Japanese leaders chose war rather than capitulation, even though some of them, including Admiral IsorokuYamamoto, the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, suspected that their country could not win a war against the United States.
It has become increasingly apparent that any notion of U.S. “strategic ambiguity” with respect to Taiwan is dead. Both the Joe Biden administration’s rhetoric and U.S. military deployments in the western Pacific indicate that the United States will come to Taiwan’s defense if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) uses force against the island. The logic underlying this more confrontational stance is that it will deter Beijing from taking rash actions. It is far more likely to produce a potentially catastrophic military collision between the United States and China.
The reliability and credibility of any U.S. security assurances to Taipei are based on the assumption that U.S. forces would prevail if fighting broke out. However, it is most unclear whether that would be the case. Simulations run by the Pentagon and think tanks in recent years have produced mixed results. Some of them indicate that the United States would lose such a war; others point to a hard-fought U.S. victory. Both scenarios entail a horrific cost in lives and treasure. Looming in the background is the worry that either country might conclude that an escalation to the use of nuclear weapons was necessary to avoid a humiliating defeat.
The Pentagon and its supporters increasingly focus on ways to strengthen the U.S. military presence in the western Pacific to maximize the credibility of deterrence. A recent article by Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery (ret.) and Bradley Bowman is typical. They recommend five steps to prevent defeat: enhancing the ability to strike attacking PRC forces; strengthening Taiwan’s ability to defend itself; bolstering the survivability of forward deployed U.S. units; improving the capabilities of U.S. and allied forces to fight together; and building more cyber resilient infrastructure to support military mobility.
Such analyses focus on only one element of deterrence—the balance of military forces. Even with that narrow focus, U.S. prospects are not bright. Over the past two decades, the PRC has dedicated itself to an extraordinarily ambitious military modernization program. The focus of that effort has been on air and naval weapons systems that would make a U.S. intervention to defend Taiwan prohibitively problematic and costly. Beijing may already have achieved that capability. If not, it is just a few years away.
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