Three years ago Talleyrand asked whether the move by the United States to renounce some understandings with China regarding Taiwan would provoke an international crisis. Some wiser friends suggested that this was missing the point: China was bound to do what it liked, and would not allow itself to be thwarted, or provoked, by the United States. For now, it was biding its time.
If true, the question becomes whether the US actions then, and now, are serving as an effective ‘deterrent’ in order to preserve peace in this part of the world. The answer would appear to be no. The tired image of Taiwan as a missile-coated porcupine sounds nice but is not really useful. If the leaders of China embark upon a more aggressive policy towards Taiwan resulting in the use of force, it’s unlikely they will do so because they are convinced it will be easy. They are not likely to be dissuaded from doing so because outsiders insist that it will be hard. For all that some warmongers tend to discount the terrible costs of war, few people go to war, or resist going to war, because a war is judged either winnable or unwinnable. Nations fight wars for other reasons, starting with the passion for a ‘just cause’.
Wiser friends now say that people should stop trying to programme Chinese (and Taiwanese) behaviour and think instead about other matters at stake. The porcupine school has suggested that a failure to prevent an invasion or to defend Taiwan will consign all of Asia to Chinese domination, and that US power there and elsewhere will be forever diminished.
That again appears to place the emphásis on the wrong sylláble. The Chinese people have many reasons to resent American power, but humiliating the United States and its allies is probably not the main incentive for China to attack Taiwan. Should China be so bold to do so before Taiwan, like JQ Adams’s ripe Cuban apple, gravitates once and for all toward the mainland, the likely result will be a nuclear-armed Japan, South Korea, Australia, and possibly Indonesia as well as one or two more Asian nations.
Perhaps victory over Taiwan, no matter how easy or how hard, is worth being Pyrrhic; but that is China’s call to make. For now, it must know that porcupines also have predators.