​This podcast analyzes the cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and explores the counter-arguments from Part 1 of this series.

Read the original article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/4/

Keywords: China, Taiwan, CCP, PRC, Broken Nest, USA

Episode Transcript:

Stephanie Crider Host

(Prerecorded Conversations on Strategy intro) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast’s guest and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Cliff

Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Roger Cliff. Dr. Cliff is a research professor of Indo-Pacific Affairs in the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College. His research focuses on China’s military strategy and capabilities and their implications for US strategy and policy. He’s previously worked for the Center for Naval Analyses, the Atlantic Council, the Project 2049 Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Host

The Parameters 2021-22 Winter Issue included an article titled, “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan.” Authors Dr. Jared M. McKinney and Dr. Peter Harris laid out an unconventional approach to the China-Taiwan conundrum. Shortly after the article was published, Parameters heard from Eric Chan, who disagreed with them on many fronts.

We’ve invited you here today, Roger, to provide some additional insight on the topic. Let’s jump right in and talk about “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan. What is the essence of Jared McKinney and Peter Harris’s article “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan?”

Cliff

So this article is an attempt to find an innovative solution to the Taiwan problem that has bedeviled the United States since 1950. In this particular case, the author’s goal is not to find a long-term, permanent solution of the problem, but simply to find a way to deter China from using force against Taiwan in the near term. Specifically, a way that doesn’t entail risking a military conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers. Their proposed solution is a strategy of deterrence by punishment, whereby even a successful conquest of Taiwan would result in unacceptable economic, political, and strategic costs for Beijing.

The premise of the article is that China’s military is now capable enough that it could conquer Taiwan, even if the United States intervened in Taiwan’s defense. The result, they argue, is that the long-standing US deterrence-by-denial strategy for deterring a Chinese use of force against Taiwan—in other words, by threating Beijing with the risk that a use of force against Taiwan would fail—is no longer credible. Unlike most strategies of deterrence by punishment, the strategy that McKinney and Harris proposed does not primarily rely on military attacks on China. Instead, the punishment comes in the form of imposing other costs on China for a successful use of force against Taiwan.

This has several elements. One is the United States selling to Taiwan weapon systems that will be most cost-effective and defending against a Chinese invasion. This would make a successful invasion of Taiwan more difficult and, therefore, more costly for China.

Related to this, they also recommend that Taiwan’s leaders prepare the island to fight a protracted insurgency, even after Taiwan’s conventional military forces have been defeated. The most important element of their strategy, however, consists of the United States and Taiwan laying plans for what they call “a targeted, scorched-earth strategy” that would render Taiwan not just unattractive, if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain.

According to McKinney and Harris, this could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which they say is the most important computer chipmaker in the world. They would also encourage Taiwan to develop the means to target the mainland’s own microchip industry and by preparing to evacuate to the United States highly skilled Taiwanese working in its semiconductor industry. McKinney and Harris say that a punishment strategy should also include economic sanctions on China by the United States and its major allies, such as Japan. And possibly giving a green light to Japan, South Korea, and Australia to develop their own nuclear weapons.

At the same time as threatening increased cost to China for using force against Taiwan, the authors also advocate decreasing the cost to Beijing of not using force against Taiwan. Specifically, they recommend that Washington reassure Beijing that the United States will not seek to promote Taiwan’s independence.

Host

We got some pretty strong pushback from Eric Chan. In fact, he wrote a reply to this article. Can you break that down for our listeners and explain the essence of Chan’s response to the article?

Cliff

In his response to McKinney and Harris’s article, Eric Chan of the US Air Force makes three main critiques. First, he questions their assertion that attempting to maintain deterrence by denial would result in an arms race between the United States and China, pointing out that China has already been engaged in a rapid buildup of its military capabilities for the past quarter century, even while the United States has been distracted by the war on terror and its counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second, Chan finds McKinney and Harris’s recommendations for reducing the cost to Beijing of not using force against Taiwan to be unconvincing. In particular, he disagrees with their claim that Taiwan is moving farther away from mainland China, pointing out that polling in Taiwan has repeatedly found that the vast majority of people there favor a continuation of Taiwan’s current ambiguous status.

Therefore, Chan implies, there is essentially no cost to Beijing for not using force against Taiwan as Taiwan is not moving farther in the direction of independence. Chan also points out that the reassurances that McKinney and Harris recommend that the United States offer to Beijing are in fact things that the US is already doing.

Chan’s third critique is that the cost of China of the punishments that McKinney and Harris recommend compared to the costs that Beijing would already have to bear as a result of fighting a war of conquest over Taiwan are insufficient to provide any additional deterrent value.

