Diplomacy & Crisis News

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Ukraine’s dogged resistance to Russian aggression surprised many experts who anticipated a rapid Russian victory. It also elevated the importance of understanding a nation’s resolve to resist aggression as a critical determinant of war outcomes. Ukraine’s example naturally raises questions about Taiwan, which faces a similar potential threat of aggression from a powerful neighbor.

Taiwan’s capacity to resist invasion is an issue of top importance to the United States. Any U.S. military intervention in a China-Taiwan clash carries a high risk of escalation to a major war. Washington and the U.S. public might opt against intervention if Taiwan’s military rapidly collapsed or if the conflict appeared to be a lost cause. Conversely, a resolute and dogged Taiwanese defense could garner international sympathy and increase the likelihood of U.S. government and public support for intervention. Taiwan’s resolve also plays a critical role in enabling even the possibility of a U.S. intervention. Because the Pacific Ocean is so vast, it could require considerable time—potentially several months—for the United States to mobilize sufficient U.S.-based combat power to augment forward-deployed military forces and fight a major contingency in East Asia.

In a recently released report, RAND researchers evaluated Taiwan’s capacity to resist high-end attacks. We considered four factors: political leadership and society, military effectiveness, durability (ability to withstand punishment), and allied military intervention. We concluded that political leadership and society was the most important factor by far. Strong political leadership (in the form of respected national leaders capable of commanding and enforcing the public’s loyalty), a largely unified and cohesive public, and strong public support for a compelling national cause or ideology offer the most durable foundation for a resolute defense.

A prepared and capable military can bolster the effects of political leadership by denying the adversary an easy conquest. By staving off imminent defeat, Taiwan’s military could prolong the conflict and allow time for foreign intervention to arrive and for international sympathy to strengthen. Severe disruption to the economy and infrastructure of the island—along with mounting civilian and military casualties—may bolster public resolve in the initial phases of the conflict, but over the longer term, those disruptions are likely to erode public support for the war.

The promise of U.S. intervention offers an additional important resource for infusing determination and resolve, but the effects of a promised intervention will depend both on the state of the island’s political leadership and military capabilities and on the nature and scope of promised U.S. aid. In general, the weaker Taiwan’s political leadership and its military are, the earlier and more robust the U.S. intervention must be to maximize the prospect that Taiwan will avoid defeat.

Our study raises several implications for U.S. planners and policymakers. First, analysts should pay particularly close attention to the quality and strength of the island’s political leadership and degree of social cohesion in the lead-up to a crisis and conflict for insight into the island’s ability to withstand a large-scale Chinese attack. All other variables, including the state of its military and the island’s enduring vulnerabilities, should be regarded as of secondary importance.

Paradoxically, an evaluation of the island’s political leadership in peacetime sheds little insight into how it will perform at war, a point underscored by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s leadership, which appeared unremarkable in peace but bold and inspiring in war. This is because the circumstances of how and why a conflict begins can significantly impact a leader’s resolve and the population’s cohesiveness. Since we cannot predict what the circumstances will be, it is thus extremely difficult, if not impossible, to estimate how Taiwan’s leadership may perform in war.

Second, Taiwan’s disadvantage in the quantity of armaments and troops does not necessarily doom it to defeat. Taiwan can take important steps to improve the effectiveness of its military. However, even if Taiwan’s military dramatically improved its combat effectiveness, China’s military advantage will likely continue to grow owing to the enormous resource imbalance. Given these trends, Taiwan’s ability to withstand a major Chinese attack will increasingly hinge on the strength of its political leadership and social cohesion above all other factors.

Third, the impact of severe casualties and economic loss likely would cut two ways in a major war. Initially, Taiwan’s public likely would rally around the national leadership in favor of resistance to an aggressive China. However, over the long term, heavy costs of conflict likely would erode public support for continuing the war. Public backing for a war to defend against a Chinese attack could fade after an initial surge of support. How public support changes over time could vary depending on the strength of the island’s political leadership and degree of social cohesion, however.

Finally, U.S. military intervention will continue to remain important for Taiwan’s ability to withstand a large-scale Chinese attack, owing to the island’s vulnerability and military disadvantages. A well-led and socially cohesive Taiwan might be able to mount a determined resistance for perhaps many months, but over time the island’s vulnerability and the military’s inferiority would likely take a severe toll. Absent a robust U.S. military intervention, Taiwan’s government would be severely challenged to withstand a determined all-out Chinese attack indefinitely.

Dr. Timothy R. Heath is a senior international defense researcher at the nonpartisan, nonprofit RAND Corporation.

Image: Shutterstock.

In their much-talked-about Harper’s magazine essay, “Why Are We in Ukraine,” Benjamin Schwartz and Christopher Layne provide a coherent and convincing case against U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine. They argue that U.S. foreign interventions and geopolitical meddling in pursuit of global hegemony and dominance that went well beyond NATO expansion were responsible in part for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

Schwartz and Layne suggest that Washington is fighting a proxy war, and a “decidedly hot” war—as opposed to a cold one—in Ukraine. They refer to the U.S. involvement there as the “most intense and sustained military entanglement in the near-eighty-year history in the competition between the United States and Russia,” with weapons provided by Washington inflicting casualties on Russians “directly or indirectly,” and with America “edging close to direct conflict” with Moscow.

