Three French-made Mirage 2000 fighter jets taxi on the runway in front of Hsinchu Air Base in Hungary.China has staged its largest ever military exercise in Taiwan despite condemnation from the United States, Japan and the European Union. .
Sam Eh | AFP | Getty Images
The last time tensions between Beijing and Washington escalated over Taiwan, the US Navy sent warships through the Taiwan Strait and China was unable to do anything about it.
Those days are over.
Since the mid-1990s, China’s military has undergone changes when crises erupted over Taiwan’s president’s visits to the United States.
“The situation now is very different,” said Michel Flournoy, a former secretary of defense policy in the Obama administration. “It’s a more contentious and more lethal environment for our forces.”
Unlike his predecessors, Chinese President Xi Jinping now has a formidable military force, including anti-ship missiles, a massive navy and an increasingly capable air force. That new military might is changing the strategic calculus of the U.S. and Taiwan, raising the risk of conflict or miscalculation, former officials and experts say.
In the year During the 1995-96 crisis, amid current tensions, China conducted live-fire military exercises, issued a dire warning to Taipei and launched missiles into waters near Taiwan.
But the U.S. military responded by sending several warships to the area, including two aircraft carrier groups, in its largest show of force since the Vietnam War. The carrier Nimitz and other warships drove home the idea of American military superiority as they sailed through the narrow waterway separating China and Taiwan.
“Beijing needs to know that the strongest military power in the Western Pacific is the United States,” said then-Defense Secretary William Perry.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China at the time had a low-tech, slow-moving force no match for the US military, with a navy and air force that could not go very far from China’s coast, past and present the US. Officials said.
Matthew Kroenig, who served as an intelligence and defense official under Bush, Obama and Trump, said: “They realized they were vulnerable, they realized they could fly American aircraft carriers right in their face, and there was nothing they could do about it.” administrations.
Impressed by the technical performance of the US military in the first Gulf War, the Chinese were “schooled in the American way of war” and began a concerted effort to invest in their military and, above all, to strengthen their position. According to Kroenig, the coast of Taiwan.
Beijing in 2010 She drew many lessons from the 1995-96 crisis, concluding that she needed satellite surveillance and other intelligence to detect adversaries over the horizon and to deploy “blue water” naval and air forces in the western Pacific. David Finkelstein, director of China and Indo-Pacific security affairs at CNA, an independent research institute.
“The PLA Navy has made tremendous progress since 1995 and 1996. It’s amazing how quickly the PLA Navy has built itself up. And of course, by 95-96, the PLA Air Force was almost no longer flying over water,” Finkelstein said. Retired US Army officer.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, described China’s impressive military power as a strategic earthquake.
“In my view, we are witnessing the biggest shift in global geostrategic power that the world has ever seen,” Miley said last year.
According to four-star admiral and former NATO commander James Stavridis, China’s military is now “very formidable, especially at home and around, especially around Taiwan.”
China’s navy now has more ships than America’s, he said. Although the U.S. Navy’s fleet is large and has advanced, experienced crews and commanders, “its size has its own quality,” said NBC News analyst Stavridis.
China is currently building powerful ships and helicopters to launch an all-out invasion of Taiwan, although whether the PLA is capable of such a task is still a matter of debate, he said.
In the year In the 1995-96 crisis, China lost contact with one of its missiles and became determined to disengage global positioning systems linked to the US, said Matthew Funaol, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It made them think that “we cannot rely on technologies from other countries”.
U.S. and Taiwanese officials must now consider a more lethal and efficient Chinese military that would deny the U.S. the ability to deploy warships or aircraft with impunity and operate safely from nearby bases, Funaiole and other experts said. .
“The game has changed in terms of how stacked the deck is for the US. It’s a more equal game. Whatever the US does, China has options,” Funayol said.
China, angered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this week, has begun large-scale, live-fire military drills including ballistic missile launches, surpassing exercises during the 1995-96 conflict. The drills are located in the waters around Taiwan to the north, east and south, and some of the drills are within 10 miles of Taiwan’s coast. China once had the capacity to exercise large-scale maneuvers in waters east of Taiwan, experts say.
China fired at least 11 ballistic missiles near Taipei on Thursday, including one that flew over the island, Taipei officials said. Japan says five missiles landed in its economic exclusion zone near an island south of Okinawa.
At this time, the US government has not made any announcements about warships operating in the Taiwan Strait. “Biden can try to do that, but China can put them at the bottom of the problem. That’s something they couldn’t do in 1995,” Kroenig said.
The White House said the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier would remain in the area during exercises around Taiwan to “monitor the situation.” But National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said a previously planned ICBM test had been postponed to avoid conflict.
Despite tough talk and rising tensions between the two superpowers, China is not looking to start a war over Pelosi’s visit and is seeking a show of force, not an invasion of Taiwan, former US officials and experts said.
China’s interim president, Xi, is focused on boosting his country’s ailing economy and seeking an unprecedented third term in office at the next Communist Party congress later this year. But China’s newfound military presence could lead to overconfidence in Beijing’s resolve or lead to a cycle of escalation in which each side is forced to respond to show commitment, former officials said.
There is concern that Xi may underestimate US commitment and believes there is a window of opportunity to contain or close Taiwan in the next few years before the US invests in new weapons and shifts its military balance, said Flournoy, now chairman of the Center for New American Security think tank.
“I worry that China miscalculates because the narrative in Beijing continues to be that America is failing, that America is turning inward,” Flournoy said. “This is very dangerous, if you underestimate the potential enemy.”
To prevent such an outcome, Flournoy argues that both Taiwan and the US should strengthen their military forces to deter Beijing and raise the costs of any potential invasion or intervention against Taiwan.
Finkelstein said he was concerned that a chain of “action and reaction” could lead to a conflict no one wanted, and that the risk of miscalculation by Beijing, Taipei and Washington was “skyrocketing.”
In order to cover the tension, the US and China should have a strong dialogue to reduce the temperature, he said. “We have to talk to each other constantly.”
