This interview focuses on The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, edited by Hoover distinguished visiting fellow Matt Pottinger. Order it here from Hoover Institution Press.
Jonathan Movroydis: How did The Boiling Moat come to fruition?
Matt Pottinger: The book was an idea that Hoover fellow Larry Diamond and I hatched while we were visiting Taiwan in late 2022. It occurred to me that having a book that lays out several steps that we need to take in the United States, that Taiwan needs to take for itself, and that Japan needs to take to shore up deterrence would be welcome. Time is of the essence. So, I hustled to bring together a terrific group of co-authors and to contribute some chapters myself and edit this volume.
It’s a military strategy, in a sense: the steps we need to take to show that we have the hard power available to credibly deter, or defeat, an attempt by Beijing to coercively annex Taiwan.
We talk about the diplomatic and the economic realms as well, but we think that hard power has no substitute. There are things that can complement hard power, but you have to have hard power first to credibly change the calculus of the dictator in Beijing who’s considering a war.
Movroydis: Taking Taiwan, or bringing Taiwan into the fold, was always a goal for mainland China. In February 1972, during President Nixon’s historic trip to China, the two sides essentially agreed that Taiwan was an internal dispute and that the matter should be settled peacefully. How did this change?
Pottinger: US policy has been remarkably consistent on this question, going all the way back to our formalization of diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China during the Carter administration. A couple of things happened. We normalized ties with Beijing, but we did so on the understanding that settling the question of Taiwan’s status would have to be something that the people in Taiwan, which is a democratic society, would have to agree to, as well as people in the People’s Republic of China. And not only would you need consent on both sides for settling this question, but it would also have to be peaceful and not something coerced by either side. That essence is captured in the communiques and in other important documents. One is the Taiwan Relations Act, where Congress made clear that it would be a matter of grave significance for the United States if Beijing were to try to coerce a change in Taiwan’s status, and that the United States would provide for Taiwan’s defense. Others came from the Reagan administration—documents declassified during the Trump administration—and made clear how the United States interprets its communiques with China and its obligations to itself and Taiwan.
What has changed is that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, rather than settling for a peaceful status quo and for some kind of negotiations with Taiwan, has instead refused to negotiate with the elected government of Taiwan—now two elected governments in a row that he’s been unwilling to talk with.
Xi has also made clear that he wants to change the status quo and is willing to use force to get there. So, his impatience, his insistence that Taiwan actively move toward a kind of political unification with the People’s Republic of China, and his willingness to apply increasing levels of coercive threats are a departure from his predecessors.
Movroydis: So, it’s a departure from Hu Jintao, Deng Xiaoping, even all the way back to Mao Zedong.
Pottinger: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping both said they could wait centuries, if necessary, to find a settlement with Taiwan. None of those leaders ever renounced the possible use of force, but at the same time, they didn’t apply increasing coercion through military activities around Taiwan and through efforts to wage what Beijing calls the three warfares—legal, psychological, and discourse—to such a degree that Xi Jinping has undertaken.
Movroydis: And what has that entailed? You document some public statements by Xi Jinping that are markedly different from those of his predecessors.
Pottinger: When he met with President Biden almost a year ago in San Francisco, Xi Jinping said something that I’m not aware any Chinese leader has ever said to an American president: Beijing now expects Washington’s support for its policy of “resolving” the Taiwan question. Previously, Beijing had said, as you mentioned, that this is an internal matter and they don’t want the United States in the middle of it. Now what Beijing is saying is, no, actually, we want Washington to essentially collude with Beijing to subvert Taiwan’s democracy and sovereignty.
He also told President Biden that peace is all well and good, but really, it’s more important now to push this to a resolution point. So, prioritizing a so-called resolution of the Taiwan question over peace in the Taiwan Strait is not something we’ve heard from a Chinese leader in many decades.
Movroydis: The book’s subtitle is “urgent steps to defend Taiwan.” Why are they urgent?
Pottinger: I think that the combination of Xi Jinping’s statements of intent, combined with the very formidable military capability China has amassed and is continuing to amass quite rapidly, is what creates the sense of urgency. Those capabilities constitute the largest peacetime buildup by a country since Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Also, the fact that Xi Jinping is now progressively eroding Taiwan’s sense of its security and agency over the waters that it patrols is a very troubling signal. For example, Beijing has now boarded a Taiwan-flagged vessel in at least one instance. It increasingly sends Chinese government vessels inside the restricted waters very close to the shore of Taiwan-administered islands. Not just Kinmen and Matsu, which we remember from the famous Kennedy-Nixon debate decades ago, but also islands that are closer to Taiwan, like Dongyin. Dongyin is important to Taiwan’s defense, and Beijing has recently sent ships into its restricted waters. Beijing has also sent coast guard ships right off the east coast of Taiwan to hang out there for a couple of weeks at a time. Those ships carry out exercises in which they board mainland Chinese vessels to demonstrate that they might go further and start trying to board Taiwan’s vessels.
