The defense issues website 1945.com, on Friday, presented some troublesome predictions about China, namely that China is preparing to invade Taiwan and will do so in the next few months. That's a debatable premise, but indications over the last few months are, admittedly, making it look more likely.
On 4 March, the administration of US President Donald Trump imposed a set of tariffs on the PRC, which Washington billed as incentives for Beijing to return to what Washington defines as equitable and fair trade. This prompted the PRC ambassador to make the semi-ambiguous threat that his country was prepared for any “type of war” with the US.
The ambassador’s statement has been interpreted as Beijing now deciding that the time may be ripe for a move against the ROC as the opening round in a direct conflict with the US.
Intelligence sources who have spoken to 19FortyFive about this story now state that they believe an attempt by China to do just that is no less than six months away.
The same intelligence sources elaborate further that the “six months from now” time frame is being prompted by the belief among the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) senior leadership that the US administration in Washington will either be unwilling or unable to prevent an invasion by the CCP and its military arm, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
They may be right. Assuming President Trump maintains rebuilding our military as a top priority of his second term, then time works for us, not for China. China no doubt has plans for seizing Taiwan; they probably have been maintaining and updating plans to do so since 1948, unless the People's Liberation Army's top-level Operations people are completely incompetent.
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Chuck DeVore, a retired US Army LTC, presented three likely scenarios for how this could be done. Let's take a quick look at each.
As DeVore projects, the first option would be a full-on blockade of the ROC. China’s navy (PLAN) would ring the island “like a steel noose, turning the Taiwan Strait into a kill zone. Of course, 90 percent of Taiwan’s food and all its natural gas come by ship. Snip that lifeline and the island will starve for months. No invasion, no blood-soaked beaches, just a slow strangulation.”
This seems the most likely option, on the surface. It would achieve the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) goals with the least risk to China itself. But it's probably not the best option for China, as it also is the option that would necessarily drag on for months, giving Taiwan's allies the chance to gear up and figure out how to break the CCP's blockade. Blockades are notoriously hard things to maintain, and Taiwan is important enough to the West that there would be enormous military and economic pressure put on China from the moment the blockade went up.
The second possibility would involve massive Chinese missile strikes devastating Taiwan’s defenses and overloading its Patriot and other missile defense systems. Beijing’s army of “patriotic hackers” would crash the ROC power grids and shut down the internet and phone networks. Simultaneously, 100,000 PLA troops would hit the island’s beaches.
Given the 12-hour time difference with Washington, this would all transpire, as DeVore writes, “before the US wakes up.” Beijing’s objective would, therefore, be to “seize [the capitol] Taipei in days and present the world with a done deal.”
This is a middle ground, but the CCP probably won't risk the notion that everyone in Washington, including everybody at the State Department and our national intelligence services, will just be sleeping peacefully in their beds while China invades a friendly nation. No, we would detect any such move, the president and vice president would be awakened, and an American response would be only delayed by minutes.
But then, there's this:
The third possibility is the nightmare, doomsday scenario.
In this variant, the PRC attempts to take the ROC and destroy the defense potential of the US and all of America’s regional allies.
Missile barrages would not only smash military sites on the ROC but also any US bases in Japan, Guam, and the Philippines. While this chaos is being created in Asia, Beijing’s 20,000 or more men of military age smuggled into the US under the protocols of President Joe Biden’s open border begin attacks in conjunction with Mexican cartels.
The US loses complete control of the southern border with shootouts at border crossing points and sabotage attacks inside of the border on the Texas side. Infrastructure is brought down by attacks on power grids.
There are many thousands, almost certainly at least six figures, of Chinese nationals in the United States illegally right now. Many more are here under such things as student visas. The Chinese nationals caught trying to enter the country have been, overwhelmingly, young, fit men of military age. And thanks to the non-enforcement of the Biden administration, many of them were allowed to enter, and now we have little or no idea where they are or what they are doing. A scenario like this would allow China to take Taiwan - not quickly and not easily, but it could overwhelm the island nation in time. It would also prevent much of an American response.
Bear in mind that this final scenario would be, no doubt, the start of a third world war. This scenario isn't just an attack on a nation friendly to the United States. This scenario posits attacks by Chinese forces directly on American bases in the Pacific, and indirect attacks on our homeland. This would result in a declaration of war by Congress, the first since 1941; any other outcome is impossible to contemplate. It would result in the full mobilization of the American economy to a war footing. But much of our industrial base is gone. We aren't the manufacturing powerhouse we were in 1941, and we wouldn't have the luxury of time that we had in 1941.
It's hard to imagine what China may be planning. Here in the West, we tend to think in terms of the next few years and think of history in terms of decades, centuries at most. China, on the other hand, thinks in terms of millennia, and as I have always written, they may not be a land of great ideas, but they are a land of great momentum. They take a long view - but they may also, given their various economic and demographic woes, decide that if they want Taiwan, it's now or never.
In the next few months, it seems, we will find out.
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