SUBSCRIBER+INTERVIEW — A new leader takes power in Taiwan, Taiwan and China hold competing military drills, the rhetoric from both sides grows increasingly strident, as do calls from U.S. lawmakers to come to Taiwan's aid in the case of a Chinese invasion. Far from Taiwan itself, the U.S. and China engage in fierce economic competition over trade and economic policy, aimed in both countries as a way to guarantee the primacy of their industry and innovation in the decades to come.
These are among the elements for what some see as a looming great-power conflict, one that is at the heart of Cyber Initiatives Group Principal and Silverado Policy Accelerator Dmitri Alperovitch's new book, World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century.
Alperovitch is hardly alone among expert analysts worried about the dangers of a U.S.-China showdown - though there's a wide range of views when it comes to managing the risks. While some have called for a restoration of better ties between Washington and Beijing, including concessions to China in exchange for collaboration on several issues, others believe a harder line is in order. When it comes to Taiwan, the divide is stark, between those advocating for diplomacy and others who calling for more robust assistance to Taiwan, to bolster the island's defenses if and when an assault comes from the mainland.
Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly spoke recently with Alperovitch for an episode of the Cover Stories Podcast, about the dangers and ways to mitigate them in the years ahead.
THE CONTEXT
- Taiwan’s new president Lai Ching-te was inaugurated on May 20. He called on China to “cease their political and military intimidation against Taiwan” and “ensure the world is free from the fear of war.” China has called Lai a “dangerous separatist.”
- China launched a two-day military exercise in the week after Lai's inauguration, called Joint Sword-2024A, as what it called a “strong punishment” for Taiwan’s “separatist acts.” Chinese state media suggested the drills were an exercise in blockading Taiwan.
- Taiwan has responded with live-fire drills along its coast and on Matsu island to simulate counterattacks on Chinese amphibious and naval attacks.
- Amid rising tensions over Taiwan, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with his Chinese counterpart Admiral Dong Jun at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. The Pentagon said the two officials discussed Chinese military activities around Taiwan, U.S. operations in the region, as well as issues regarding space, cyberspace, and nuclear weapons. Austin also warned China against further supporting Russia’s defense industry amid the Ukraine war.
THE INTERVIEW
The excerpt of this interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Kelly: You've been watching this issue for a long time. Why did you decide to write a book about it?
Alperovitch: I've been concerned about the rise of China for the better part of the last two decades. And at the same time, I've been looking at what's going on in the broader world.
You have an authoritarian leader in Xi (Jinping), very much like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, who has consolidated power, has no opposition, and is driven by a distorted view of history, just like Putin. In Xi's case, believing that Taiwan always belonged to China, even though that's actually historically wrong. There's never been a period in the entire history of Taiwan when whoever controlled the mainland fully controlled Taiwan. And you have both men driven by ego that very much want to accomplish this mission of enlarging their empires on their watch, not leave it to the future generations.
Xi talks a lot about the fact that you can't leave this “problem” of Taiwan to the future generations. And you have both countries driven to some extent by destiny, believing that this is unfinished business.
Save your virtual seat at a meeting with Cyber Initiatives Group Principals on Wednesday. June 12th as they discuss the U.S. and China and how cyber plays a role in what comes next
In China, when they're looking out at the world, they see themselves as being contained by U.S. allies and U.S. military bases. Starting from the east, with the Korean peninsula – obviously we have American troops there – and going towards Japan. We have American troops in Okinawa and other places around Japan. Taiwan, limited troops there, but nevertheless viewed as an outpost of the U.S. And now the Philippines once again hosting American troops. So they're seeing themselves as contained by the United States. And in order for them to achieve their objective of becoming a great power, which they believe is their right – in fact, for much of their history, they were the leading economic power in the world – they can't allow someone like America to control their naval forces, which are essentially bottled up in the South and East China Seas. And the entire Pacific is essentially right now a lake for the U.S. Navy.
Taking Taiwan would allow them to break out of that containment, as they see it, and enable (them) to project power and dominate. So that is why China, I think, is intent on taking Taiwan.
I think the period between 2028 and 2032 is incredibly dangerous, likely the last period of Xi's rule. He's going to look at that period as an opportunity to change that status quo and bring Taiwan into Chinese control. In 2032, he'll be 79. And the Chinese system doesn't tend to elect leaders into their 80s, perhaps a little bit of a difference with our system.