Yet notwithstanding all the many ways in which the two depict and criticize U.S. policy in Ukraine, the historical analogy they seem to employ by implication—that of Vietnam, given that the title of their essay recalls a 1968 speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson entitled, “Why are we in Vietnam?”—is misplaced for a very simple reason: unlike that war in Southeast Asia, where close to 60,000 American service members had lost their lives fighting, there are no American troops engaged in combat in Ukraine. Nor are Americans fighting in Ukraine in the same way that they did in Iraq or in Afghanistan over the past twenty years. They aren’t fighting there at all.

A case can certainly be made—in the same way that U.S. post-Cold War, anti-Russia policies, in particular, the expansion of NATO and the support for Ukraine led eventually to the current war there—that American policies of providing diplomatic, military, and economic aid to Kiev could, at some point in the future, create the conditions for direct U.S. military intervention, and perhaps even to direct nuclear conflict with Russia.

Certainly, if and when Ukraine is invited to join NATO—a big and conditional “if”—the United States would then be committed to sending troops to help protect that country from outside aggression. This is in line with how we will soon be committed to defending Finland or, for that matter, other sovereign states like Montenegro. Some Anti-interventionists criticize those commitments, but these enjoy bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and don’t face any major public opposition.

Moreover, a case can be made that America’s support for Ukraine, even if it doesn’t join NATO, could be extended and yet not draw the United States into a military conflict.

In a way, the opponents of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy recall the leading members of the foreign policy establishment who in 1948 opposed then-President Harry Truman’s decision to recognize the new state of Israel. They argued that American support for the Jewish state could prove to be costly for Washington in the long run.

They lost that debate then. But in retrospect, they were right that the long-term support for Israel would prove to be costly for the United States. Yet at no point in the seventy-five years of close cooperation between Washington and Israel has America been drawn into a direct military intervention in the wars between the Israelis and the Arabs—or with Soviet Russia, the former patron of Egypt. The sole exception that has proven this rule is the brief nuclear close call during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

If anything, despite the high costs of the relationship, U.S. public and congressional support for Israel has remained solid all those years, even at the height of the oil embargo that the Arab energy-producing states imposed on the United States to punish it for supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

The point is not that Schwartz and Layne are wrong in their criticism of U.S. policies towards Russia and Ukraine. Rather, it is that, unlike the long-term response to U.S. interventions in Vietnam or Iraq, the American public—and by extension, Congress—is apparently willing to sustain U.S. entanglements abroad as long as American boys and girls are not fighting there and their costs don’t involve many American casualties.

Indeed, studies conducted about public attitudes toward U.S. military interventions abroad have confirmed what is probably common sense: that there has been a direct correlation between the rise in the number of American casualties in those wars and public support for U.S. involvement in them. If anything, with the end of the draft and the rise of a volunteer American military fighting American wars, and with more soldiers surviving battlefield injuries, the public seems to be more tolerant of costly American military interventions, even in the face of American casualties.

Otherwise, how can one otherwise explain what amounted to American public apathy as U.S. direct military intervention in Afghanistan lasted for two decades, with close to 2,000 American servicemen killed and more than 20,000 injured? And when was the last time that Congress debated the presence of close to 30,000 American service members in the Korean Peninsula seventy years after the war there had ended?

Moreover, notwithstanding the rising “inwardist” public attitudes in response to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, these conflicts haven’t dulled support for military involvement, at least according to a recent survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The surveyors found that, instead of seeing a public that is shrinking back from getting involved in the world, “especially when there’s an ally involved, we’ve actually seen somewhat of an increase in support for using the military.”

Some public opinion analysts have, in general, suggested that the public has supported the Biden administration’s policies in Ukraine, including the economic sanctions imposed on Russia and the aid provided to Ukraine, but remain opposed to sending U.S. troops to fight in that country—something which President Joe Biden has insisted will not happen during his presidency.

From that perspective, it’s doubtful that by recounting the history of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy—which antagonized the Russians and has been central to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine—the arguments made by Schwartz, Layne, and others are going to have any impact on the public or congressional attitudes.

Instead, opponents of these policies need to explain why they oppose backing U.S. NATO allies against a potential Russian threat and providing support to a friendly sovereign nation invaded by a foreign aggressor.

One should not really expect mounting public and congressional opposition to American assistance to Ukraine, a relatively democratic nation with people who “look like us,” when Washington has been providing a corrupt Middle East regime, Egypt, with over $50 billion in military aid and $30 billion in economic assistance since 1978.

A Ukraine that continues to be seen by America as a nation fighting for its survival against a U.S. adversary is more likely than not to continue to benefit from U.S. assistance—not unlike Israel, which, with $236 billion in military and economic aid, has become the largest recipient of American assistance.

Critics of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, therefore, face a major challenge in trying to change public and congressional attitudes as long as the United States itself is not drawn directly into the fighting there.

It would probably make more sense for these critics to focus on how to reorient American policy towards Russia and create a new balance of power in Europe when the war ends, thereby ensuring that the conflict doesn’t remain frozen like in the Korean Peninsula. If that were to happen, then people seventy years from now might be forced to explain why the United States remains in Ukraine.

Dr. Leon Hadar, a contributing editor at The National Interest, has taught international relations at American University and was a research fellow with the Cato Institute. A former UN correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, he currently covers Washington for the Business Times of Singapore and is a columnist/blogger with Israel’s Haaretz.

Image: Shutterstock.

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