For example, he points out that the economic cost to China of destroying the Taiwanese and Chinese semiconductor industries would be minor compared to the enormous economic damage that any cross-strait war would inevitably cause to China. Similarly, he argues that the prospect of Taiwan fighting a protracted counterinsurgency campaign would be of little deterrent to a Chinese government that has decades of experience brutally crushing popular resistance.

After critiquing this strategy recommended by McKinney and Harris, Chan asserts that the only way of deterring China is to demonstrate an ability to destroy a Chinese invasion force while systematically grinding the rest of China’s military to dust.

Host

Thanks for laying the groundwork for this conversation. So what I would like to hear from you is how would you analyze these arguments?

Cliff

Yeah, so to better understand both the McKinney and Harris article and the Chan critique of it, I think it’s useful to examine the decision-making model that is implicit in McKinney and Harris’s argument. Their analysis treats Beijing as a unitary, rational actor that is faced with a choice between two alternatives. It can either use force against Taiwan or it can continue not to. If it chooses not to use force, then Taiwan will continue in its current, unresolved state.

In addition, however, McKinney and Harris argued that, over time, the likelihood of Taiwan voluntarily agreeing to unification with the mainland is diminishing—and, therefore, that the cost of Beijing of not using force against Taiwan is, in fact, gradually increasing over time.

On the other hand, if Beijing chooses to use force against Taiwan, then there’s two possible outcomes. It could, of course, fail, in which case Beijing would be worse off than before because not only would Taiwan remain independent, but China would also have incurred the human and material costs of fighting and losing a war.

If the use of force succeeded, however, then they assume Beijing would be better off because the benefits of conquering Taiwan would outweigh the costs of the war fought to achieve that. They argue that, up until now, Beijing has been deterred from using force against Taiwan because of the likelihood that the United States would intervene on Taiwan’s side and defeat China’s efforts. Thus, from Beijing’s point of view, the expected costs of using force against Taiwan have exceeded the costs of not using force.

Since they do not believe it is feasible to restore the military balance in the favor of the United States and Taiwan so that a Chinese use of force against Taiwan would likely fail, they now propose a strategy to raise the cost of even a successful use of force against Taiwan, while reducing the co...

Deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan without recklessly threatening a great-power war is both possible and necessary through a tailored deterrence package that goes beyond either fighting over Taiwan or abandoning it. This podcast explores cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and offers counter-arguments as well.

Read the original article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/4/

Keywords: Broken Nest, China, Taiwan, PRC, CCP

Episode Transcript:

Stephanie Crider Host

Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

The guests in speaking order on this episode are:

(Guest 1 Jared M. McKinney)

(Guest 2 Peter Harris)

(Guest 3 Eric Chan)

Host

Today we welcome Dr. Jared McKinney and Dr. Peter Harris, authors of “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan,” featured in Parameters Winter 2021–22 issue. We are also pleased to welcome Mr. Eric Chan.

Dr. McKinney is the chair of the Department of Strategy and Security Studies at the eSchool of Graduate Professional Military Education—Air University, and reviews editor of the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Dr. Harris is associate professor of political science at Colorado State University and Indo-Pacific perspectives editor of the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Mr. Chan is the senior Korea/China/Taiwan strategist with the Headquarters (Department of the) Air Force’s Checkmate Directorate and a reviewer for the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. He also serves as an adjunct fellow with the Global Taiwan Institute. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Conversations on Strategy.

Let’s talk about the China and Taiwan conundrum. Jared and Peter, your article, “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan,” proposes an unconventional approach to China’s relationship with Taiwan. The article garnered worldwide attention, including from the (Chinese Communist Party or) CCP, which condemned the strategy. Jared, Peter, please give us a brief recap of your article.

