The dupe of this latest Mata Hari scandal is Jensen Huang, CEO of the chipmaking firm Nvidia, which he has led since founding it in 1993. Semiconductor chips are “the building blocks of the modern digital economy”, found in everything from laptops to cars, sensing devices, and smartphones. Nvidia designs the most coveted chips, those that are used by AI models such as Claude and ChatGPT, a position that has propelled the company to prominence as one of the most valuable firms in the world, and Huang to rockstar fame. With a fortune that Forbes estimates now places him in the top 10 richest people on the planet, Huang has acquired cultish celebrity: one of his leather jackets raised $960,000 in a charity auction. 

But over the weekend, Huang sent a letter to all Nvidia staff, apologizing for an extra-marital affair. “Corporate CEO has sidechick” doesn’t sound like it should be such a big deal, but this one’s different. The affair was with Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese national and senior executive at the Singapore-based cloud provider Megaspeed. This firm was already suspected of smuggling restricted American tech to China, and Ms Huang suspected of being a Chinese spy. The discovery has sent shockwaves through an already jittery tech market, knocking 8% (approximately $350 billion) off Nvidia’s value. 

More than a sex scandal or a story for the business pages, l’affaire Huang is high geopolitical drama, for the light it shines on the stop-at-nothing rivalry between the USA and China on tech. When Bill Clinton advocated China joining the WTO in 1999, it was believed that China getting richer would inevitably make it more democratic, catalyzing the replacement of the CCP with a more Western-like regime. As we all now know, that’s not how things worked out. Instead, the US sacrificed its own industrial base to fuel the rise of a peer rival. But as if that’s not bad enough, today the eagle and the dragon are locked in a neck-and-neck race to preeminence in AI development. It’s this context that makes it so shocking that Jensen Huang, one of America’s nerd princes, should have found himself trapped by a honeypot spy, loyal to America’s chief rival. 

So intense is the competition between American and Chinese AI labs, and so contested is access to the most advanced hardware that powers them, that in 2020 export restrictions were imposed on Chinese import of American semiconductors. Megaspeed, meanwhile, has been under suspicion for some time of trying to find ways round these restrictions. This firm rents data processing power to AI firms across Asia, and uses $1.4 billion of Nvidia chips to power its data centers. But in 2025 an inspection found the number of chips in use was much lower than the number Megaspeed had purchased. Where were the others? Hawks feared they had been smuggled to China. 

The battle for semiconductors is granted another twist by the persistence of a supply bottleneck, that both constrains the AI build-out and affords a persistent sore point to China: Jensen Huang’s island of birth, Taiwan. Nvidia subcontracts the most complex part of its chip manufacturing to factories in Taiwan, an island around the size of the Netherlands and roughly 100 kilometers off the coast of mainland China. Taiwan became the home-in-exile of the Chinese Nationalist government, after their displacement by communists in 1949 — but Beijing insists on the PRC’s right to govern Taiwan too. Chinese maps show Taiwan as part of the Middle Kingdom, and Christian Dior was forced to apologize to Chinese customers in 2019 after making a presentation that included a Taiwanless map of China. 

Taiwan’s principal defense against being annexed by Beijing has long been its dominance in semiconductors. A farsighted program established by Taiwanese technocrats during the Seventies was delivered first by acquiring semiconductor know-how from an American firm, then training a generation of engineers, and finally developing a model that enabled Taiwanese plants to serve US firms without being perceived as a competitor. Aided by this long-term strategy, and a now richly developed base of secondary suppliers and expertise, this precariously positioned island secured a position as chokepoint in one of the most vital technologies of the 21st century. And this in turn has secured ongoing Western support for its independence: what former Taiwanese prime minister Tsai Ing-Wen called its “silicon shield”. 

Will it last? That’s less clear. The tectonic plates may be shifting: the US has poured considerable effort and money into reducing its dependence on overseas semiconductor manufacture. In 2021 Intel and TSMC both responded to US political pressure by announcing the construction of new semiconductor plants in Arizona. Then, in 2022, the bipartisan CHIPS Act provided the US Government $50 billion to invest in semiconductor research, development, and manufacturing within the USA. And while some had expressed skepticism on the “reshoring” project, it seems to be picking up speed: buoyed by AI demand, Intel recently announced that its delayed Ohio semiconductor plant will be re-started.

With semiconductor manufacturing re-shored, would “honeypot” scandals come to an end? I doubt it. There have been many such scandals throughout history, and in each case the basic mechanism is the same: some powerful man gets persuaded by the one-eyed monster not to think too hard about why an attractive woman is suddenly so interested in him. Only the specific configurations of power and money vary.

But as long as powerful rivalries and information asymmetries exist, there’ll be plots to even the scores through seduction. With the US-China rivalry in full spate, the tech bros should perhaps be more braced than they seem to be for an army of Mata Haris. Even if Taiwan loses its unique position, or one side definitively wins the AI race, there will always be new geopolitical tensions, and new information asymmetries.

But if there are lessons in this story for the nerd kings of America, there are also lessons for us in Britain — both in those ways we can’t be China or the USA, and also perhaps in those ways we could be more Taiwan. There’s no meaningful sense in which we can compete as peers with two continent-sized empires. But we might infer from l’affaire Huang that it’s a bad idea to lose all the China experts from your government. Whoops. Also maybe not to take the Chinese government at their word, when they pinky-promise that the mega-embassy they want to build with secret underground rooms, near important buried data cables, isn’t a listening post. 

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Another, perhaps more strategic consideration might be wondering what Britain could learn from Taiwan, about how to live next door to a much larger geopolitical bloc without being too badly bullied. Taiwan shows how a nation that’s not big enough to lead on everything can still preserve independence, by being indispensable in one vital sector. As the US continues its project to re-shore semiconductor manufacturing, and Xi Jinping pledges to assimilate Taiwan, it might not last forever. But the strategy hasn’t failed yet. 

What’s the equivalent for Britain? Perhaps it’s a wild idea, but my starter for ten would be offshore data centers. These are experimental, but not completely so: China launched the first underwater data center earlier this year. I gather the water temperature around the British Isles is well-suited to the cooling needs of such installations, and a prototype is scheduled to launch in the North Sea soon. Of course housing vulnerable and strategically important infrastructure off Britain’s coastline would necessitate restoring our degraded naval defense capability. But this too would be a happy return to historic national norms. 

Jensen Huang, at least, believed in Britain, even if we don’t. Before his personal life blew up, he visited to mark Nvidia’s investment in British startups, while lauding our potential and intellectual superpowers. While recent evidence suggests he’s perhaps not always a flawless judge of others’ motives, his track record suggests he understands a thing or two about building. And we could do with building. Torn as we currently are between the US and EU, we need less effort on “soft power”, “moral leadership”, and pointless acts of post-colonial self-flagellation, and more on a realist effort to build out resources our neighbors need badly enough, to come to our aid in extremis. 

Actually doing this would necessitate being governed by engineers and those who think long-term, rather than bee-brick bureaucrats and decline managers. This would certainly be a change of gear. It might even require a bit of Mata Hari-ing here and there. But I’m with Jensen Huang: it can be done. He might be a flawed messenger but let’s take him at his word, and be more Taiwan.

To Taiwan’s leaders, that sounds ominous. Did Trump just receive a thorough schooling in Xi’s view of his near neighbor, making it less likely that Trump might — in his own words — “travel 9,500 miles to fight a war”?

At stake is not just whether this US administration, or a future one fashioned in its image, would defend Taiwan if attacked; Trump is also currently mulling the approval of $14 billion worth of weapons sales to East Asia’s most embattled island. 

The uncertain politics of weapons supplies renders all the more important a controversial decision made in Japan last month. It is moving to abolish long-standing restrictions that limit military equipment transfers to five nonlethal categories: rescue, transport, warning, surveillance and mine-sweeping.

In future, countries with which Japan has a defense equipment and technology transfer agreement — a roster of 17 nations that includes the US, UK and Australia (but not Taiwan) — will be able to avail themselves of Japanese-made missiles, rockets, drones, jets, frigates and eventually electromagnetic railguns and laser weapons, both currently in development. Lasers, of the type tested in recent weeks aboard the experimental vessel Asuka, are seen as the holy grail of cost-efficient defense against swarms of cheap drones.  

Japan’s move has been widely described as historic. The country has been a beacon to pacifists for more than 80 years. Atomic devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 forced the world to face the possibility that any future war might be humanity’s last. Leaders and citizens in those two cities have, as a consequence, long embraced a role as the moral conscience of anti-nuclear activism. Japan is celebrated as an example of a society that flourished after renouncing war — which it did at the behest of the United States, author of Japan’s postwar constitution during a transformative seven-year Allied occupation.   

Yet advocates of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s more assertive security stance argue that Japan’s postwar comeback had less to do with pacifism and more to do with the country’s strategic value to the United States during the Cold War. Japan allowed US bases and forces on its soil, turning the archipelago into a giant aircraft carrier. In return, the US allowed Japan to shelter under its nuclear umbrella while devoting its industrial expertise to cars and consumer electronics rather than costly defense. 

Increasing numbers of Japanese now accept that those days are over. The new world of the 2020s is all about countries fending for themselves, as America becomes a less stable global guarantor, and international institutions like Nato, the EU and especially the UN struggle to maintain relevance. With China pressing its regional interests, and North Korea refining its nuclear weapons technology, Japan must do more than simply cross its fingers that if push came to shove a future American president would invest potentially scarce political capital in protecting its old Asian ally — especially if they had recently been treated to a late-night history lesson by a charming Chinese president.     

Takaichi has made clear the importance of self-sufficiency in areas like energy, semi-conductors and rare earths. She clearly takes the same view when it comes to self-defense. She is subjecting Japan’s key national security documents to a fast-tracked review and is now seeking to grow her country’s defense sector by expanding its client list beyond Japan’s own Self-Defense Forces (SDF). Ever-greater proportions of Japan’s GDP are being ear-marked for the country’s own defenses. And within weeks, the Prime Minister will receive recommendations on reviewing those key national security documents — including potential revisions to her country’s three non-nuclear principles: never to produce or possess nuclear weapons, or allow them to transit Japanese territory. 

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Developing Japan’s defense sector is a long-term project. Toshiba and Mitsubishi Electric have already announced that they will be hiring new people. But such is the gradual pace at which capacity is built, products developed and sales agreed, that Takaichi herself may well not be in office by the time her latest policy change begins to bear fruit.   

Still, the potential market for Japanese weapons is vast. America’s own stocks are perilously low after wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and Asian neighbors including the Philippines appear keen to acquire Japanese hardware. The Philippines’ defense secretary has welcomed Takaichi’s move, and a sale is in the offing of three pre-loved Abukuma-class destroyer escorts, which are soon to leave active service in Japan. 

Further afield, Japan may be able to steal business from the US arms industry, amid growing complaints  about high costs and late deliveries. Added to this is Japan’s perceived ability to make big ideas work where America has given up. The railgun is a prime example. The US spent half a billion dollars over several decades before setting the project aside in 2021. Japan has a working prototype.

Problems loom. China has once again raised the specter of Japanese “remilitarisation”. For now, Takaichi may be able to shrug this off as hypocrisy: China is building up its own military at a far quicker rate, while rising to become the world’s fifth-largest arms exporter — to countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. 

And yet consider how Japan’s latest move looks if you’re sitting in Beijing. Japan has long been building links with countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Australia, in an attempt to counter Chinese economic and military power. If you then start to see hi-tech Japanese weapons arriving at military bases in these countries, you might conclude that a line is being crossed from friendly ties into coalition-building.

