Book Review - Why Taiwan Matters - Wall Street Journal

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https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/ ... d-43c9865b


‘Why Taiwan Matters’ and ‘The Boiling Moat’: Danger Island
The future of Taiwan’s political control is a matter of great importance to multiple world powers, and to the Taiwanese themselves.

By Tunku Varadarajan - a Journal contributor, he is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

Feb. 21, 2025 11:58 am ET

[Reading Liberally Note – the portion of the review dealing with “The Boiling Moat” is separated with a row of asterisks.]


Taiwan this month was in the headlines, an event remarkable for its infrequency. In truth, there should never be a moment when we don’t fixate on this disputed island—independent in every way save for the absence of formal, de jure sovereignty—that’s separated by no more than a narrow strait from a snarling, revanchist China.

Speaking at the Honolulu Defense Forum on Feb. 13, Adm. Samuel Paparo, the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, sounded a chilling warning. China’s “aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now,” he said, “are not exercises as they call them, they are rehearsals. They are rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland.”

In “Why Taiwan Matters” Kerry Brown, a former British diplomat who is currently a professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College, London, tells us that this proudly renegade island is “at the heart of arguably the greatest geopolitical challenge of the twenty-first century.”

The conquest of democratic Taiwan by Communist China would not only snuff out the freedom of 23.4 million people, it would “wreak havoc,” as Mr. Brown puts it, on the global economy in a manner that exceeds the depredations of the Covid-19 pandemic or the 2008-09 financial crisis. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, for instance, produces more than 90% of the semiconductors that reside in the hearts of our computers. If TSMC’s plants were to be shut down or destroyed or sabotaged in war, much of the world would grind to a halt. (Let’s also shudder at the possibility of the plants falling, intact and functioning, into Xi Jinping’s hands.)

And then, of course, there’s the small matter of a possible World War III, with the U.S. and its allies coming to Taiwan’s defense and China responding with all the self-righteous nationalist fury it can muster.

Until the 1990s, writes Mr. Brown, China could “express its claims for reunification forcefully but had limited capacity to do anything about them.” The country was neither rich nor mighty. Today, it is both. The world’s second-largest economy with the world’s second-largest military expenditure—after its much-resented superior, the U.S., in both cases—China can now “think about doing things that were never an option in the past.” The question for many, says Mr. Brown, “is no longer whether China can actually do anything, but when it will act.”

If the Chinese Communist Party elites have a psycho-political obsession, it is to achieve “complete national unification.” Hong Kong and Macau returned to Chinese sovereignty in the late 20th century; Tibet and East Turkestan (Xinjiang in the jargon of Beijing) were swallowed by China several decades earlier. Taiwan is now the final piece of the puzzle that Mr. Xi craves in order to bring about, in his words, “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

In “The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan,” Matt Pottinger has edited a collection of 13 essays that offer “practical and feasible steps” the free world should take “to deter Xi from triggering a catastrophic war.”

Mr. Xi has reiterated his adamant unificationist goal on numerous occasions, restating the mainland policy toward Taiwan that has remained unchanged since Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists set up an alternative Chinese government on the island after their defeat by the Communists in 1949.

Yet in Mr. Xi’s meeting with President Biden in November 2023, the Chinese “commander-in-chief-of-everything”—as he is accurately described in one of the essays in “The Boiling Moat”—demanded not only that the U.S. stop arming Taiwan but also that it “support China’s peaceful reunification.”

In his introductory essay, Mr. Pottinger writes that this was the first time Mr. Xi called for American collusion or participation in reunifying China and Taiwan. It’s “a fundamental revision” of Beijing’s longstanding but relatively limited demand that the U.S. “refrain from supporting Taiwan independence.” In other words, says Mr. Pottinger, Mr. Xi’s “moves aren’t aimed at maintaining the decades-old status quo in the Taiwan Strait but at ending it.”

Mr. Pottinger, a reporter in China for this newspaper in the early 2000s, was a U.S. deputy national-security advisor from 2019 to 2021 and the architect of U.S. China policy in the latter stages of Donald Trump’s first presidential term. He has assembled a lively and erudite cast of strategic experts, ranging from, among others, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College to a former U.S. Navy nuclear-trained officer, a Japanese admiral, a decorated veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, a former U.S. Marine who helped set up Japan’s amphibious force, and a former secretary-general of NATO.

Convinced that the time for effective economic and diplomatic methods may have passed, Mr. Pottinger and his contributors focus wisely—and unabashedly—on the military dimension of the Taiwan challenge. The only way to prevent war, they argue, is to deter it militarily. Deterrence was what kept the Cold War cold. The U.S. and its allies must therefore waste no time in expanding their capacity for the making and acquisition of munitions.

One of the book’s contributors, Ivan Kanapathy—a former instructor at the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School (known as Top Gun), who served as the deputy senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council—gets impressively granular. He provides a shopping list of exactly what munitions Taiwan should acquire. These include “4000+ man-portable air defense missiles,” “200+ mobile short-range air defense vehicles” and—wait for this—“enough rifles, pistols, and ammunition such that each member of the military, reserves, and civil defense force has emergency access to a personal weapon.”

China is a hegemonic one-man show. And so Mr. Pottinger’s book “singles out Xi Jinping personally as the object of deterrence,” the Chinese strongman having consolidated more power in his domestically unassailable person than any leader since the colossus Mao Zedong. “No other decision maker counts nearly so much as Xi,” writes Mr. Pottinger, “when it comes to questions of war and peace.”


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“The Boiling Moat”—a phrase taken from the Book of Han, an early history of China—is a compelling “how to” compendium that tells us how to sink China’s navy (a whole chapter reveals the best way); to counter a Chinese quarantine or blockade of Taiwan; to ensure that Japan embraces publicly “the near inevitability that it would be compelled to fight in the event China attacks Taiwan”; and to make the best use of Australia as a stalwart ally of freedom. One compelling chapter argues that Taiwan must “adopt a new military culture” akin to that of Israel, turning itself into a warrior-state—or “a porcupine, making itself unappetizing or, if that fails, fatal to a hungry predator.”

Mr. Brown’s “Why Taiwan Matters” has a different focus. It is, in part, a lively and accessible history of Taiwan, explaining the island’s evolution from military dictatorship under Chiang Kai-shek to its current political condition as the most vigorous and healthy democracy in Asia. Credit for this is due to a succession of presidents from both the Nationalist Party, historically more conciliatory to China, and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), more assertive at all times of Taiwan’s separateness from China.

While the DPP has flirted with sovereignty and self-determination, it has always been careful to stop short of provoking China with any outright declaration of independence. It is this “strategic ambiguity”—embraced also by the U.S.—that has kept Taiwan and China from falling into war. Mr. Brown urges us to persevere with the “unglamorous task” of keeping ambiguity alive. As he says, a strenuous defense of the stalemate “is all that we can meaningfully do. Anything else is insanity.”