Current investments and trade patterns would be wound down over the months and years to come - to the extreme detriment of both sides (especially China, and especially if most of our allies made the same policy changes, since there is nowhere else besides the Western world where China can find 1 billion wealthy consumers looking to purchase its goods).

America surely would find it unacceptable to maintain most existing economic relationships with China. But most existing trade patterns are being sustained, even in the face of America’s tariffs dating to the Trump administration.īy contrast, if China attacks Taiwan, everything will likely change. Rather, some investments in areas such as high technology that might have been envisioned for China some years ago are instead being directed elsewhere, to safer harbors. For all the talk of “ decoupling” China’s economic relationship with the West, that is not really happening. It literally could become the worst catastrophe in the history of warfare.Įven if a war were somehow to be “winnable” - perhaps because Taiwan’s political leadership were arrested or killed and a successor regime chose to surrender rather than fight, or because the United States somehow chose to sit the war out and China rapidly prevailed - the economic consequences would be enormous. Instead, the conflict probably would expand horizontally to other regions and vertically, perhaps even to include nuclear weapons threats - or their actual use. Neither Beijing nor Washington would accept defeat in a limited engagement. Most likely, the war would not remain limited. Either of these outcomes is plausible, and in my view, impossible to dismiss in advance. If the submarines were particularly hard for us to find - especially likely if China can successfully attack air bases on Okinawa and ships we might use to create convoys east of Taiwan, a possibility that cannot be dismissed - we could lose much of our surface Navy and fail to end the strangulation of Taiwan by China’s submarine force. But there is no guarantee of that outcome, either. For example, China could lose most of its submarine fleet, in some scenarios, and see any blockade defeated, according to certain plausible assumptions about how well our anti-submarine warfare platforms might function as they searched for those submarines. That would be true even if the war were to remain limited in geography and scale. This is true today and will remain so for the foreseeable future - though the United States and Taiwan should take steps to improve the odds that Chinese President Xi Jinping will see war as highly undesirable, if he does not see it that way already.Īs I attempted to show in a paper released by Brookings during our Taiwan trip, it is unrealistic, if not impossible, to predict which side would win any conflict over Taiwan. To do so would be to make an even worse mistake than Russian President Vladimir Putin’s when he chose to attack Ukraine in February in the apparent belief that he could achieve a quick and relatively easy win. Specifically, none of the three governments that could begin a war over Taiwan - those in Washington, Beijing and Taipei - should see war as in its interest. Of course, war is always bad and should be avoided when possible. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in time, and by Chinese missiles, airplanes and warships in space - I came back to the United States convinced more than ever that there really should be no war over Taiwan - not soon, not in a few years, not ever. After a week of consultations and briefings in Taiwan with a team from Brookings Institution - our visit was sandwiched between those by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen.

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