Then there is the question of the past. Memories remain vivid in East and Southeast Asia of the swaggering entitlement and resulting cruelties — murder, rape, starvation — that characterized a militarily-dominant Imperial Japan in the first half of the 20th century. Part of the problem is Japan’s perceived lack of contrition, thanks to the absence of political and public stock-taking comparable to that seen in postwar Germany. The question asked by those in Asia who genuinely worry about remilitarisation is whether, in 1945, Japan entered a period of deep change or was simply deprived by the Allies of the ability to behave as it previously had. For some, this is about a putative Japanese psyche, which blends civility with a propensity towards unrestrained violence. It is an old notion, dating back in the Western imagination to Catholic missionaries’ shock at the ease with which lives were taken by warriors during Japan’s 16th-century civil war. 

We ought to resist such arguments, which in their modern form are rooted in wartime Allied propaganda. The Imperial Japanese Army did not start out as an evil organization, a mere vehicle for Japanese bloodlust. It degenerated, under specific historical conditions in the Thirties and Forties, into an institution defined by brutality, poor discipline and a racist disregard for the value of non-Japanese life. 

Those concerned about Takaichi’s latest move ought to worry less about unreconstructed samurai toting laser weapons and take an interest instead in how it was that Japanese civil society eroded. One of the most important forces launching Japan down the road to true militarism back then was a perceived threat from abroad — the US, China, the Soviet Union — combined with the dominance of the country’s politics by industrialists, military men, an unaccountable police force and a partially corrupt judiciary. Critical newspaper coverage was met with bullying, fines, imprisonment and eventually the shutting down of publications. Radio remained under strict government control. Parliamentarians, already given precious little real power under Japan’s constitution, were progressively silenced. Bit by bit, and under the rhetorical cover of doing what had to be done to save their country, a ruling clique squeezed the life out of Japan’s fledgling democracy.

Now look at how Prime Minister Takaichi has instituted her new policy on lethal weapons. It was not in her manifesto; nor was it put before parliament. Instead it was decided at cabinet level — albeit flagged back in 2025 as something Takaichi wanted to do. The question for the next few years is probably not going to be whether Japan ought to build up its military-industrial base and give its armed forces greater legal leeway. It will likely do both — the strategic climate, sadly, seems to require it. The question is whether Japan’s democracy, and the civil society on which it rests, remain healthy enough to manage these changes in a way that people, both in Japan and around Asia, can trust.   

In 2013, when Takaichi’s mentor Shinzō Abe was seeking to develop his policy of “proactive pacifism”, he got a State Secrecy Law through parliament. Now a government can, with no external or judicial checks, deem anything it likes to be a secret — thereby preventing its disclosure. Meanwhile, the people who collect and weigh the nation’s secrets are subject to little oversight.

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This matters because Takaichi’s far-reaching reassessment of Japan’s national security includes the creation of a new national intelligence bureau, to replace Japan’s existing and fragmented system. She also plans to launch what some are calling a “Japanese CIA”: a foreign intelligence service and training school. Critics charge that these organizations, together with new cybersecurity initiatives, are developing faster than the sorts of checks and balances needed to uphold constitutional rights including the right to privacy. Add to this mix the building of a lucrative defense industry heavily reliant on export contracts, and you risk a return to foreign policy being shaped by cliques working in murky semi-darkness. 

Back in the Sixties, some of the staunchest defenders of constitutional freedoms were communists, socialists and university students. Mass protests in 1959-60 against renewal of Japan’s security treaty with the US became serious enough that Japan’s democracy was briefly threatened: there was violence inside and outside parliament, and a decision was nearly taken to cross the Rubicon and call in the Self-Defense Forces to put down the protests.

A protest tradition has remained alive and well in Japan ever since: seen in student protests during the late Sixties; a struggle over government attempts to seize farmland to build Narita Airport; opposition to the presence of American forces in Okinawa; and anger, in the aftermath of the triple disasters of 2011, at the mismanagement of Japan’s nuclear power infrastructure.  

Takaichi has faced protests of her own in recent weeks, including over the prospect of Japan sending military equipment to the Gulf. Developing more robust forms of self-defense and even deterrence is one thing: people in Japan are not naïve about the threat posed by China and North Korea, and their warm relations with Taiwan continue to be a thorny issue in Sino-Japanese diplomacy. But setting out to make money from the prosecution of wars around the world is a very different proposition. Becoming a “merchant of death” far more obviously offends against the history and morality of postwar Japanese pacifism.

It may also be bad for businesses, in particular those whose profits depend on Japan’s global reputation as a peaceful and civilized place — from tech and games companies to the country’s burgeoning tourist industry. They may become part of a new post-pacifist coalition, which accepts that those sunny postwar decades are not coming back but seeks to carry their best peace-loving qualities into the future — not as rhetorical cover for something darker, but as meaningful “Japanese” values. 

Japan is already home to a large number of well-networked NGOs, which campaign on a range of civil society issues. These include holding the police and judicial system to account over the importance of their independence from politics together with the questionable methods used to secure Japan’s famously high conviction rate of over 99%. Nihon Hidankyō, an organization which campaigns for nuclear abolition, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024. 

The activities of these civil society groups, in shaping the thinking of the electorate while holding power meaningfully to account, will be essential over the years to come. If Japan’s role as a beacon of pacifism is indeed coming to an end, its new purpose could be almost as valuable: showing the world’s democracies how a country can rearm without losing its conscience.

Beijing has a clear theory of victory for the summit: it wants the international press to report that Trump is selling out Taiwan. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told American interlocutors directly that Taiwan is the “most important issue” in the US-China relationship. His goal for this summit, and for the next one in Washington later this year, will be to persuade Trump to move towards a broader accommodation on the Taiwan issue. But even if Trump refuses to budge, Xi wants to create a narrative that his US counterpart is giving way on Taiwan. If that narrative gains steam, even if it isn’t true, it could drive Taiwan to the negotiating table out of desperation.

Xi’s first request is reportedly tiny and inconsequential. He wants Trump to say that America “opposes” Taiwanese independence, not just that it “does not support” it — a line the US has taken since the Clinton administration. Practically, there is no difference between these two positions. The essence of the longstanding American position is that both Beijing and Taipei must be deterred from changing the status quo unilaterally. The United States has never had any interest in declaring support for Taiwan’s independence. But if Trump is seen as tweaking his communication of the One China Policy under duress — even slightly — Xi hopes to make it seem that more substantial concessions are coming down the road. 

Xi has his eye on Taiwan’s January 2028 presidential election, when he hopes that a candidate more interested in dialog with Beijing will come to power. Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is hoping for a fourth consecutive term. Xi, though, is seeking to engineer a restoration of the Kuomintang (KMT), which agrees in principle (with its own interpretation) that Taiwan is part of “One China”. Xi can do business with the KMT. He will not negotiate with the DPP. His goal: erode Taiwanese voters’ faith in the United States, so that they turn away from the DPP. 

The broader point is that Xi’s main vector of coercion right now is political, not military. The West has long envisioned a Taiwan crisis as a 2027 amphibious invasion. This risk remains real, as China acquires new military capabilities. But an invasion would be challenging and fraught with danger, especially given the turmoil in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) leadership. Xi would rather take Taiwan for free, if he can get it. 

In case Trump refuses to give Xi what he wants, China is preparing options short of war to assert control over Taiwan. The most concerning scenario is known as the “quarantine”, or indirect control option. This would not be a blockade. It would not seek to force Taiwan’s immediate surrender, or to stop the flow of goods in and out of the island. Instead, Xi would assert that, as a matter of law, People’s Republic of China (PRC) customs authorities should be able to control who and what comes and goes to “Taiwan province”. He could move towards this outcome incrementally, for instance by asking that airlines entering and leaving Taiwan submit passenger manifests for approval, or that cargo ships entering and leaving submit to spot inspections. The goal would be to undermine Taiwan’s economic autonomy while persuading private companies and the United States to accept this as a new normal. In time, if Taiwan still refused to negotiate, he could use these new tools to apply targeted economic pressure. If Taiwan capitulated, Xi would then gain effective control of the island’s semiconductor manufacturing base. The United States could in principle destroy those facilities, of course — but not without paying an enormous economic price itself. 

Trump’s public communications do not suggest that he understands why a quarantine would be dangerous. He is also preoccupied with other issues. He is negotiating against the backdrop of the Iran war. Thanks in part to quiet backing from Beijing, Iran has chosen to drag out negotiations rather than make a deal. Its chokepoint coercion play in the Strait of Hormuz is working: the US Navy was unable to prevent Iran’s closure of the Strait; the insurance market has not recovered; oil futures still carry a war premium; strategic petroleum reserves are running low. Trump needs a deal to reopen the Strait and stop the energy crisis from crushing the US economy. He may also think he needs Xi’s help to solve the Iran problem. 

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To be sure, Trump will go to Beijing strong in significant ways. The artificial intelligence boom continues, with US labs decisively in the lead. Beijing was surely in of awe many aspects of the US military campaign against Iran: the special forces operations, the impeccable air-to-air refueling campaign, the use of AI for intelligence collection and targeting. China’s leaders are keenly aware that the United States retains structural, qualitative advantages in the military domain that their country has not yet matched. They also recognize that the core of the American state, including many of Trump’s senior advisors, see the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the primary adversary. And they expect that US opposition to China’s rise is structural, and that Washington will adopt increasingly extreme tactics as China continues to rise. Xi does not want a confrontation with America now; if he did, he would not have invited Trump to Beijing in the first place. 

Xi does not seem to be in a rush. The National Party Congress is approaching next autumn, when he will need to reshuffle key leadership posts and secure a smooth transition to a fourth term. A stable relationship with the United States works for him, at least for now. But this may change in early 2028, when Taiwan holds its election. Then, if Xi senses weakness in Washington, he may feel empowered to push — with a quarantine, if necessary. 

It is not too late for Trump to salvage the summit. Xi is deterrable, and a well-planned summit could signal that the United States is resolved and prepared to resist him without provoking him. But this will require exceptional discipline from the American president. The quarantine is preventable, but it cannot be deterred by military hardware alone, nor by speeches about democracy. The United States must show that it has an integrated counter-strategy that combines military readiness, economic leverage, and allied coordination. 

The reason for this string of punishments lies in a comment made in early November by Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. Asked what might constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan when it came to the tensions swirling around Taiwan, she offered what many Japanese would regard as a reasonable and realistic answer: “If there are battleships and the use of force, no matter how you think about it, it could constitute a survival-threatening situation.” Under a law passed in Japan 10 years ago, expanding the traditional interpretation of Japan’s pacifist constitution, this would mean that Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) could be activated.

Taiwan lies 110 kilometers away from Japan’s south-westernmost island of Yonaguni. You can see it from the beach on a clear day. Over the past decade, scuba-divers have jostled for space on Yonaguni with members of the SDF, there to set up bases and radar stations and more recently to prepare for the deployment of medium-range surface-to-air missiles. The fear in Japan is that any Chinese attempt on Taiwan would pose a threat to islands like Yonaguni. They might be attacked or even occupied, for use as forward operating bases.

China’s reaction to Takaichi’s comments was swift and forceful. In addition to shutting down Japanese films and concerts, the government placed a devastating import ban on Japanese seafood and asked Chinese tourists planning to visit the country — as millions do every year — to think again. China regards Taiwan as its business, and no-one else’s: a renegade province that will be dealt with as and when it sees fit. For Takaichi to hint at military intervention was deemed unacceptable.