Movroydis: You write that a coercive annexation of Taiwan, even in the absence of a US intervention, would not alleviate Sino-American tensions, but would in fact supercharge them. Why?
Pottinger: Because it’s clear from China’s military doctrine that they view the subjugation of Taiwan as the first step in a regional and global hegemony strategy, not as the endpoint of their security policy. For example, Chinese military doctrine, as first discovered by Ian Easton, a researcher based in Washington, shows that Beijing views Taiwan as an important prerequisite to coercing Japan into sort of a vassal-state status.
In Beijing’s view, once China is able to set up submarine tenders, air bases, and surface fleet bases in Taiwan, it will be easier to flank Japan on its eastern side and effectively threaten blockades to ensure that Japan is subordinate to Beijing’s will. The same is true for Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines, which is, like Japan, a treaty ally of the United States. What you’re left with is Chinese doctrine that confirms the worries of General Douglas MacArthur back in 1950 when he said that we cannot allow Taiwan to fall into the hands of a hostile power because it would become “an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender.” It would make America’s alliance commitments untenable in places like the Philippines and Japan.
It’s essentially about pushing the United States out of the Pacific, even though the Pacific has been central to American security and prosperity since George Washington was president.
Movroydis: Do you think, from your perspective and those of your co-authors, that China would risk invading Taiwan in the near future? And could Taiwan deter a PLA invasion on its own?
Pottinger: Taiwan does not have the capabilities on its own to win a protracted war against the People’s Republic of China.
What Taiwan does have is a professional active-duty military. It has a number of capabilities that it needs to add to and to supplement in order to threaten the Chinese navy so that China continues to understand that it would be an extremely costly endeavor to try to coercively annex Taiwan.
I will say that Xi Jinping is not a reckless gambler, according to my reading of his actions in the dozen years that he’s been supreme leader and in the many hours that I’ve spent in meetings with him during my time working at the White House. I don’t think he is as willing to gamble as, say, Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinping is holding those iron dice, but he’s not going to fling those dice across the table and engage in war unless he’s extremely confident in the result ahead of time.
What that means is there’s still an opportunity, although the clock is winding down, for us to deter him, and deterrence is far preferable to war. Imagine if we had done a better job as a NATO alliance of deterring Putin before he undertook his 2014 invasion of Ukraine and then his much larger, full-scale war in February 2022.
Deterrence is an act of psychology. It’s about persuading your adversary that war will be highly unpredictable and far more costly than pursuing means short of war. That has to be the sum total of the actions we undertake as a government and in concert with our allies and partners. They should add up to a fading sense of optimism in the mind of Xi Jinping about the utility of war.
Movroydis: What will that take?
Pottinger: Well, the good news is that even as China has spent trillions of dollars on its military buildup since the turn of the century, the types of capabilities that the United States, Japan, Australia, and Taiwan need to have in their arsenals to foil an invasion or blockade are actually far cheaper than the capabilities that Beijing has been painstakingly building in order to impose its will on an island a hundred miles from its shore. In warfare, a defender has a natural advantage. Numerically, it takes roughly three times as many soldiers and forces to take a defended position as it takes to defend that position.
When you add the factor of amphibious warfare and that Beijing would have to send its fleets across the waters, the ratio actually is even more favorable to the defender. What that means is that we need to be acquiring capabilities through increased, rapid investments in our collective defense that put the very expensive, exquisite systems in the PLA arsenal at risk: things like warships, large ferries that would be used as troop carriers and armored personnel carrier ferries, and all that sea lift. Taiwan doesn’t need to have air dominance. It just needs to deny Beijing air dominance.
That is also a much better cost curve for the defender. You can find asymmetrically cheap capabilities to hold expensive capabilities in the Chinese arsenal at risk. My co-authors and I, after this whole exercise of trips to Taiwan, research, interviewing, and writing—we came away with a sense of optimism that this is a deterrable conflict. Only, however, if we begin to take more concerted, serious steps to acquire the capabilities to hold China at risk. We also need to do more to respond to other aggressors in the world, whether it’s Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine conflict, or Iran with its terrorist proxies operating on Israel’s borders or in Yemen attacking shipping in the Red Sea, or even Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, who just stole an election from his own people. We need to respond to these things to demonstrate to Xi Jinping that we have the resolve to actually stand up for our interests around the world.