Kelly: You've been to Taiwan several times. Are the people you've spoken with there, government leaders, sharing your views on this?
Alperovitch: They're very concerned, but you have to appreciate that Taiwanese politics is as divided as our politics, maybe even worse in many ways. You have the two key parties – the DPP party, which is the ruling party, (its leader) was just elected president. They're often called the pro-independence party – that's a misnomer.
No one in Taiwan, except for a very small minority, is interested in declaring independence because they know that will be a provocation. They know that the United States will not support it. And the official position of (President) Lai is that we don't actually need to declare independence because we're already independent. Countries don't just randomly declare independence when they already feel like they're a country.
The KMT, which is the opposition party, which ironically has always been the anti-China party, really started changing in the 1990s, when it started to take the approach that better relations with China are good for Taiwan, that the only way that Taiwan can secure the status quo is to secure its semi-independence is by appeasing China.
And their position is basically that America's an unreliable ally. They're using what's happened with Ukraine and the questions about aid, and saying America will leave us behind. They will stab us in the back. There's no way that we can defend this island ourselves. So the best way to avoid war, a catastrophic war, is to try to appease China, try to not provoke them, try to have better relationships. So those are basically the political dynamics in Taiwan.
It's a very difficult situation. There's growing concern in Taiwan. One of the people I met there is this remarkable individual that's organizing a self-defense nonprofit to basically get the Taiwanese population to care more about their defense and doing preparatory work related to that, and he has huge numbers of people signing up, interested in learning how they can contribute to the defense. They're certainly seeing what the Chinese are doing with regards to invasions of their air defense zone, their territorial waters around some of the outlying islands, and they understand that the threat is growing and the balance of forces is not in their favor.
Kelly: You titled the book “World on the Brink.” Do you think, Dmitri, that the world is on the brink of World War III?
Alperovitch: I do. I think that this is going to be a very dangerous decade. And as bad and terrifying as this war in Ukraine has been, that is going to be nothing compared to what a conflict over Taiwan would be like for the world. First off, for the world economy, that conflict would almost certainly bring us into global depression. Instantaneously, you will have the semiconductors that are manufactured in Taiwan, that the entire digital economy depends on, being offline potentially for many months, if not years. You will have trade with China, very likely curtailed to a minimum, if not zero. No country is going to be unaffected by this conflict. Not to mention that if the United States chooses to fight this conflict because of the strategic importance of Taiwan to the United States - if that happens, this is going to be unlike any war we’ve fought, probably since the Civil War, when you look at the number of casualties that are projected in war games. In some of the war games that I've run, it's going to eclipse anything on a daily level that we've seen even during World War II. So this is going to be just absolutely catastrophic, not to mention that this would be a conflict between two nuclear armed powers, who knows if it stays conventional.
We are in a very, very dangerous moment.
Kelly: You open the book with a very interesting scenario about how this might come to be.
Alperovitch: You often hear in the media this idea that this would be an amphibious invasion of the beaches, sort of a repeat of D-Day in Normandy – “Saving Private Ryan,” Chinese edition. And that's just not the reality.
I found it illuminating to go outside of Taipei and actually visit the key terrain, walk those beaches, walk those mountains that litter the island and appreciate how difficult and treacherous this invasion would be. This is not a cakewalk by any means.
First of all, the Taiwan Strait is incredibly treacherous. It's very shallow, about only 300 feet. You can't even put submarines in there. During the summers, you have typhoons and winter storms that make the Strait basically impassable to anything but large container ships. So it makes planning for an invasion extremely difficult. And once you get to those beaches, you have nowhere to go in most cases, because behind those mountains is a river, and there are tunnels everywhere. It is not the plains of Ukraine or even Normandy where you can break out and march on Paris and on the Ardennes. That is not the reality of Taiwan.
Talking to both former U.S. military attachés that have spent time in Taiwan, as well as military folks there, you start to appreciate that the only way that this becomes a reality is really with the capture of infrastructure that you need to unload hundreds of thousands of troops, massive amounts of logistics, massive amounts of armored vehicles and infantry-fighting vehicles that you need to actually occupy this island of 23 million people. And the only way to do that is if you capture the ports, you capture the airfields around the island. The scenario really envisions an airborne assault on those facilities as a first phase, and then carrying these massive ships that can get in and unload those troops and equipment, and then you can bring in heavy transport planes into the airfields that you capture.