In fact, Takaichi wouldn’t have much room for maneuver in the event of a Taiwan emergency. A decade-old law allows for the SDF to be deployed if a country with which Japan has close relations is attacked — but only if Japan’s own survival is also at stake. Even then, the SDF is only permitted to do the minimum necessary to protect Japan and its people. Those surface-to-air missiles headed for Yonaguni don’t have the range to make it even halfway to Taiwan.

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Still, Japan tends to follow America’s lead when it comes to Taiwan: recognizing China’s claim to the island without endorsing it, and maintaining a policy of strategic ambiguity when it comes to potential actions in the event of a Taiwan emergency. Takaichi briefly crossed a line here, damaging Chinese attempts to manage the public conversation about Taiwan across East Asia and beyond. China is reportedly involved in buying media influence in Taiwan, wooing low-level officials with subsidized visits to China and undermining faith in democracy. Hints of solidarity with Taiwan, which might boost pro-independence sentiment and morale, go down very badly in Beijing.

Chinese officials have no doubt watched with growing alarm as Japan and Taiwan have grown close across recent decades. The two are not formal allies — Japan doesn’t officially recognize Taiwan — but they have a strong trading relationship. Taiwan’s semiconductor-maker TSMC has a factory in Japan and a second is in the works. Taiwanese people also adore Japanese culture: Japan is a major tourist destination for Taiwanese, and everywhere you go in Taipei, you’ll see Japanese food, fashion, anime, music and convenience stores.

Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te was thus pushing at an open door when, in the wake of China’s ban on Japanese seafood, he posted an image of his lunch to social media — yellowtail sushi and scallops — and suggested that now might be a good time for Taiwanese to eat Japanese seafood. The idea went viral on social media and people have been buying up Japanese seafood and booking holidays to Japan.

What’s remarkable about this is that Taiwan was part of the Japanese empire for 50 years, from 1895 to 1945. Korea and parts of China were under Japan’s control for less time and yet bitterness there remains acute and politically potent to this day. Why, then, such warmth for Japan in Taiwan?

Part of the answer is that when Taiwan transitioned from martial law to democracy in the late Eighties and early Nineties, Japan served as an inspirational model: rich, open, peaceful and technologically advanced. Affection grew over the years that followed. When Japan suffered its “triple disasters” of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in 2011, the generosity of Taiwanese donations was equaled only by those from the US. A decade later, when China placed a highly-damaging ban on imports of Taiwanese pineapples — ostensibly for health and safety reasons, but widely regarded as political — Japanese consumers participated in a “Freedom Pineapples” campaign, buying up Taiwanese produce in a show of solidarity.

But colonialism is part of this picture, too. Far from being swept under the carpet for the sake of better relations, Taiwan’s half-century under Japanese rule is remembered by many on the island as a formative phase in its history.

In 1895, Japan was an emerging Asian power, keen to show the likes of Britain and France that it was capable of becoming their equal. One of the ways to do that, during the high noon of empire, was to demonstrate the civilizing influence that you could have on other countries, near or far.

Taiwan was the ideal candidate, after it was ceded to Japan by Qing China following the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5). The island’s Japanese administrators treated it, in the words of one official, like a “laboratory” for testing out modern ideas of all kinds. Wide streets were created featuring impressive buildings including what is now the presidential office — which faces east, towards Japan and the rising sun. Schools and hospitals were built, rabies and various tropical diseases were eliminated, and opium addiction was tackled; 10,000 kilometers of roads and railway lines were laid down and a public sanitation system was established. Japanese rice, miso soup and raw fish all became major elements in the Taiwanese diet.

Democratic politics was not on the list of Japan’s modernizing reforms. In common with their British and French imperial mentors, the Japanese did not believe colonized peoples to be ready for self-determination. Anti-Japanese resistance in Taiwan’s mountains was severely punished — on at least one occasion, it is thought, with the use of chemical weapons. An educated urban middle class discovered that asking nicely for rights didn’t work either.

But for the Japanese and many Taiwanese, the results of the “model colony” approach were deeply satisfying. European visitors to Taiwan professed to love what the Japanese had done with the place, lavishing praise on colonial administrators for the manifest good they were doing.

Taiwanese nostalgia for the era of Japanese colonial rule owes a great deal, too, to what happened in the years after Japan’s defeat in 1945. The island came under the control of the mainland Chinese government led by Chiang Kai-shek. When he finally lost his war against Communist insurgents in 1949 and a People’s Republic was declared, he and what remained of his allies and army — some 1.5 million people — fled to Taiwan. They ruled the island under martial law for the best part of 40 years, fostering economic growth but dealing with democratic aspirations so harshly that both the old Japanese empire and the new postwar Japan appeared benevolent by comparison.

China and Japan may still find a way out of the current impasse. Perhaps economic self-interest will ride to the rescue, restoring relations between two countries that did nearly $300 billion worth of trade with one another in 2024. But with both Taiwan and Japan beefing up defense spending under pressure from Washington, and Xi Jinping showing few signs of changing his mind about the urgency of the Taiwan question, some kind of escalation around the island appears grimly inevitable.

Russia’s failed full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 has no doubt been watched with much concern in China. China’s leadership risks serious reputational damage, both at home and abroad, if an attempt on Taiwan by its relatively inexperienced armed forces goes wrong. And yet the more that China’s ability to manage international public opinion appears thwarted by warm feelings and symbolic seafood moments, the likelier its leaders are to conclude that a much talked-about naval blockade and even a full-scale invasion is unavoidable.

Both presidents had reason to be pleased. Each got what he wanted: a compromise which doesn’t cut off options, at least for now. Both achieved their specific aims: for the US side, the removal of many of the restrictions on Chinese exports of rare earths; for the Chinese, lower tariffs on their goods entering the US. They also managed to put off some of the hardest questions on how the US-China relationship will develop in the next few years.

Their similarity of intent was masked by their very different personal styles. Trump is freewheeling, improvisational, unpredictable. This is not to say that he lacks direction: for this meeting, he had a key goal of getting an agreement on fentanyl and rare earths, and he achieved both. Xi, in contrast, is tightly choreographed, sticking to talking points and bland language. (There is only one recorded incident of Xi making a joke during his relationship with the US: on a visit to America in September 2015, he declared that his anti-corruption campaign purging the Chinese Communist Party was “no House of Cards”, referring to the skulduggerous television show about a scheming US president). Trump has been warm in his language about Xi, calling him “respected” and referring to him as the “king of China”. Xi has said little about Trump personally.

Compare this disbalanced personal dynamic with each president’s relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin is clearly able to adapt to Trump’s fixations and bugbears, as when he sympathized with the US President’s dislike of mail-in ballots (even though Russia makes wide use of digital remote voting), and assured him that he would not have invaded Ukraine in 2022 if Trump had remained president. Yet it’s hard to see Putin having a conversation with any Western leader, not just Trump, where the surface level conversation and deeper intent really match.

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The relationship between Xi and Putin, in contrast, seems genuinely quite close. Xi’s respect for Russia is not purely instrumental. His father Xi Zhongxun grew up in China’s revolutionary movement under the influence of Russian and Soviet literature, and seems to have passed on some of that interest to his son. (Joseph Torigian’s superb biography of Xi Zhongxun, The Party’s Interests Come First, notes Xi’s knowledge of relatively obscure Russian novels.) Putin, of course, has his own nationalistic view of Russian culture and its importance, and is willing to flatter China, although he seems to have little specific to say about its culture or society. This year, official records show that the two leaders have talked on the phone frequently and met at various international gatherings. Indeed, Trump posted disapprovingly on Truth Social during the Victory Day parade in Beijing in September, accusing Xi, Putin and Kim Jong-un of conspiring against America. There’s no record of a Chinese reply. Putin at least sometimes tries to reply to Trump in his own idiom. Xi never does.

On the core issue of trade, both gunslingers have put their weapons away — for now. China has made it clear that it’s able and willing to use restrictions on the export of rare earths and critical minerals to squeeze the US and other Western powers in the most sensitive parts of their supply chains. The US has likewise indicated that it’s prepared to take the hit to consumers that comes from restrictions on China by pushing tariffs up to unbearable rates. The possibility of mutual destruction has led to a temporary deal.

But the negotiations are nowhere near finished. The Trump administration says that China has agreed to restrict the export of fentanyl, which is responsible for severe opiate addiction in the US. Yet it’s hard to know how enforceable the fentanyl ban really is. In the end, fentanyl production in China, unlike the production of EVs or solar panels, is not subject to governmental oversight, and it’s going to be hard to track how much China really controls the drug. The export restrictions and tariffs have been lifted for just one year.

In South Korea, Trump and Xi managed to avoid some of the biggest questions that divide them. Perhaps the biggest issue is Taiwan, where policy seems to be changing at some speed on both sides. Over the years, Xi has made ever-louder comments about the need to “resolve” the Taiwan question — that is, its unification with the mainland — in public speeches. China’s military spending rose to over $314 billion in 2024, and the PLA Navy is developing its capacities for the kind of amphibious assault that would be needed for an invasion. While logistics do still make that particular outcome unlikely, Taiwan is nevertheless vulnerable to a blockade, as well as to cyberattacks.

For the past half century, even though the US switched recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing, the US has maintained a strong commitment to help Taiwan defend itself. Under the first Trump administration, senior figures such as the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former deputy national security advisor Matt Pottinger made it clear that they regarded the defense of Taiwan as a top political priority. Joe Biden stated several times during his presidency that the US would defend Taiwan: he was so emphatic in this claim that his staff had to walk back the assurance several times to restore the “strategic ambiguity” that was supposed to define policy.

Under the new Trump administration, however, the position on Taiwan seems more fluid. A planned shipment of some $400 million worth of arms to Taiwan last summer was halted by the administration. Taiwan president Lai Ching-te’s attempt to transit the United States on his way to Latin America (where there are still a few states that recognize Taiwan) was also vetoed earlier this year. Of course, the US still provides plenty of military assistance to Taiwan in service of what has become known as a “porcupine” strategy for self-defense. But China seems less inclined to tolerate Taiwan’s status quo, and many in Taiwan are unsure that the US will offer them long-term protection if the situation changes suddenly.

Trump left Seoul declaring that he would visit China in April next year. So far, the Chinese side has been silent on a date. Clearly neither party would think it worth a presidential visit if there was nothing to sign off on. And many of the issues look intractable on both sides. The US has to decide whether Taiwan is worth defending: say no, and a democracy could be destroyed and American power in the Pacific permanently diminished; say yes and thousands of American lives could be lost in yet another far-off war. Meanwhile, China wants access to US high tech: American security officials are skeptical about the wisdom of allowing the export of high-level chips, while the tech magnates who are central to the new administration are keen to expand their market in China.

Above all, China wants to know whether the recent change in US foreign policy is real. Recently, the term “involution” (neijuan) has become popular in Chinese internet usage, referring to an increasingly inward turn of many of the youth in China’s competitive society. Today, China’s leaders are trying to work out whether the “involution” in the US is real, and if so, how that can be made to boost China’s rise to becoming the global power that sets the rules. The Seoul meeting did not come close to answering those questions. Perhaps the summit in Beijing next spring will do.

Hundreds of thousands of PLA troops are about to make landfall in the largest amphibious operation since D-Day. The long-anticipated invasion of Taiwan has begun.

