The president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Xi Jinping, has a serious anti-access, area-denial problem on his hands. The US Armed Forces and the US intelligence community have the ability to impose an extremely high cost on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the event of an armed attack on Taiwan.
A year ago, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken nevertheless warned that the leadership of the Communist Party of China had determined that the status quo in international affairs was “no longer acceptable,” and they were “determined to pursue reunification on a much faster timeline.”
The former US chief of naval operations, Admiral Mike Gilday, added that the United States must be prepared for contingencies involving an armed attack before 2024.
To reunify Taiwan with the mainland, the PRC government needs the global area of operations to be reshaped before the PLA is ordered to carry out an armed attack against Taiwan. The problem for the administration of US President Joe Biden is that the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine have already done some of that reshaping.
Biden heads to Middle East
The overlapping conflicts have significantly reduced the non-nuclear costs that the US Armed Forces and intelligence community can impose on the PLA in the event of an attack on Taiwan. That is one of the reasons Biden must take the calculated risk of traveling to what has in effect become an active war zone to try to offramp the outbreak of a regional war in the Middle East.
In Israel and Jordan, the White House will find the path forward to be very difficult to navigate. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has divided the world. The ongoing siege of Gaza has divided it even further. Now, rift lines have emerged in the international system that some fear could mark the outlines of a new world order.
Either way, these conflicts have significantly reshaped the global area of operations to the benefit of the PLA. The world is becoming desensitized to major-power conflicts involving contested violations of state sovereignty.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and major non-NATO allies are showing signs of fatigue in the provisioning of military aid and other costly interventions. And the international political environment is becoming far less conducive to providing anywhere, anytime access for US Armed Forces. Queue the Sahel.
When his plane touches down in the Middle East on Wednesday, Biden will need to be careful. If he remains true to his words, he will choose the proverbial war over shame. So long as it is not a shameful war, that seems like the right approach.
Hamas needs to be eliminated. It is a terrorist group that has shown itself to be capable of a horrific level of depravity and indifference to human life. It is also a proxy militant group that just gave a proof of concept for how it could be used by a revisionist power to weaken the worldwide anti-access, area-denial capabilities of the US Armed Forces.
For the Biden administration, the chosen path avoids a “peace with honor” outcome. However, the US still faces the risk of a war by a major non-NATO ally that violates international norms and carries unintended consequences for major-power competition.
To date, the first part of this equation has made the most headlines. There is widespread concern about the risk of war crimes being committed against Palestinian civilians. There should be such a concern. It is a collective assault on our shared humanity when we don’t hold militaries accountable for committing war crimes.
The same cannot be said about the second part of this equation. It is largely being overlooked by the media. It shouldn’t be.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel, the US government has been moving aircraft-carrier strike groups and intelligence collection platforms around the board to support a military intervention in Gaza and deter an expansion of the conflict elsewhere in the Middle East. That carries strategic risks.
The Biden administration needs to mitigate those risks. Otherwise, the US government could inadvertently leave the door open for the PLA to make a move against Taiwan. If such a low-probability, high-impact event were to occur, it would pose an even greater threat to international peace and stability than what we have already witnessed in Ukraine.