Kelly: The subtitle of your book is “How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century.” What do you think the U.S. should be doing right now?
Alperovitch: One of the arguments I make in the book, in part by going back into history, is that we are unquestionably in Cold War II. It's not a 2.0, it's not a continuation of the first Cold War. But we're in a Cold War with China.
If we're in a Cold War, what is our grand strategy for victory? And what does victory even mean? Because unlike the first Cold War, where George Kennan famously had this realization that the Soviet Union is an unnatural phenomena, one day it's going to collapse and if we just wait them out and have a stable deterrence against conflict, we will win – well, China is not collapsing. China's been around for 5,000 years. It's not going anywhere. It'll probably be around for another 5,000 years, if not longer.
So the strategy has to be different, looking at every dimension of the conflict, obviously military first and foremost. We have to deter this invasion of Taiwan, this potential for world conflict, diplomatic trade and technology race.
We absolutely have to win the race for the four critical technologies of the 21st century. Number one, AI and autonomy. I think we're seeing what potential that has for both military, national security, and economic growth. Secondly, biotechnology and synthetic biology – incredibly exciting, not just in the medical space, where you could have really revolutionary treatments and drugs being developed, but also in the construction of new materials, where you can imagine one day perhaps you would create cement-like materials with synthetic biology as opposed to the very energy-intensive and carbon-emitting processes we use today. The third one is space. We have to dominate the aerospace sector thanks to companies like SpaceX. We have the lead there right now. And the fourth one, which we're losing, frankly, is energy, green energy, as we're transitioning to a carbon-neutral world. Everything from nuclear, solar, wind, batteries, EVs – China dominates nearly every aspect of that, and we have to catch up and eclipse them as quickly as possible.
For all four areas, there are two critical components that are essential to victory: semiconductors and critical minerals, both rare earths as well as other critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, et cetera. And there again, on the critical minerals, we're very far behind. China processes 90% of the world's rare earths. They have mining rights around the world that they've been able to secure for many other materials. And on semiconductors, we're on the precipice. It can go either way. We've done some work to try to curtail the advanced chip manufacturing in China, but China may very well in the next five years dominate the so-called foundational chips, which are actually the majority of all chips that are being produced. And China is working really, really hard to dominate that entire sector and make us dependent on them. So it's really a mixed bag when it comes to the technological race. We've got advantages in some areas and we're losing in others.
Kelly: What are you hoping that people will walk away from this book thinking, or be inspired to do?
Alperovitch: This book is not written for the 300 policy people that care about this issue in DC. I talk to them all the time anyway, so I didn't need to write a book to make my arguments to them. This book is written for the American public, and frankly for the global public, to warn them of the dangers of this coming conflict, which I think could be just absolutely disastrous for the world, truly a World War III type of situation.
I see the same trend lines that I saw with Russia and Ukraine playing out in that region and then the Pacific. And most importantly, it's a call to action for everyone to wake up every single day and think about what they can do, because it's not just a job for the U.S. government and for the U.S. military. That's certainly an important component – I talk about how we need to reform our defense strategy of Taiwan, how we need to reform our defense industrial base, which is lagging far behind. But it's also about industry, and how industry has enabled China's rise, has given them these critical technologies or has enabled China to steal those critical technologies. And we have to be changing that as well, in order to get as much leverage on China as possible.
I don't advocate for decoupling. Decoupling is, A, unrealistic. China is too big to decouple from. And B, it’s actually counterproductive, because if you fully decouple our economies, you will not have any leverage over them to try to deter this invasion. But I do argue for this new concept that I call unidirectional entanglement, where we want to increase our leverage over China, we want to make them more dependent on us, and we want to decrease our dependence on them in the areas that I talked about.
And by the way, this is the Chinese strategy. Made in China 2025 is exactly that strategy, to become independent in manufacturing across a range of critical technologies that they've identified, and they have a sort of decouple-from-America directive, where their state-owned enterprises and their government sector is trying to push American technologies out of their networks. So they're trying to implement the same strategy.
We have a lot of advantages. They're still far behind. We need to make sure that they stay behind. There are two things that you can do to win a race. One, you can run faster than the other guy. And that's certainly really important. But two, you can slow the other guy down. And we need to be doing a lot more of that.
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