In Washington, the President is presented with an urgent and daunting decision. Extensive wargames have repeatedly indicated that Taiwan’s only hope for survival is for US military forces to intervene immediately and decisively, blasting much of the PLA invasion force out of the water while they are still exposed and vulnerable. Hesitation, they have learned, always leads to a grinding war of attrition that Taiwan is destined to lose. Indo-Pacific Command urges the President to unleash its “Hellscape” plan: using swarms of drones, anti-ship missiles, and attack submarines to temporarily turn the Taiwan Strait into a watery no man’s land, buying time for American reinforcements to arrive. But there is no way around the obvious reality: this will mean war between the world’s two largest nuclear-armed superpowers.

Moreover, the commanders of US air and space forces insist they be authorized to immediately attack China’s “kill chain”, the network of satellites, sensors, and command, communication, and control centers that allow long-range weapons to find and accurately hit targets. Both sides have a huge incentive to strike first, before the other does: leaving them effectively blinded. American military satellites, in particular, are invaluable, irreplaceable, and sitting ducks. The President knows his counterpart in Beijing is weighing up the same decision. But there’s a big problem: not only are many of these systems on the Chinese mainland, they’re often the same ones used to target nuclear weapons; destroying them could be interpreted as the prelude to nuclear attack — in which case the incentive becomes to “launch ‘em or lose ‘em”. The situation is already escalating out of control.

Meanwhile, China’s leader has already hesitated: he has declined to open his gambit with a Pearl Harbor-like attack on vulnerable US bases and carrier groups around the Pacific, hoping Washington may yet back down and surrender Taiwan without a fight. But he has resolved that if the US does intervene, he will immediately sign off on massive strikes against not only American forces but also the allied Japanese, South Korean, and Philippine ones as well. Russia and North Korea are awaiting a green light to play roles of their own. Suddenly, the world teeters on the edge of World War III.

***

Though this scenario is fiction, for now, the chance of a major conflict over Taiwan in the not-so-distant future is real, and growing. Xi Jinping has declared in no uncertain terms that the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China is not only essential but the very “essence” of the leader’s epochal vision for the “great rejuvenation” — making China great again by reestablishing it as the world’s number one superpower. For Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, the island democracy of 24 million people is already their territory, separated from them only by Western imperial meddling. Its return to their control is non-negotiable. As Xi thundered in a major speech in 2022, “The wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Complete reunification of our country must be realized, and it can, without doubt, be realized.”

Xi has assigned specific dates to this goal. He has declared that reunification must be achieved no later than 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China, but has also named 2035 as the date when China’s rejuvenation should be “basically realized”. Given that in 2035 Xi will likely still be in power, albeit aged 82, and that retaking Taiwan would be the nationalistic triumph to cement his political legacy in China, this appears to be his real deadline. That makes him a man in a hurry, and so he has ordered China’s military to complete its modernization program and be ready to “fight and win” a major war over Taiwan with a peer competitor (like the United States) by 2027.

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Still, Xi would clearly much prefer to take Taiwan without fighting, if at all possible. China faces numerous internal challenges — including a slowing economy, a demographic crisis, widespread corruption, and social instability. And Xi seems to have prioritized these issues over external threats (to limited success). More important, though, is the fact that war is always an inherently unpredictable and risky business, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated for analysts in Beijing. An invasion of Taiwan would be a risk of far greater magnitude, with the penalty for failure likely to be, at a minimum, the economic devastation of China, the political delegitimization of the CCP regime, and the end of Xi Jinping.

There is another reason for Beijing’s hesitation. It has long believed that the United States and the broader West is in terminal decline, that time is thus on China’s side, and that it can simply wait until American power collapses of its own accord. As a recent Heritage Foundation report details, “observation and assessment of Western civilizational strength or decline helps to shape almost every aspect of China’s policies, both foreign and domestic”. And it has paid close attention to the West’s “culture war” in particular. Viewing progressive “Left-liberal ideas as profoundly corrosive and destabilizing”, the CCP has concluded that “the West’s will and ability to put up a fight are degrading over time”, and that “if it remains on its present course, the West could even withdraw from the world stage, collapse, or split apart”. As long as China believes this, it has no logical reason to ever bother fighting the United States over Taiwan at all.

Yet this conclusion is precisely why we may now be entering a period of particular danger. Should Beijing assess that, under the Trump administration, America is successfully reversing its decline and entering an era of cultural, economic, technological, and military revitalization, then its strategic calculus is liable to flip. Like Imperial Japan, which before Pearl Harbor became obsessed by the motto “if the sun is not rising, it is setting”, China might conclude that its window of opportunity could be lost. In that case, China’s incentives would suddenly invert: it would seem advantageous to attack sooner rather than later, before its relative strength vis-à-vis the United States declined.

This danger is accentuated by the fact that China currently has a number of significant advantages in a war over Taiwan. In fact, the United States has “had its ass handed to it for years” in most wargames, as David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defense, memorably put it. In particular, China possesses huge material advantages, including massive stockpiles of anti-ship missiles that can strike US surface ships from long range. Meanwhile America would run out of critical munitions within an estimated three to seven days and be unable to replace them, given that it currently takes its manufacturers nearly two years to produce a single cruise missile.

In general, a lack of domestic manufacturing capacity is the West’s most damning weakness when it comes to modern warfare. Even after three years of war in Ukraine, the United States and Europe combined still cannot match the capacity of Russia to manufacture basic munitions like artillery shells. Russia currently produces some three million shells per year, compared with 1.2 million by the US and EU together.

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China's plan to defeat the West

By George Magnus

Unlike during the Second World War, today the United States is no arsenal of democracy. As it stands, were it to find itself in an extended war of attrition with China, an industrial titan which manufactures a full 29% of the world’s goods, the US appears likely to find itself at a shocking disadvantage. For one thing, China maintains an astonishing 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US, as a leaked slide from an Office of Naval Intelligence briefing starkly exposed in 2023. China already possesses the world’s largest navy, with more than 370 vessels, compared with the US Navy’s 296.

All of which is to say that, if the CCP comes to believe that the Trump administration will succeed in its stated goal of revitalizing America’s fortunes, then it may see the near future as the best time to challenge it over Taiwan. Although that is likely to begin with a series of intermediate steps designed to test US resolve, such as a blockade of the island, rather than a full-scale invasion, intentional or unintentional escalation is not out of the question.

The situation is not hopeless, however. The United States and Taiwan don’t need to be able to dominate China militarily to prevent a war; they merely need to make an attack on the island appear so exceptionally costly to China that it never dares pull the trigger. This is what Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, calls a “strategy of denial”, and it can be accomplished by focusing squarely on mass-producing and deploying asymmetric weapons such as drones, missiles, and sea mines to turn Taiwan into a veritable porcupine.

This plan is sensibly straightforward, yet still somehow manages to rankle much of Washington, including people within the conservative coalition. On the one hand, it offends the hawkish neoconservative remnant of the Republican Party, because, as Colby has explained, taking Taiwan’s defense seriously — along with the reality of China’s strength and America’s limits — will necessarily mean prioritizing Asia, requiring allies in Europe and the Middle East to provide more for their own defense instead of attempting to police the entire world ourselves.

Moreover, a focused strategy of asymmetric denial would mean reorienting billions of defense dollars currently being wastefully spent on those items most beloved by defense contractors and lobbyists: flashy big-ticket machines, such as aircraft carriers — which also happen to already be militarily obsolete. Like the battleships of old, these weapons are relics of a more ostentatious age, kept alive by Congressional pork politics, not military necessity. Finally, the strategy flies in the face of the Republican old guard’s neoliberal free-trade and free-market pieties, given that it will require a concerted, state-backed industrial and trade policy designed to quickly maximize American domestic manufacturing and rein in insecure globe-spanning supply chains.

On the other hand, the idea of defending Taiwan also causes a portion of the more non-interventionist MAGA base to bristle. Why, they ask, should America ever waste its blood and treasure to fight for an island on the other side of the world? This is a good question, but it has a good answer.

The stakes of a conflict over Taiwan are of an entirely different category than any of the wars of choice the United States has involved itself in this century. Although little Taiwan is a democracy facing down an authoritarian great power, defending an abstract ideal like democracy is not the real reason for the United States to intervene over Taiwan. Rather, the blunt truth is that if the United States fails to protect Taiwan (as it has done since 1949), this would, more than any other geopolitical catastrophe, demolish our credibility as a security provider, conclusively mark the decisive moment China achieved hegemony as the world’s new dominant superpower, and lead to the rapid collapse of the web of alliances and institutions charitably known as the “liberal international order” and less charitably as the American Empire.

And while many on the populist Right, myself included, are deeply skeptical of America’s sprawling empire and the vast costs of maintaining it, its sudden collapse would have swift and devastating consequences for the American nation at home. For one thing, our economy today is utterly dependent on running both a massive trade deficit of imports and gargantuan federal debts. The former depends on the latter, and both are completely dependent on the US Dollar maintaining its “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s reserve currency — a status it retains essentially only because the United States is the world’s top dog. A clear victory by China over Taiwan would end that privilege, with the world quickly reordering itself for a Chinese century. In the defeated United States, the result would be a simultaneous debt, financial, and economic crisis of a magnitude that would make the Great Depression seem mild. Americans’ standard of living might never recover.

The case for defending Taiwan is, therefore, firmly a matter of America’s national interest, not idealism. And to do so would be to maintain peace through strength — to avoid war through deterrence — not to seek forever wars abroad. The Trump administration should be prepared to make that case. Moreover, in so doing it can point out that all the steps necessary (bringing industry home, disciplining defense procurement, restoring military competence, and pushing allies to do more for their own defense) are fully in line with a broader America First agenda. This rearmament would be a campaign of nation-building at home, not abroad.

Still, even if political unity on the issue can be achieved, the Taiwan problem promises to be among the most pressing and consequential challenges President Trump faces throughout his second term. Taiwan lies at the center of the emerging new cold war between China and the United States, and the intensifying risk of that clash going hot is already reshaping the world. The looming specter of war over the island marks the end of one era — decades of naïve “end of history” idealism, unthinking globalization, and heedless military adventurism — and the beginning of a new age of renewed realism among nations. To deal with the next decade of acute peril, the United States will need to develop a new foreign policy to match, one that combines realism and resolve in equal measure.

His slogan, “America First”, was interpreted by many as a call to focus on domestic issues rather than overseas conflicts and regime change. And it was seemingly backed up by his running mate, J.D. Vance, who suggested that the Democrats failed because they “built a foreign policy of hectoring, moralising and lecturing countries that don’t want anything to do with it” — as opposed to the Chinese, who “have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people”. 

Two weeks after Trump’s historic victory, however, hopes that the next president might pursue a more isolationist — or at least less interventionist — foreign policy are already fading into the distance. 

Since the election, a fierce battle has been raging within the MAGA movement between restrainers and sabre-rattlers. When political commentator and comedian Dave Smith wrote on X “that we need maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration”, he was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr, who said: “I’m on it”. The anti-neocon faction rejoiced when news emerged that Nikki Hailey and Mike Pompeo, known for their ultra-hawkish positions, would not be joining the administration. But as Trump started unveiling his cabinet selections, the excitement quickly turned to despair — and anger. 

Many of the names chosen by Trump to fill key foreign policy and national security roles are, in fact, well-known neocons and war hawks who advocate a muscular foreign policy against countries such as Iran and China (much like Hailey and Pompeo themselves). Such appointments don’t suggest a pivot away from Biden’s reckless interventionism and imperial overreach, but rather a return to policies that Trump once criticised. 

Take Marco Rubio, Trump’s choice for Secretary of State. Rubio, a prominent senator from Florida, is a longtime hawk who has spent most of his political career promoting neoconservative foreign policy positions, particularly on Iran and the Middle East, and advocating US military action abroad. In the eyes of many MAGA supporters, he is the quintessential representative of the establishment wing of the Republican Party that Trump has long railed against. Back in 2016, when Rubio ran for the presidential nomination, Trump belittled him as “Little Marco”, and Rubio responded by calling the magnate “frightening”, “disturbing” and a “con artist”. 