McKinney

Thanks for having us here today, Stephanie. The Taiwan conundrum is how to have great-power peace without abandoning Taiwan to Chinese domination and how to preserve Taiwan’s independence without a great-power war. Is there a way out of this conundrum? Peter and I have argued that there is, and we’ve termed this approach “the broken nest.” Chinese leaders, even pathological ones like Mao, have long understood that grand strategy is all about balancing different vital interests. We took some inspiration for the strategy from a 1975 meeting Henry Kissinger had with Mao Zedong, in which Taiwan was discussed. Kissinger asked Mao when Taiwan would return to the mainland. Mao said, “In 100 years.” Kissinger replied, “It won’t take 100 years. Much less,” and then Mao then responded, “It’s better for it to be in your hands, and if you were to send it back to me now, I would not want it because it is not wantable. There’s a huge bunch of counterrevolutionaries there.” This is the bottom line of the broken-nest strategy, to make Taiwan, given the (People’s Republic of China’s or) PRC’s broader interests, “unwantable.” The phrase “broken nest” comes from a Chinese proverb that asks, “Beneath a broken nest, how can there be any whole eggs?” We designed this approach according to what political scientists call “deterrence by punishment” and the literature on tailored deterrence, which asks analysts to try to match techniques to a specific adversary. We proposed a tailored deterrence package composed of four elements. We argued, first, that Taiwan should invest more money in weapons designed to make the island costlier to invade. Second, that Taiwan should threaten China with a preplanned resistance campaign to demonstrate to the mainland that subduing Taiwan would not be cheap, quick, or easy. Third, we called for a targeted scorched earth strategy, whereby Taiwan’s semiconductor industry would be destroyed in the event of a Chinese invasion. And, finally, we proposed that regional actors such as Japan and Australia threaten Beijing with massive military buildups in the event of force being used against Taiwan. While none of these elements can stand on their own, together, we suggest that they’re sufficient to make Taiwan “unwantable.” The bottom line is that we think this could be the beginning of a solution, at least for now, to the Taiwan conundrum—and, although one might proffer this or that objection, to our knowledge, there is no more realistic or credible option in the current marketplace of ideas. But if there’s a solid alternative, we want to hear about it, and so we’re looking forward to the conversation today.

Host

Wonderful, thank you. Shortly after we published your article, Parameters heard from Eric Chan from the US Air Force’s Checkmate Directorate, who took issue with some of the main points in the “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan” article. What’s your perspective, Eric?

Chan

Hello Stephanie, thank you for having me. This is a very good discussion, and I’d like to thank the authors for making a very interesting point and a lot of very interesting ideas about how to do a tailored deterrence theory. However, the main issue that I have with this tailored theory is that it’s really designed to deter a pre-Xi Chinese Communist Party. This doesn’t really cover the aggressiveness of Xi Jinping and his ideological bent in terms of finishing what he calls a Taiwan problem. Because there’s such a focus on the ideological portion of this conflict, many of the proposed solutions to this deterrence theory fails against this newly aggressive China. For instance, scorched earth, especially targeting things like (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or) TSMC, fails primarily because the economic portion is not as important to Xi as it was to party leaders from a generation ago. And, moreover, this imposes significant political costs on Taiwan, on any Taiwanese political leadership that would advocate for such a strategy. And I think if we have learned any lessons from Afghanistan, that is that we shouldn’t be proposing military solutions that are disconnected from the political realities. So, when you talk about deterrence against Xi’s China, because deterring an aggressive power is really hard to do, especially when they’re bent on ideological confrontation with the United States, that means the US really has no other choice than to be able to threaten a great-power war against China, and especially because we’re looking at the party entering what we can deem as the most dangerous decade. This really means that the US needs to be able to propose realistic methods of deterrence that aren’t really limited by either economic deterrence or even by Taiwan being able to advocate for a bloody insurgency campaign. Economic deterrence alone isn’t enough to properly deter the party, nor is insurgency campaign raged by Taiwan; that would not be sufficient to deter the Chinese Communist Party. Instead, the US must be able to credibly threaten a massive, great-power war. Taiwan needs to be able to pose the tactical and operational problems to the party that makes the US threats even more credible. So, unfortunately, despite the very clever ways that we’re trying to tailor deterrence here, it is likely insufficient to properly deter the party of today.

Host

Thank you for your thoughts on that. Jared and Peter, back to you for a brief response before we dig a little bit deeper into this topic.

Harris

Thanks Stephanie, and thanks to you, Eric, for engaging with our argument. You make some very good points—points that we agree with, some points that we have honest disagreements about, and then some points that we look forward to exploring with you further today. The first thing I want to clarify, a point of agreement between the three of us, is that nothing in our article should suggest that we absolve Beijing of responsibility, the heightening tensions across the strait. We agree that China has become more aggressive. We agree that China has become more assertive, and it’s the root cause of the problem or the urgency that the problem now has. I’m in print elsewhere as arguing that China is responsible for worsening the security environment, for empowering hawks here in the United States, and that Beijing should take steps to reassure Taipei and Washington that it has no plans to invade. We take China’s increase in power and its increase in assertiveness as context where a challenge to be overcome. The second point I’d like to clarify is that we do not argue that China wants Taiwan so that it can control the island’s semiconductor industry. From your written response, I took that that’s what you understood our argument to be, and that’s been a common misperception in some of the other commentary that we’ve seen since our article’s publication. But we do not argue that China wants Taiwan to control its semiconductor industry. Rather, our argument is that China has become dependent on Taiwan’s semiconductors to a nontrivial degree, so that Beijing can now be threatened with the withholding of those technologies. To be clear, we are open to debate about how costly it would be to China to lose access to TSMC chips, but we need to see some logic and evidence to conv...