Will there be war? How soon will it be? It depends on who you ask.
But the tornado of claims and counterclaims surrounding Beijing’s belligerent territorial behaviour is gaining momentum and the US decision to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon on Sunday won’t slow it down.
“I see hotheads in Beijing, and I see hotheads in the Pentagon and the various commands,” retired US Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis told US media amid the latest flurry of threats, warnings and insults. “And I worry about it a lot.”
Key global military and diplomatic personnel are becoming increasingly blunt.
“My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” the chief of the US Air Force’s Air Mobility Command General Mike Minihan proclaimed in a memo leaked at the weekend. He went on to order his troops to “fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most. Aim for the head.”
NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg was only mildly more diplomatic during a later visit to Tokyo.
“NATO allies would have been remiss if we didn’t expose what China does and the consequences for our security,” he said. “There is no justification for China’s threats against Taiwan. And it will be in no one’s interest to have a conflict around Taiwan”.
And Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong told a London address that the Indo-Pacific was becoming “more dangerous and volatile” – though she didn’t mention the “C” word.
But Beijing’s Communist Party-controlled media retorted that such growing international pushback only strengthened “China’s determination to address the Taiwan question once and for all”.
The dogs of war
General Mike Minihan is just one of a growing parade of serving and retired senior US military officials expressing a foreboding view over the future of South East Asia.
“I hope I am wrong,” he wrote, but noted Chairman Xi Jinping had “secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022. Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason. United States’ presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a distracted America. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.”
Just days earlier, former chief of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, reiterated his claim that China would attack Taiwan by 2027.
“I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years,” he told the US Senate Armed Services Committee before leaving the military in 2021.
Last week, he told media in Tokyo that Chairman Xi’s refusal to renounce the use of force at October’s Communist Party Congress was “a signal that my assessments in the spring of 2021 hold true to this day.”
And in October, chief of US naval operations Admiral Mike Gilday said: “When we talk about the 2027 window, in my mind that has to be a 2022 window or potentially a 2023 window. I can’t rule it out,” he said.
But Brookings Institution China and Asia senior advisor Ryan Hass warns such talk is dangerous.
“I do not begrudge military leaders working internally to build urgency to bolster deterrence in Taiwan Strait. That is their contribution to US national strategy,” he tweeted. “I do have qualms about a deeper issue of undisciplined public messaging, though.”
Of barks, bites and guts
Mr Hass says Washington’s official messaging has consistently downplayed the threat of war. “I do not think there’s any imminent attempt on the part of China to invade Taiwan,” US President Joe Biden told the G-20 summit in Bali late last year.
“General Minihan’s “gut” is in a different place than CJCS Milley, Secretary Austin, or President Biden,” says Hass. “The stakes are too high for undisciplined public messaging on Taiwan. This scattershot of statements and clarifications is confidence-deflating at a time when it is imperative for the US to be projecting steady, confident determination to uphold peace and stability.”
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last month that the threat of war was low despite rising tensions. “What we’re seeing recently is some very provocative behaviour on the part of China’s forces and their attempt to re-establish a new normal,” he said. “But whether or not that means that an invasion is imminent, I seriously doubt that.”
And former NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis this week contradicted his colleagues’ claims.
“The job of the military is always to be ready to fight, but in my view, odds of a war with China are decreasing, not increasing at the moment,” Stavridis tweeted. “The reason? President Xi is watching the Russian debacle in Ukraine and will likely be more cautious as a result.”
But US Marine Corps Commandant General David Berger was less optimistic after meeting with senior Australian military officials in Canberra.
“I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t predict because there are too many variables,” General Berger told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). “My own view is this is going to need everything in the cupboard to prevent a conflict. We have to be prepared all the time.”
But he reiterated that Beijing wasn’t as powerful a position as it presented itself to be.
“No partners, no allies … they are behind us technically, technologically,” he said. “(But) we can’t slow down, we can’t back off, we can’t get comfortable with where we are because the risk then is the other side moves a half step and we’ve lost the deterrent value that we’re after in the first place.”
Actions speak louder than words
Meanwhile, Chairman Xi continues to send mixed messages.
At the Communist Party Congress, he once again insisted it was the Party’s “historic mission” to reunify and rejuvenate the Chinese nation. And this “natural requirement” must be completed by 2050.
But Xi didn’t mention Taiwan during his recent New Year’s address. Instead, he emphasised the need to “cherish peace and development and value friends and partners.”
Then, on Monday, four Chinese coastguard vessels confronted five Japanese commercial and private vessels in the waters surrounding the disputed Senkaku Islands group.
Beijing has steadily built up its coast guard and fishing militia presence around the uninhabited rocks over the past few years. They are now almost a permanent fixture.
China’s Coast Guard spokesman Gan Yu told Japan to “immediately stop all illegal activities” in the area. Japan’s Coast Guard responded by saying it had “warned off” four Chinese vessels in its territorial waters.
The following day, Beijing sent a strike group of 31 aircraft and nine warships into sensitive airspace around Taiwan. And several fishing militia vessels confronted a Philippines patrol ship in the South China Sea.
It’s a continuation of Beijing’s self-defeating behaviour, argue strategic analysts Andrew Taffer and David Wallsh.
“Beijing’s ambition to isolate Washington from its Asian allies has been derailed in large part by its desire to redress more immediate grievances — namely, to reclaim what it sees as lost territory and punish countries that offend its sensibilities,” they write in Foreign Affairs. “These impulses have resulted in major strategic errors and suggest that Beijing is not nearly as adept at planning and executing long-term strategy as many believe.”
They said “no one should expect more disciplined statecraft” during Chairman Xi’s unprecedented third term.
“If Xi and his comrades were eager to facilitate different outcomes, they would have changed tack long ago. That they didn’t suggests Beijing was genuinely more interested in reclaiming lost lands and thirsting for deference than it was in undermining US alliances.”
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @JamieSeidel