A Fearsome Prediction for Taiwan

Japan in 1941 wasn't always bent on war with the United States; but it was bent, from the late 19th century, on becoming a high tech economy. Following the Meiji Restoration the Japanese culture began inviting Westerners to come consult on everything from banking and policing to ship design -- they beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese War -- and redesigned its whole society accordingly. Then they began imperialistic expansion, which pressed further and further into territories the United States felt weren't acceptable. When we cut off their access to modern steel, it threatened Japan's whole model. War was the result of these sanctions as much as anything else.

The Biden administration introduced crippling sanctions on Chinese semiconductor production this year, which go so far as to threaten to strip the citizenship of Americans who work for Chinese industry. (It is not at all clear that move is constitutional, but what else is new.) There has been some speculation that China might follow the midcentury Japanese road to war, likewise to recapture its capacity to drive forwards to economic power.

Now a former American ambassador states that, should China attempt to capture Taiwan, the United States would not allow Taiwan's semiconductor production facilities to be taken intact. 
Speaking at the Richard Nixon Foundation’s Grand Strategy Summit on 10 November, former US National Security Advisor Ambassador Robert O’Brien appeared to lend credence to reports the US will disable Taiwan’s semi-conductor chip manufacturing capabilities if China attempts to reunify the island with the mainland.

“If China takes Taiwan and takes those factories intact – which I don’t think we would ever allow – they have a monopoly over chips the way OPEC has a monopoly, or even more than the way OPEC has a monopoly over oil,” said O’Brien.

The US Army War College Press published a paper in November 2021 recommending that the US make credible threats to destroy Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) facilities, eliminating the most important supplier of micro-processing chips to China and the World.

The paper by Jared McKinley and Peter Harris, Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan, became the most highly downloaded paper from the US Army War College of 2021, and suggested that the US lay plans in Taiwan for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render the island “not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain.” 

Of course it is the job of the Army War College to consider what might eventuate in war, and how to deter a war. This is strikingly similar to the road that Russia has been forced down with Ukraine, though: increasingly they are facing a scenario in which even managing to attain their goals will only saddle them with a costly new stronghold, with only destroyed infrastructure, and likely to harbor insurgency.  

19 comments:

  1. I'm not sure announcing this sort of thing will win friends in Taiwan.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I imagine you’re right.

    ReplyDelete
  3. A key part of Japan's attack on the US was that the Imperial Army did not think the US had the will to fight a war. They believed we would sue for peace after the destruction of our Pacific fleet.

    Now, the Imperial Navy knew better, and said so, but the Army was in control and made the call.

    So, do the Chinese, or at least the Chinese who will make this decision, think we'll fight?

    ReplyDelete
  4. We think we will. The CDRUSINDOPACOM has been making a point of ‘being ready to fight today’ for some time. But we’ve cut exercises substantially since COVID, and are currently decommissioning our under-mountain Red Hill fueling facility— which is definitely having serious problems— in favor of sea based refueling which would be vulnerable to Chinese subs.

    I’d guess they think they can take us, and that our military is weak, fat, and unserious.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well that's not good.

    ReplyDelete
  6. There is also a question about how serious the Taiwanese themselves are about fighting.

    ReplyDelete
  7. The timing of when Japan decided to go to war with the US may not be what you think.
    Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942 by Richard Frank has some great discussions of the timing of Japanese decisions, and who made them. His analysis is based on Imperial records, not post-war stories told by the surviving officers and ministers.
    Basically, Japan decided on war before the major oil and metal boycotts, because the only alternative was to back out of China. They knew they would be defeated, but their personal and cultural pride would not let them back down.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Richard B Frank of the US Naval Institute? Interesting. I have not read his account. It’s revisionist, based on how you describe it, but when new or better information becomes available revision is often the thing to do.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Interesting. I'll have to look it over. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  10. It's a great book, looking at the entire Sino/Pacific theater, not just the US part of it. Supposed to be first of 3 books, but I haven't seen timeline on the other volumes.

    ReplyDelete
  11. It's well-reviewed. I think you can access an open review at Parameters 52 (3) Autumn 2022.

    Try: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3174&context=parameters (scroll to p. 166)

    Also, Naval War College Review, vol. 75 no. 1., p. 158

    Having not read the book yet, I still would argue that the Imperial Navy was pretty sure Japan was going to lose, but the Army had other beliefs. The Japanese government itself was fragmented during this time period and a recurring theme is that the different parts often did not share information with each other.

    ReplyDelete
  12. It's also interesting that the Kuomintang had been operating out of Japan in trying (eventually successfully) to overthrow the government of China in the pre-war period. They had previously overthrown the Qing dynasty, established a fascist state, then had to flee to Japan after the fascist leader decided to declare himself Emperor and a one-man ruler and violated the constitution (this seems to be a common flaw with the fascist model) and their efforts to correct him failed.