Rubio was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, of the bombing of Libya and of the Obama administration’s failed attempt at regime change in Syria. He has also supported US interventionism in Latin America, particularly against Left-wing governments. A staunch ally of Israel, closely aligned with the views of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Rubio has consistently taken a hardline stance against Iran. He opposed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, arguing for stricter sanctions, and even advocating military strikes. On the current conflict, he has defended Israel’s every move in the war in Gaza and Lebanon. He is also an anti-China hardliner: he was instrumental in pushing for legislation that would counteract China’s influence in US technology sectors and has been vocal about China’s human rights abuses. 

In the past, Rubio has also called for strong measures against Putin’s regime, though in recent years he has aligned with Trump on opposing military support for Ukraine. But aside from the latter, where we can expect Rubio to back Trump’s efforts to end the war, his track record suggests that Rubio will maintain a focus on aggressively pursuing US interests abroad, and countering all the official enemies and geopolitical rivals of the United States, including via military means. 

Trump’s Secretary of Defence pick Pete Hegseth — a national guard veteran and Fox News anchor — is more of a wild card. In the past, the former soldier was an ardent supporter of US military engagement in the Middle East: in 2008, as head of the pro-war lobbying group Veterans for Freedom, he appeared with George W. Bush at the White House to support Bush’s plan to escalate and extend the Iraq war. Today, his view seems to have shifted. In a recent interview, he described himself as a “recovering neocon”, characterising the post-9/11 forever wars as a mistake that had “made things worse”. However, he remains an ardent supporter of Israel’s war on Gaza, describing the story of Israel as that of “God’s chosen people”, a view which aligns with his evangelical Christian background, where support for Israel is often seen as part of a theological stance. He has also stated that “Zionism and Americanism are the frontlines of Western civilisation and freedom”. 

Trump’s other key foreign policy picks all lean in the same direction. Mike Waltz, Trump’s next national security advisor, is another militant neocon who criticised Biden for not escalating aggressively enough in Ukraine and supported allowing Ukraine to use US weapons to strike deep into Russian territory (though, like Rubio, he recently voted against additional military aid to Ukraine). He has also advocated bombing Iran; opposed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan; called for “a new Monroe Doctrine” to deter Chinese influence throughout the Western hemisphere; and promoted escalating military support for Taiwan. 

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Like Rubio and Hegseth, Waltz, too, is an unwavering supporter of Israel. He has criticised the Biden administration for undermining Israel’s position in the current conflict, particularly in the context of the Gaza and Lebanon wars. And has suggested that Israel be allowed to “finish the job” when dealing with threats like Hamas and Hezbollah, indicating a preference for a more assertive response from Israel. The theory is, as he set out in a piece for the Economist earlier this year, to “move quickly to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine in order to transfer US focus and military assets back to the Indo-Pacific region and counter China”. 

Similarly, Brian Hook, who will lead Trump’s transition at State Department, is known for his hardline stance on Iran: as the US Special Representative for Iran during the previous Trump administration, Hook was a key architect of the “maximum pressure” strategy against the regime, which involved reimposing and expanding sanctions after he helped Trump withdraw from the nuclear deal. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s new ambassador to the UN, is an equally staunch Israel supporter and Iran hawk. “There is no excuse for an American president to block aid to Israel”, Stefanik told the Israeli Knesset earlier this year in a speech where she criticised Biden for delaying a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs. 

While Stefanik initially supported aid to Ukraine, she voted against the latest aid package in April. She has also suggested that the US should take a more aggressive stance against China. Before being elected to Congress, in 2014, she worked for several leading neocon think tanks, including the National Endowment for Democracy, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Foreign Policy Initiative. 

As is clear, fervent support for Israel is a common thread among all of Trump’s foreign policy nominees. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s choice as the next US ambassador to Israel is an evangelical Christian who describes himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist”, and frames his support for Israel through biblical and religious perspectives. He has been a vocal supporter of Israeli illegal settlements in the West Bank, which he refers to as Judea and Samaria. “There’s no such thing as a settlement,” he has said. “They’re communities. They’re neighbourhoods. They’re cities.” In 2015, he even drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation committed to fighting antisemitism, after accusing Barack Obama of “marching the Jews to the oven” by signing a nuclear deal with Iran. 

The overwhelmingly pro-Israel stance expressed by the new appointments, rather than staunching the violence in the Middle East, risks encouraging Netanyahu to further escalate the war, including against Iran, potentially drawing the US into an all-out regional conflict. 

The only conflict where peace and de-escalation seem to be on the agenda is Ukraine. Trump seems keen to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, and even if that is likely to prove harder than he thinks — also because of the pushback he’s likely to face from pro-war forces in his own party, as well as in Europe — it at least offers some hope. The nomination to national intelligence director of Tulsi Gabbard, who has been a vocal critic of US involvement in what she called “counterproductive, wasteful foreign wars”, could also be read as a sign of this intent. 

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But overall, it’s hard to make the case that Trump’s foreign policy line-up isn’t a victory for the pro-war uniparty. Perhaps this was only to be expected: the stance of Trump’s foreign policy picks — which can be summarised as being pro-Israel, anti-Iran and anti-China — is, after all, closely aligned with Trump’s own views, as well as with the policies he pursued during his first administration. So a 180-degree isolationist turn was never on the table. 

Even though the priorities may shift — as the focus moves to Iran and China rather Russia — the next Trump administration isn’t likely to stray very far from the strategic orientation that has guided the US under the Biden administration, grounded in aggressively stemming the decline of American global dominance by resorting to diplomatic, economic and even military pressure. While we can expect Trump to prioritise diplomatic and economic tools over outright war, and to adopt a more transactional and less ideologically-driven approach to international affairs, this is ultimately no guarantee of peace. 

His previous administration testifies to this: while it is true that Trump started no new wars, as his supporters often claim, one may argue that he helped pave the way to many of the conflicts currently unfolding around the world. By withdrawing from the nuclear deal with Iran, ordering the killing of Soleimani and spearheading the Abraham Accords — aimed at sidelining Iran, while erasing the question of Palestinian statehood — many believe that Trump helped create the conditions that erupted on October 7. Similarly, Trump’s trade war with China set the stage for a broader geopolitical confrontation that has since assumed an increasingly marked military dimension. Indeed, even insofar as the Russia-Ukraine conflict is concerned, it was the Trump administration that began selling lethal weapons to Ukraine, and then unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, further fuelling Russia’s security concerns about the aggressive nature of Nato’s involvement in Ukraine. 

This highlights the intrinsically contradictory and ambiguous nature of “America First”. For many in the MAGA movement, it evokes a return to a pre-World War II ethos, when the US prioritised domestic concerns over entanglements abroad. It suggests a focus on economic self-sufficiency and a military posture confined to defending the homeland rather than engaging in costly overseas conflicts. But for many in the incoming Trump administration — and Trump himself — it arguably means something quite different. It means a strategy aimed at recalibrating America’s engagements in order to maximise US interests, including by asserting military dominance while at the same time avoiding direct military involvement. 

However, that is a very thin line to tread, especially in today’s age of heightened geopolitical rivarly, in which the economic and military dimensions are deeply intertwined. In such a context, anything less than a clean break with the US’s hegemonic approach is likely to lead the world down the same dangerous path laid out by the Biden administration. 

How strange, then, that Britain’s Armed Forces are unprepared to defend their country. Over the past month, an increasing number of military insiders have been sounding the alarm, warning that, if we are to survive, we may have no choice but to enlist a “citizen army”. 

The truth, however, is even more concerning. 

As Aris Roussinos reveals in this Special Report, it may be too late to guarantee Britain’s survival. Decades of political indifference and dismal procurement strategies have left our Armed Forces outgunned and obsolescent. And with military insiders increasingly expecting a land conflict with Russia, Britain now faces an uncomfortable question: is the coming war already lost?

Read on to learn about:

• Russia’s ability to expose Britain’s weakness
• The dismal state of Britain’s Armed Forces
• A catalogue of procurement fiascos
• How we were crippled by support for Ukraine
• Can Britain build a new army?
• Why we must pivot towards the air and sea

How close is Britain to all-out war? It would be comforting to assume that all the recent warnings from defence officials are mere hyperbole. But quite the opposite is true: as it stands, there is a very real risk that the British Army will be politically committed to fighting a land war against Russia in eastern Europe within the next five years. Without American support, we are on course to lose.

When the Chief of General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, claimed last week that “we need an army designed to… equip the citizen army that must follow”, the debate it produced centred on whether Britain is now too woke or too ethnically diverse to sustain mass conscription, while also considering whether the Britain of 2024 is even worth fighting for. While these are valid questions, the broader context — the idea of a land war against Russia — was left largely unexamined.

Yet Sanders’s warning was not without precedent. In 2022, he declared that this is “our 1937 moment”, in which the British state had a few short years to mobilise industry and modernise the Army on a war footing, with the aim to avert a war if possible, or at least not lose if one began. But if 2022 was 1937, by Sanders’s reckoning, 2024 is 1939 — and this work has not been done.

Russia will expose Britain’s weakness

In 2022, even as Russian troops found themselves bogged down and on the back foot in Ukraine, Sanders presciently cautioned observers that “historically, Russia often starts wars badly”. Thanks to “its depth and resilience”, however, it “can suffer any number of campaigns, battles and engagements lost, regenerate and still ultimately prevail”. While Russia’s slow progress initially birthed a crowing sense of overconfidence among British commentators and Ukraine’s online cheerleaders, Sanders warned: “Putin’s declared intent recently to restore the lands of ‘historic Russia’ makes any respite temporary and the threat will become even more acute. We don’t yet know how the war in Ukraine will end, but in most scenarios, Russia will be an even greater threat to European security after Ukraine than it was before.”

A year and a half later, Ukraine is firmly on the back foot, and while Russia’s gains on the ground are slow and costly, Putin’s mobilisation of his vastly larger economy and population towards the war effort mean that, over the course of the next few years, Russia’s prospects of victory will become more likely, while Ukraine’s will dwindle. To defeat Russia, in the current reality, means not recapturing lost territory but blunting the Russian advance at such cost to Putin that negotiations to freeze the conflict become a more attractive prospect than total military victory. In pursuit of this goal, Ukraine has been dependent on a constant flow of war materiel from the United States which has now ceased, and on a rapid scaling up of Europe’s military-industrial capacity that has not manifested. Just to stay in the fight, Ukraine will be forced to conscript half a million men from a civilian population increasingly unwilling to fight in a war that has caused the country, according to Sanders, “hundreds of thousands” of casualties.

Indeed, the unspoken assumption in military circles is a scenario in which Ukraine loses the war against Russia, perhaps next year or the year after. And if this happens, Putin will then turn his gaze to eliminating Nato as a threat to Russia by launching a war on the alliance’s eastern frontier. The United States will be too preoccupied with its confrontation with China to take part, and European armies, including Britain, are too under-equipped to win. As Sanders warned two years ago: “Given the commitments of the US in Asia during the Twenties and Thirties, I believe that the burden for conventional deterrence in Europe will fall increasingly to European members of Nato and the JEF [Joint Expeditionary Force].”

