markedly poorer under Chinese hegemony.

Consider what China would do to ensure that their new economic order does not fall apart. As we have seen with their aid to the Zimbabwean, Venezuelan, Namibian, Zambian, and Kazakh regimes, China is more than happy to export their authoritarian technologies and methods to shore up client states. After all, democracy is volatile and unpredictable, and the Chinese government would hardly risk an upstart political party winning an election and taking their country out of the Chinese economic and strategic orbit. So when countries wish to be free, democratic, and subject to the rule of law--as they do in Venezuela and Zimbabwe--the Chinese government has a vested interest in stamping out that democracy. For better or for worse, the United States has broadly supported democratization and the buildup of civil society and rule of law institutions around the world. This was not without blunders, but without the United States the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe may look very different today. If the United States further loses its credibility as a security guarantor and China gains it, Beijing will only have more leverage to pull more countries into their orbit, at which point it will encourage every authoritarian impulse and disrupt every democracy. Simply put, a Chinese victory in Taiwan would propel its hegemonic ascendance. That ascendence would worsen democracy and freedom globally.

Now back to the issue of Taiwan. As demonstrated, China could reasonably assume that the United States would not defend Taiwan, Taiwan is currently unable to defend itself, and a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would kill America’s image as a credible security guarantor whilst empowering China, effectively killing the international system. In short, in the status quo, risks are very high. To solve that issue, America cannot simply give out a security guarantee, considering the hollowness of its past guarantees. And even if the United States elects a government earnestly willing to defend Taiwan (I sure hope so, Tom Cotton for President 2024), China may not believe that government, and even if they did, they could just wait four to eight years. Basically, even in the best case, the United States lacks the ability to communicate clearly to China what the costs of invading Taiwan actually are. The solution, in turn, is to make the costs so impossibly high and indubitably clear that China would never countenance a military invasion of Taiwan.

That cost is nuclear war. Indeed, if China would stand to lose Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen in a nuclear confrontation if it invaded Taiwan, then the Politburo may reconsider its priorities. After all, Taiwan would not be of much use if all of China’s major economic centers (and maybe even Taiwan) were smoldering ruins. You would hardly be reuniting your volk if the state you wished to reunite your volk under is burnt to a crisp. Moreover, the Chinese government’s legitimacy is invariably predicated on economic growth. A punishing nuclear war--which would greatly reduce Chinese economic growth to say the very least--would pull the house of cards from under Xi Jinping’s throne. Note that the United States’ nuclear umbrella over Taiwan--if it even exists--can never achieve the same effect. It is not a difficult assumption that the United States--especially in its current state--would not defend Taipei at the cost of Los Angeles. But Taiwan, if they lose their territory, would have little to lose in launching a nuclear war on China. The potential of nuclear war changes the calculus substantially, and reduces the odds of an actual war breaking out.

I am under no illusions that this proposal is easy to swallow; the thought of renewed nuclear proliferation inevitably reminds us of that harrowing Cold War when we teetered on the brink of armageddon. It is far from ideal. After all, the west idealized a China that, through globalization, becomes a responsible stakeholder of the international system, rather than upend it for the sake of maximizing its own power. But the Chinese government we see today does not want responsible membership in the international system. Instead, its policies pose an existential threat to a global system of open markets, democracy, and the rule of law that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and brought prosperity to an unprecedented swathe of human civilization.

And if China succeeds in invading Taiwan, there is no guarantee of it stopping there: as John Mearsheimer noted in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, all states can never be sure about the status of their own security. That “security dilemma” encourages states to expand their territorial, economic, and political orbits as much as possible to ensure their own security. Adding on to that analysis: not all countries have the same sensitivity to security dilemmas. Countries which are generally sure of themselves and their security are less likely to engage in predatory behavior; why would they need to if they perceive themselves to be secure? China, having faced multiple humiliating invasions in the past century followed by another generation of isolation, does not feel confident nor secure, irrespective of the overwhelming facts to the contrary. Indeed, it does not feel even whole, with what they consider an integral part of their blood and soil outside their de facto jurisdiction. As long as the Chinese government exists in this form and is legitimized by irredentist rhetoric, it will invariably pursue ends antithetical to a stable international system. No amount of cajoling or appeasement will keep the peace, only a hard power threat sufficient to change the calculus in Zhongnanhai can do the trick.

We live in perilous times, but perhaps the most counterintuitive solution: arming Taiwan with nuclear weapons is the best security guarantee we can ever give Taiwan and the world.