    So they operated from Japan while they overthrew the quasi-Emperor, and restored their own rule. Japan doubtless provided them with support in this, and thereby learned where the levers of power were they would need for their own invasion of China some years later.

    ReplyDelete
  13. We think we will [fight].

    Who is this "we?" CDRUSINDOPACOM isn't the decision-maker. Biden is, along with a senior Pentagon management that has been allowed to usurp entirely too much command authority, and they're not at all convinced of the need to fight--not without first a lot of denial (which they're doing now, regarding arming the RoC, much less filling existing orders), followed by a lot of foot dragging, followed by a lot of telling the RoC what they need, rather than listening to the RoC as they develop in real time their empirical needs to flesh out their already stated needs. Which is what they're doing now in the face of the barbarian's invasion of Ukraine.

    As to ‘being ready to fight today’, even the Pentagon's own war games indicate that across a broad range of PRC-invades-RoC scenarios, we lose. Badly. And the PRC, unlike 1941 Japan, has the wherewithal to followup that Pacific destruction with overt moves to eliminate altogether as any sort of rival.

    I’d guess they think they can take us, and that our military is weak, fat, and unserious.

    Certainly, our military management is all of that.

    To get an idea of the underpinnings of Xi's determination to "supplant" us, read Qiao Liang's and Wang Xiangsui's Unrestricted Warfare.

    Eric Hines

    ReplyDelete
  14. Who is this "we?" CDRUSINDOPACOM isn't the decision-maker. Biden is...

    Well, someone is; whether it's actually Joe Biden is kind of unlikely. One of the difficulties of the moment is that we have little visibility on how our government is actually working.

    Whoever's running the Biden administration is taking a hard line on China's semiconductors, though. If they don't understand that it's likely to lead to a fight, they'd better.

    On the other hand, the CCP has its own internal problems these days.

    ReplyDelete
  15. The deeper issue, regarding America's dependence on other (and not-always-friendly) nations for semiconductors...and for a *lot* of other things...is, why has this country been so discouraging of manufacturing industries in general?

    The common and easy answers are 'high labor costs' and 'greedy CEOs', but there are plenty of other factors, ranging from unwise environmental and permitting requirement to tax policies to our dysfunctional education system, and...especially...the belief that manufacturing doesn't really matter all that much, that it is a low-margin business staffed by second- and third-tier people. A serious administration would be providing leadership on all of these factors, not just passing reverse bills of attainder of behalf of favored industries.

    See my related post Dangers of National Dependency:

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/66842.html

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous12:04 PM

    An industrial economy makes the "wrong sort" of people rich: Technically minded serious people.

    We live in an oligarchy of deeply petty, imbecilic, unserious clowns who want to be regarded as philosopher kings. Industry is sabotaged and sent away because it is a *threat* to them. It provides a route for both ordinary productive people to live comfortably and with some degree of independence (though not so much as a broadly distributed farming and small-town economy), and it produces all sorts of threatening counter oligarchs: Captains of (real) industry, who by necessity are concerned with the real state of the real material world. Bullshit doesn't feed a steel mill.

    toastedposts

    ReplyDelete
  17. Anonymous1:01 PM

    Of course, the above also presupposes a real economy. Our economy is so corrupted by monetary manipulation and government-adjacent money laundering that who gets rich is entirely dependent on whether you're friends with the oligarchy, who can simply make up the balance in their bank accounts. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with selling an average citizen any sort of product, physical or non-physical.

    Partly why "go-woke, go-broke" doesn't actually happen. Partially why we're becoming desperately poor people looking to the glittering princes of washington for patronage and favor - your neighbor's money becomes comparatively worthless when some aristocrat can add as many zeros as he feels like to his.

    toastedposts

    ReplyDelete
  18. Anonymous1:11 PM

    I suppose one final observation: If you want a computer, you'd better buy the parts now.

    Taiwann is one of the only sources of good cpus - the highest resolution semiconductors. TSMC has made itself indispensable to the world. Its loss will quite materially cripple the ability of the world to make electronics. Other non-Chinese Asian rim countries are centralized producers of other critical electronic components like hard drives, etc.

    WWIII in the pacific will destroy the ability of the world to create electronics, which will lead to the decay and possible death of the entire rest of the mechanized industrial food chain.

    There are production equipment manufacturers such as ASML located elsewhere, but the production is done in the pacific rim.

    toastedposts

    ReplyDelete
  19. Good thing some of that is coming back to the US.

    Still, as you point out, good time to buy parts. Those US factories aren't built yet.

    ReplyDelete