Giving evidence last summer to the Commons Defence Select Committee, the RUSI analyst Justin Bronk suggested that Britain’s “window of vulnerability is probably late 2026 to about the end of 2028”. That is, he cautioned, “the maximum window of vulnerability for a Chinese-American clash in the Pacific”, as, due to Pentagon procurement errors, this is the period in which Chinese naval power in the Pacific will overmatch the American forces they are rapidly preparing to confront.

As Bronk has warned elsewhere, “in the event of such a military confrontation with China in the mid-to-late 2020s, Russia will have a strong incentive to take a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break Nato while the US cannot reinforce Europe effectively. By 2026-2028, Russia’s industry will have been at full-scale military production for years, allowing it to rebuild its increasingly battle-hardened forces.” It is because of this likely scenario that prominent US strategic thinkers such as Elbridge Colby, who would be expected to play a major role in a future Trump administration, have warned that “America must first and foremost ensure that it can defeat China in a conflict, and Washington no longer has a military capable of fighting two concurrent wars”.

With a laser focus on America winning a war against China, Colby makes clear that “European Nato needs leadership” — and Britain should fulfil that role. Bronk implicitly acknowledges this, warning that: “We must plan on the danger that, if the Americans are more than occupied, they will not just be unable to reinforce Europe; they will be pulling things out… in all domains, because the threat is really huge in the Indo-Pacific. I would ask people in the country as well: how secure would you feel against Russia in Europe, given it will continue to mobilise long after Ukraine fighting stops, if the United States is not coming to save us?”

The only answer is: Not very. According to one recent study, based on the volume of artillery fire in the Ukraine war, the British Army would run out of munitions after eight days.

The dismal state of Britain’s Armed Forces

If Russia defeats Ukraine, and then launches an incursion against Nato in Eastern Europe while the US fights the greatest war in its history in the Pacific, then Britain is committed to fighting Russia on land in Europe without significant American help. This is not a scenario for which British defence planning has geared the Army to undertake, and is not a war the Army is currently capable of fighting.

Everyone is aware that the British Army is too small for its stated task. From 109,600 troops in 2000, the Army had shrunk to a mere 80,500 in 2022. As Sanders warned: “If this battle came, we would likely be outnumbered at the point of attack and fighting like hell.” And yet, in the year and a half since, the Army has shrunk to 76,950, and is on course to shrink further to 73,000. Sanders has resigned in protest. To put these numbers in context, Russia has currently deployed 40,000 troops in its current operation to seize the small Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, just one front in a series of Russian offensives taking shape over the coming year. Yet it is perhaps under-appreciated that not only is the Army too small for its purpose, it is vastly under-equipped for the coming task.

The most sobering evidence of Britain’s shoddy preparation for our increasingly dangerous strategic environment can be found in the testimony of Armed Forces chiefs and military experts to the Commons Defence Select Committee. Its 2021 report on the state of Britain’s armoured capability put its conclusions in its title: “Obsolescent and outgunned.”

As it warns: “Were the British Army to have to fight a peer adversary — a euphemism for Russia — in Eastern Europe in the next few years, whilst our soldiers would undoubtedly remain amongst the finest in the world, they would, disgracefully, be forced to go into battle in a combination of obsolescent or even obsolete armoured vehicles, most of them at least 30 years old or more, with poor mechanical reliability, very heavily outgunned by more modern missile and artillery systems and chronically lacking in adequate air defence. They would have only a handful of long-delayed, new generation vehicles, gradually trickling into the inventory, to replace them.” Due to “bureaucratic procrastination, military indecision, financial mismanagement and general ineptitude”, for which the Army’s leadership is, if anything, more responsible than the Government, “we are still some four years away from even being able to field a ‘warfighting division’, which, itself, would now be hopelessly under-equipped and denuded of even a third combat brigade”.

As Brigadier (Retd.) Ben Barry, Senior Fellow for Land Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, warned the enquiry: “The reduced UK division”, which would be Britain’s initial land contribution to a war against Russia, “has half the anti-armour capability, only 30% of the tanks of a Russian tank division, two-thirds of the armoured infantry fighting vehicles, 20% of the anti-tank guided weapons and 15% of the self-propelled artillery. It would be very difficult for that reduced division to stop a Russian tank division. A Russian tank division would seriously overmatch the reduced Third Division. ‘Overmatched’ is a very polite, clinical way of saying ‘could be defeated’.”

As another expert witness, the defence consultant Nicholas Drummond, observed, Russia outguns the British Army in a number of areas: “The first is artillery. It needs to do a wholesale renewal of its artillery systems.” The second is the British Army’s “ability to fire anti-tank missiles from under armour. It does not have that ability. It urgently needs that. The third missing capability is air defence. We are woefully short, and we would get absolutely spanked if we went to war without investing there.”

A catalogue of procurement fiascos

Since 2021, even those timelines have slipped, and capability has worsened since then. Britain’s armoured fleet consists of Challenger 2 Main Battle Tanks, CVR(T) reconnaissance vehicles, Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles and FV432 Armoured Personnel Carriers. By the middle of this decade both the FV432 and CVR(T) will be approaching 70 years in service: indeed, CVR(T) was partly designed to fit between the trees in Malayan rubber plantations. Warrior and Challenger 2 entered service in the Eighties and Nineties and are also reaching the end of their working life. Yet the joint MoD and Army “fiasco” of procuring their replacements has left the Army waiting for new armour that will not enter service until the end of the decade at the earliest.

The long-delayed Ajax Armoured Fighting vehicle, whose vibrations cause the troops inside debilitating injuries, may enter service in 2030: the Army is “cautiously optimistic” on this point. According to Select Committee evidence, the upgraded Challenger 3 is expected to enter service in tiny numbers — 18 — by November 2027, and its full complement of 148 by December 2030. The wheeled Boxer family of armoured vehicles will see 27 enter service in 2027, not reaching its full complement of 623 units until 2032. As the Committee Chair Tobias Ellwood remarked: “The full complement will not come into service here until the 2030s, when we can start doing our all-arms combat. Until then, we have a mix and match of old and obsolete kit, with the stuff that is coming online.”

If Britain goes to war in the mid-2030s, it will do so with a small but modern armoured force. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the war may already be over by then. As Bronk warned the committee, if the MoD was tasked with providing “a backbone of European deterrence against Russia, with credible warfighting capabilities in Europe in the next three to five years”, and resourced to do so, it will still take “five to 10 years to build that force”.

Crippled by support for Ukraine

If Britain goes to war with Russia within the timeframe our military leadership fears, it will do so with the Army we have, or can quickly build in the next few years. And as the RUSI analyst Jack Watling warned in 2020, the Army we have is not equipped for the task: “The UK lacks ground-based air defences and deployable long-range precision fires… Its heavy armour is under-gunned, its protected mobility is worn out, its artillery is outranged, its logistics are under-resourced, its deployment is too slow, and its ammunition stockpiles too small to deliver the effect for which it is designed.”

Due to well-meaning political decisions, which have not been matched by a sense of urgency in rebuilding the Army, the situation has deteriorated further. The donation of 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine, along with AS90 self-propelled artillery systems, M270 rocket launchers and L118 Light Guns, FV432s and significant quantities of anti-armour munitions and artillery shells “will leave us temporarily weaker as an Army, there is no denying it”, Sanders warned a year ago. “There is no doubt our choice will impact on our ability to mobilise the Army against the acute and enduring threat Russia presents and meet our Nato obligations.”

As Watling cautioned in 2022, “UK anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) stockpiles have now been significantly depleted — having been gifted to Ukraine — leaving British units toothless. With the announcement that the UK’s MLRS are also going to be sent to Ukraine, the punch that was supposed to buy out the UK’s lethality in the close fight is about to be stripped from the order of battle. The already woefully inadequate stockpiles of rockets for these systems are now to be expended.” As one senior defence source told the press: “We’ve given away pretty much everything we can afford to give…” As another warned: “The PM’s wartime approach is currently to cut the Army, hollow it out further by gifting [equipment to Ukraine] and with no plans to replace [the weapons] for five to seven years.”

Britain’s Nato commitment to the ground defence of Eastern Europe is an armoured division by 2025. Unfortunately, this division does not exist. As RUSI observed in 2022, the “current force comprises two armoured regiments of obsolete tanks, while one brigade has been converted to a medium-weight Strike Brigade. This forms the core of the UK’s current land contribution to Nato’s conventional ‘hard power’ in Europe to deter Russia.”

Moreover, as Ellwood notes of those two tank brigades: “We have just one brigade deployed in the Baltic right now and it is going to take days, if not weeks, to bring that up to divisional strength. Bear in mind that if the Russians cross the border into the Baltic, that second brigade is going to be under attack all the way from the UK into the Baltic area. Our lines of communication are certainly going to be hit, and hit very hard.” In fact, it is doubtful that even the single existing brigade is currently fit for its commitment, according to the defence analyst Francis Tusa.

In the air, too, Britain will be heavily outgunned, outranged and outnumbered by its opponent. Because Nato’s SEAD capability — the ability to search and destroy enemy Surface-to-Air Missiles — is dependent on the US, for the first time since midway through the Second World War, Britain cannot expect air superiority and must work on the assumption that any build-up of forces will be both visible and vulnerable far behind the front line. Under-equipped on almost every front, Britain is heading towards military defeat.

Can Britain build a new army?

The question is what to do now. As long as Ukraine stays in the fight, Russia will not be able to expand the war, providing Britain and the rest of Europe with breathing space to rebuild military capacity. But enabling Ukraine to do so requires a vast, Europe-wide effort to produce munitions in the quantity sufficient for full-scale war. And in the two years since the war began, Europe has not achieved production sufficient for Ukraine’s own needs, let alone rebuilding Nato stockpiles. Unless this work is done now, the looming war will be lost almost before it has begun.

Even if this level of production is reached, a question mark hangs over Ukraine’s ability to conscript the manpower necessary to survive the coming war: Europe’s year or two of breathing space will be very costly in human lives for Ukraine, without even guaranteeing the country victory at the end of it. In that short space of time, Britain will need to marshal its existing resources — which means shifting its focus to training Ukrainian troops rather than gifting Ukraine our dwindling stockpiles of equipment — while converting what remains of British industry to a war economy.

Yet a country that cannot produce its own steel, and is dependent on nations that will be either open rivals or detached observers for much of its imports of raw materials, is hardly geared towards a wartime-level of production. In the short term, Britain could engage in a frantic spending spree, buying off-the-shelf armour from European allies, as it should have done years ago. But even here, whether Britain could outcompete equally panicked European allies for limited production is questionable. The recent acquisition of 14 ARCHER artillery systems to replace equipment donated to Ukraine shows that, while far short of the investment needed, a rapid procurement programme could swiftly bring results.

Ultimately, Britain needs to rapidly pool resources and production with European allies, based around a standardised, interchangeable suite of capabilities. Drummond suggests a five-year spending drive to buy Boxer armoured vehicles, anti-tank munitions, drones and long-range artillery, while increasing the Army to a size of 90,000 formed in eight brigades — all at a cost of an extra £10 billion defence spending a year, solely focused on the Army. This is a useful baseline level of thinking, but whether the political will exists is doubtful: the two controversially expensive aircraft carriers came to around £8 billion in total, while the Guardian’s lofty declaration that defence spending “should take a place in the queue” behind council funding and fighting climate change suggests that the British political class has no understanding of what the country is very shortly going to be tasked to do, the amount of effort and pain it will take, and the level of spending it will require.

A pivot towards the air and sea

Any future war would not be easy for Russia: the war in Ukraine has re-emphasised that, in modern warfare, the defending side holds a strong advantage. Britain would not fight alone: it would fight alongside the small but capable Baltic armies, currently building a joint defensive line along the Russian border, the currently more effective French Army, the German Bundeswehr and the rapidly expanding Polish army (whose defence procurement and recruiting effort, at much less cost, should shame Britain), as well as Sweden, Finland and other nations. Britain’s land contribution has been so woefully managed that we should expect to play a supporting role, perhaps under European command.

But perhaps we should rethink the question from first principles: the Army is the weakest link in the Armed Forces, and as it stands threatens to be the weak link in Nato’s ground campaign, which itself means it will be disproportionately targeted by Russian fire. Given how things stand, should Britain be frank with the rest of Nato about the state of our Army, and shift our contribution to our better-resourced Air Force and Navy?

As Watling warned in 2022: “if the UK feels it can no longer resource a war-fighting capability then this must be the starting point from which UK strategy develops, and extensive and difficult conversations with allies must be initiated.” Perhaps the time has come to warn Nato that we’re going to be late handing in our homework.

At some time in the 2030s — all things being well — Britain will possess a functioning Army, but until then it does not. A weak and underpowered British land commitment in Europe threatens to become a drag on Nato’s capacity, a burden rather than a gift. Should a war break out this decade, Britain has three choices: to go to war with the Army we have, and lose; to spend the next few years rapidly building up the Army, at vast cost; or to admit in good time that the Army will not be functional this decade, and shift Britain’s contribution to a European war to the air and sea. These are fundamentally political decisions, each of which will be controversial, and which require a degree of political leadership and popular legitimacy the current government, in its waning days, does not possess.

As the historian Robert Lyman observes: “We have opened ourselves up to a shock of very significant proportions.” This is the insufficiently-understood context in which the current conscription discourse, essentially a debate on how to quickly replace our currently-existing Army, which has been set up for defeat, exists. But unlike 1914 or 1940, there is no strategic hinterland of booming factories and willing volunteers to fall back on. There is no Empire to come to Britain’s aid, Russia’s resources will be pitted against us, and the United States will be hard-pressed with its own war against the world’s greatest industrial power.

As Watling warned two years ago: “The old British tradition of losing the early battles but winning the war does not work when it takes years to build sophisticated modern military equipment. In short, if deterrence fails, and the Army is not appropriately provisioned, there will be no comeback. There will simply be defeat.”

Later, after the Second World War, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) dictatorship used theatre as a political tool, while politics itself became a ritualised performance to a captive audience. Throughout Taiwan’s martial law era (1949-1987), moviegoers stood before each cinematic presentation to sing the Republic of China’s national anthem, set to footage of President Chiang Kai-shek performing stately duties.

Yet, politics as performance truly came into its own with Taiwan’s democratisation during the Nineties. Since then, its theatrics have been most evident in parliamentary brawls, which have featured lawmakers bashing each other with mobile phones, spraying tear gas, and hurling pig offal.

Although parliamentary handbags are now less frequent, the theatrical element of Taiwanese politics remains, as shown by the ongoing campaigns for the 13 January presidential election. Under the spotlight is Ko Wen-je — perhaps the most remarkable player to have trodden the boards on Taiwan’s political stage. Like the archetypal Shakespearean lunatic, this former Taipei mayor and current presidential candidate has onlookers struggling to discern the method in the madness.

Since the former surgeon burst onto the political scene with victory in the 2014 Taipei mayoral election, he has become infamous for his gaffes, including sexist and sizeist remarks about female politicians, references to immigrant spouses as “import brides”, and suggestions that Tibetan monks who self-immolate in protest at Chinese Communist Party (CCP) persecution do so to be “trendy”. When challenged, Ko ascribes his blurting to (self-diagnosed) Asperger’s syndrome or the naivete of a political dilettante. This image has been leveraged by his Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), which has adopted white as its colour, representing both purity and transparency, as well as Ko’s background as the white-smocked medical professional “Ko P” — Professor Ko — as he is known to his admirers. For others, however, white symbolises an absence of colour and, with it, core principles.

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Concerns about Ko’s political leanings emerged early on in his career. As a medic, he had been involved with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and his support for the Sunflower Student Movement, which occupied Taiwan’s legislature shortly after he had announced his candidacy for the Taipei mayorship, reinforced the perception of Ko as green — the colour of the DPP. When the party agreed not to field a candidate in the mayoral election, it was a tacit endorsement of Ko’s bid. The Sunflowers were protesting the then-ruling KMT’s sleight-of-hand passage of the China-friendly Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA). Although the Sunflower Movement was a grassroots movement, the DPP was broadly supportive of and associated with the students’ aims.

Despite these “pro-Taiwan” credentials, months into his first term as mayor in 2015, Ko was hobnobbing with CCP bigwigs at the Twin City Forum, which aimed to foster closer ties between Shanghai and Taipei. During subsequent trips to China, Ko visited Yan’an, the heartland of the Communist revolution, where he expressed his admiration for Mao Zedong. A former TPP associate said Ko “idolised” the Communist leader and other strongmen from Chinese history.

“During his time as mayor, his entire approach changed to yi jia qing — two sides of the strait, one family,” explains Lev Nachmann, a political scientist and assistant professor in the College of Social Science at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “Over the next few years, we saw much more desire from Ko for closer ties with China.”

With Ko’s suggestion in June that he would revive the CSSTA as president, an astonishing volte face was complete, leaving public and press bemused. Then, in November, after weeks of speculation, Ko announced a joint presidential ticket with the KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih. Opinion polls had made DPP candidate and current Vice President William Lai the runaway leader and a coalition was seen as the only way of scuppering a third successive presidential term for the DPP.

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Offering no explanation as to why someone who still identifies as “deep-green at heart” — a position associated with democracy, Taiwanese nationalism, and respect for human rights — would join forces with a party that has historically stood for the opposite values, Ko admitted that the KMT was a “lousy” party. But the KMT had a century of history, he argued, and even if it had fallen on hard times, “a starved camel is better than a horse”.

Then, almost as quickly as it had been launched, the planned cooperation collapsed due to disagreements over who would lead the ticket (though the parties will still cooperate on the concurrent legislative election). During an online meeting with TPP supporters, Ko sobbed as he suggested he had been duped by shrewder political operators into accepting a polling method that favoured Hou.

“As far as I can tell, Ko simply got rolled,” Nathan F. Batto, a research fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, wrote on Frozen Garlic, his blog on Taiwan’s elections. “Apparently, they asked all the staff members to leave the room at the beginning of the meeting. That means that Ko was completely outsmarted by [KMT Chairman] Chu and/or Hou (two people who most observers think he looks down on as not his intellectual equals).” When Ko’s staff re-entered and saw what was on the table, they were horrified, with one aide reportedly bursting into tears. Ignoring their pleas, Ko signed the agreement.

Ko’s colour-shifting has resulted in another nickname: Betelnut Ko, in reference to Taiwan’s favourite stimulant, a green-skinned nut with a white interior, that produces red juice when chewed. The implication is that Ko started out green before creating a white facade to mask his (pro-China) red core. “It’s hard to know where he stands on anything, because he never tells us,” says Batto. “His philosophy can be summed up in one sentence: ‘If you’re sincere and willing to work hard, then it’s not difficult to govern well.’” Pressed on concrete policy, Ko argues in a circle, insisting he will do what’s right by Taiwan, that there is no need to explain what that is because it’s obvious, and that he can be trusted to do it, says Batto.

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The flip side of this is that President Tsai Ing-wen’s DPP administration has not been doing the right thing during its eight years in power, though here too Ko is vague. “That’s the implied discourse,” says Batto. “They’re either lazy or corrupt. It’s non-falsifiable because he says, ‘Obviously these things are bad’, but then doesn’t say what these things are.”

A populist of sorts, Ko presents himself as operating outside the established ruling class, though with his penchant for touting his (alleged) 157 IQ and always presenting himself as “the smartest person in the room”, he is a very specific type of anti-elite. “He’s not anti-expert or anti-science like Trump, and he’s not vilifying any minority group,” says Batto.

While many see Ko as little more than a political opportunist, there are fears that he may have always been a closet blue (KMT sympathiser). “The TPP recruited heavily from already established politicians — largely blues and KMT defectors,” says Nachman. He notes that Huang Shan-shan, who served as Ko’s deputy mayor, was recruited from the New Party, which supports unification with China. “That’s about as a blue as you can get,” says Nachman.

Some analysts go further, suggesting that Ko’s bumbling, flip-flopping persona has been carefully cultivated to hide sinister motives. “Ko’s manoeuvring on the surface is for public show,” says Chang Cheng-shuh, a former DPP political strategist. “He is very good at manipulating the media, but we’re concerned that he’s strategising in secret.”

Discerning China’s hand behind the attempt to build a coalition against the DPP, Chang believes that Ko may be “Beijing’s new favourite” now that the KMT appear electorally unviable. He draws attention to Ko’s two fundraising trips to the United States last year, where, Chang says, “political donations from China may have indirectly changed hands through the Chinese-American community and old KMT families”.

However, Nachman suggests there is nothing particularly unusual in such activities and that they do not necessarily indicate a pro-China agenda. “Even the DPP has taken advantage of good relations with Chinese partners in the past,” says Nachman. “That, in itself, is not damning, but it points to who Ko is prioritising.”

For Batto, the danger from Ko comes from a dangerous combination of misplaced faith in his abilities and a lack of core principles. “He thinks he can say enough magic words to keep China at bay and not commit Taiwan to any sacrifices,” says Batto. When pushed on what those words are, Ko says he will figure that out when the times comes. “He seems to think China won’t be smart enough to know he’s duping them,” says Batto. “If I were Beijing, I’d love to deal with that person, because they’re going to make a mistake sooner or later.”

Additional reporting by Jason Pan.

It is not entirely for want of international pressure. In the spring of 2019, for instance, a new design for a 10,000-yen note featuring a portrait of Japan’s pioneering industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi was announced, provoking a harsh reaction from South Korea — where Shibusawa’s portrait had been briefly used on the currency imposed by Japanese colonial rulers. The nation’s objections were duly reported in Japan, yet little public debate followed. The banknote will be released, as originally planned, in 2024.

This response echoes the better-known controversy over “comfort women”,  a euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of predominantly Chinese and Korean women forced to become sex slaves to Japan’s imperial army during the Second World War. Japan’s apparent resistance to engaging fully and sincerely with these historic crimes  has inspired much international criticism, including demonstrations outside Japanese embassies in Seoul and Manila.

To understand why Japan is so guarded about its empire, it is necessary to understand how exactly that empire came about. After all, the nation had only narrowly escaped being colonised itself in the mid-19th century, when the industrialised Western powers set their sights on Asian territories. In the 20th, as the first and only non-Western country playing the game of great power politics, Japan tried to adopt the role of the anti-colonial colonialist, predestined to liberate other Asians from Western imperialism and to lead them on the road to progress. Japan’s stated aim was to create “an Asia for Asians”, a slogan it used to justify its own aggressive invasions. China had to be freed from the Western-backed regime of Chiang Kai-shek; Malaya and Burma from the British; the East Indies from the Dutch; Indochina from the French; the Philippines from the Americans. According to this view, Japan’s imperialism was not self-interested — and acted in opposition to Western colonialism.

Race was at the heart of Japan’s Pan-Asianism. Writing in late 1918, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who would later become prime minister, urged Japan to “reject the Anglo-American Peace” to be proposed at Versailles. Shortly after attending the conference, he wrote: “That the white people — and the Anglo-Saxon race in particular — generally abhor coloured people is an apparent fact, so blatantly observable in the US treatment of its black people.” And his suspicions were arguably vindicated when Japanese delegates tried to have a clause in favour of racial equality included in the League’s charter — and failed.

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After the worldwide depression, as the Great Powers became inward-looking — putting up protectionist trade barriers and, in some cases, introducing laws against Asian immigration — Japan’s rhetoric became focused on economic security. The nation insisted that each of its expansionist steps was part of a grand project — to build a “New East Asia Order” or the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. The official goal of Japan’s war with the West was declared, in late 1941, to be the establishment of Asian “stability”. Just as the Japanese were taught to believe in their emperor’s divinity, they were also taught that their nation had a sacred mission in Asia — especially in colonial South-East Asia, where the dissatisfaction in European colonies justified Japan’s involvement, for some. For others, it had the opposite effect: in 1962, Lee Kuan Yew, who was then Singapore’s Prime Minister, identified Japan’s military occupation from early 1942 as a wake-up call. Japanese occupation made his generation of young people “determined that no one — neither the Japanese nor the British — had the right to push and kick us around”.

To this day, the belief that ousting the predatory West from Japan’s backyard was morally legitimate persists. In the Nineties, one best-selling manga by the cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi, claiming to be a “philosophical comic book”, painted Japanese imperialism in a shamelessly self-glorifying light. The Japanese army, it argued, “bravely fought the white imperialists, who arrogantly regarded coloured peoples as lowly primates”. More recently, the hawkish former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s success was partly down to his effective deployment of neo-nationalist rhetoric, which has remained present since his death.

But whatever the present-day Japanese would like to believe, in practice Japanese occupiers used anti-colonial rhetoric while behaving very much like colonial masters themselves. This led the historian Grant Goodman to observe in 1991 that Japan “out-colonialed” Westerners in terms of brutality and exploitation. In reality, it would be misguided to dismiss Japan’s “Asia for Asians” claim as purely disingenuous, a post facto excuse for its aggressive expansionism. The philosophical underpinnings for it preceded Japan’s empire.

In the late-19th century, Asian intellectuals — often writing in English — sought to reject the colonial view of Asia as an entity that was racially inferior. The Japanese art historian Tenshin Okakura, an associate of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, emerged as one of the most influential Pan-Asianist voices. Despite its comparative material and military weakness, Okakura asserted, Asia was a civilisation par excellence. In the preamble of The Ideals of the East, he wrote:

“Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal.”

And yet, Japan’s quest to reach the status of the white nations that ruled the world was conducted not in spiritual terms but old-fashioned military ones. With Japan’s victory in the war against Tsarist Russia in 1905, it became the first non-white power to defeat a white one in a modern war. Unsurprisingly, this stoked anti-colonial sentiments beyond the Japanese archipelago. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in 1939, recalled the excitement he felt as a boy: “Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm … Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.”

A string of anti-colonialists started to seek refuge in Japan — including Indo-Chinese nationalists Phan Boi Chau and Prince Cuong De, Indian independence fighter Rash Behari Bose, and, most famously, Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern Chinese nationalism. Many of them were morally and financially supported by Japan’s Pan-Asianists. The movie studio tycoon Umeya Shokichi, for example, drew on his fortune to help finance Sun’s nationalist movement, as did Torazo Miyazaki, a philosopher who actively collaborated with the Chinese nationalists by volunteering to be their publicist and supplier of arms, and even a combatant.

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Meanwhile, one of the most important figures of 20th-century Japanese literature, the novelist Masuji Ibuse, worked in Malaya and Singapore, writing editorials for the local newspaper. He emphasised the importance of propagating the Japanese language. In February 1942, he wrote, ironically in English:

“The substitution of Nipponese (Japanese) for English as the lingua franca in Malaya is but the natural recognition of a nation which has stood up for things Asia [sic] and which is now in the process of saving Asians from continuing to be the victims of the British strategy to squeeze the wealth and culture of Asians.”

Ibuse was convinced that learning Japanese would elevate other Asians. To him, and many others, Asia was not only one, as Okakura had proclaimed; rather, “Asia was Japan”.

Despite Japan’s utter defeat in the Second World War, this narcissistic self-image persisted. That the emperor was never held responsible for Japan’s imperialism did much to hinder the development of an honest debate: his throne was spared by General Douglas MacArthur out of fear of Japanese rebellion, which would have stifled efforts to rebuild post-war Japan as a fortress against communism. A lingering reverence for the imperial institution has also made Japanese colonialism something of a sensitive — if not a taboo — subject in post-war Japan. The emperor, moreover, has become a symbol of peace in a nation that now hasn’t seen war for a lifetime.

All this partly explains why the West’s post-colonial reckoning has so far elicited no discernible reaction in Japan. There is always a slight time lag before Japan absorbs any social and intellectual movements coming from the outside world. Advocacy for LGBTQ rights, for instance, took some years for college students to embrace. Yet there is a bigger reason why Japan has not reckoned with its colonial past. Whereas in Britain the ideologies used to justify colonialism, including Social Darwinism, have been thoroughly debunked, the imperial Japanese claim that Asia had to be liberated from the West is, in theory, morally unobjectionable. None of this excuses the atrocities committed by Japan in practice. And while most Japanese today are indifferent to the topic of the empire, it’s still a subject that gets conservatives riled up. They stick to the classic narrative of Asian solidarity, in which Japan stood up to the imperial bullies, instead of emulating them.

It is a story that stars Radhaninod Pal, an Indian judge beloved by the Japanese Right. Sitting on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946, otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, he became famous for arguing that all the Japanese defendants, including the wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, should be acquitted. He insisted that Japan’s crimes were hardly unprecedented, that one only had to look at Western imperialism to find equal brutality. He also pointed to America’s nuclear bombings as war crimes, and accused the victorious powers of moral relativism and racial prejudice. Because of such statements, Pal is to this day memorialised in Japan as a brave nationalist who sided with an Asian ally in the face of Western arrogance.

Japan’s pose as the anti-colonial colonialist will persist so long as it continues to think of itself as having fought a selfless, civilisational war for the good of Asia. All the while, an uncomfortable truth will remain ignored: that, in its execution of the Pan-Asianist dream, Japan fell far too short of delivering its grand promises.

The response of every established Western Sovietologist was that I had foolishly confused folkloric categories with actual living and breathing nations — they were just “Soviets” who occasionally wore funny hats, and it was pure and utter fantasy that they might ever want to be independent. That was just seven years before the final and official collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is axiomatic that nations endure while regimes must collapse, but none of the easy Soviet analogies works when it comes to China. Yes, Beijing recognises 55 minority populations, but they account for no more than 9% or so of the total, and some of the nationalities really are only folkloric, unlike the Uyghur, Kazakhs and Tibetans whom the Chinese must actively repress.

As to the economy, it only broke the morale of the Soviet Communist Party after two decades of increasingly demoralising stagnation that had become obvious by 1980 even to casual visitors, who noticed a very distinctive no-hope “Soviet” look on most people’s faces. The Chinese Communist Party, by contrast, emerged from a visibly malnourished and downright dirty state — when I lived there in 1976, human waste was carted through its streets — with tentative growth from the early Eighties accelerating from the Nineties, gloriously enriching China until very recently.

Even today’s bad economic news reveals no terminal, necessarily regime-destroying diseases, as was true of the Soviet Union, which had to import wheat every few years even as it built more tractors for its farmers than the US. In China, in fact, the only wealth-destroying disease has been the very thing that every tourist and even some experts have admired immensely: the proliferation of a hugely impressive, mostly well-designed and well-built infrastructure, from high-speed trains that now reach even into Laos while connecting some 550 cities in 33 provinces, to the motorways that link every part of China, some all the way up mountains and into deserts, to the roughly 250 full-service airports (in 1976 only eight had enough runway for our small Trident jet), to the immense ports which imported 95 million metric tons of soya beans alone in 2021, when the Port of London handled 50 million tons of everything.

How do wonderful infrastructures destroy wealth? One example is sufficient. In 2018, on a drive along the North Korea border, I encountered a vast and beautiful white six-lane highway suspension bridge across the Yalu river. It was built to connect the Chinese city of Dandong with North Korea, to service the trade boom Xi expected with the promised opening of the North’s economy. Naturally, it would require a customs house, duly built as a very impressive high-rise, warehouses and more than 10 blocks of commercial offices. Yet when I visited, the bridge ended in a North Korean potato field, traffic was exactly zero, the customs house was empty and so were the office blocks and warehouses, some paid for by private border merchants who were bankrupt when I met them in Dandong (they openly cursed Xi for going along with the US-sponsored Security Council Embargo).

Savings that could have enriched many Chinese citizens, including the 180 million officially counted as “very poor” and the further 300 million or so still trapped in poverty, were instead wasted on the Yalu bridge complex, with uncountably greater waste on infrastructure all across China. The list starts with a least 100 grossly under-utilised airports  and the many highways that are mostly empty of traffic even in crowded China, including the wonderful multi-lane G-214 that runs all the way from the near-tropical tourist town of Dali in Yunnan up the ever-rising landscape to Tibet.

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The immediate issue now is not what might have been, had the capital been used to reduce poverty, but the way the money was found in the first place. Some was collected from taxes, but much more was found by adding to the immense debt mountain that now paralyses the investments of the private building firms that built skyscrapers and gigantic apartment blocks all over China, as well as the uniquely Chinese semi-private municipal and provincial joint ventures that built factories and infrastructural projects. The latter’s money came from the loans of the local branches of state banks, whose managers could not just say no to local party bosses, who could choose to invite them to sumptuous dinners in pretty company or to lock them up for corruption investigations as they saw fit. Back in Beijing, senior managers at Bank of China headquarters — whose role models are neither Mao, Lenin nor even Xi Jinping, but rather their Bank of England and Federal Reserve counterparts with whom many have studied in the US and England — kept trying to discipline the flood of bank loans to the chronically overambitious joint-venture companies. But they had no power at all to scare off the party bosses.

Pan Gongsheng, the current Bank chief, is certainly the most independent official surviving in Xi’s intensely autocratic China, just as the head of the Russian central bank, Elvira Näbiullina, is the most independent official in Moscow. Yet Pan knows he cannot stop the infrastructure projects that are daily adding to China’s debt mountain, without immediately replacing a debt crisis with a mass unemployment crisis — any more than Näbiullina can stop the Ukraine war, whose dead and wounded are much less of a threat for her than the ultimate horror of war-spending inflation (which in Russia can quickly starve 44 million pensioners).

The sudden economic crisis that has stalled China’s economy after decades of growth is very obviously not just “cyclical”. Xi Jinping cannot afford to just sit it out: the immense debt mountain must be reduced to resume profitable investments. In the US, the cure for the 2007-2009 debt crisis that stalled Europe’s economy as well, was the 2008 bankruptcy of literally high-flying Lehman Brothers (its 20-somethings in different offices in the same Manhattan building sent notes to each other by Federal Express via Memphis, Tennessee), and of hundreds of other high-fliers large and small. As for the millions of US homeowners with unpayable mortgages, they just walked out, becoming instantly homeless but also debt-free. Yet very few remained homeless because the US economy picked up very quickly once it was drastically purged of non-repayable loans. (Japan’s housing collapse, on the other hand, stopped the economy for a decade because home loans were personal and could not just be abandoned)

In China, the problem is the opposite: uncounted millions have all or much of their savings in apartments that stand empty, generating tax and other costs instead of income, and they cannot just walk out of them. They need renters, who in practice must be mostly young couples setting up families, especially today, when many young and not-so young single Chinese are stuck living with their parents. It is at this exact point that an economic problem becomes a political one, which can be lethal to any regime, even Xi Jinping’s constantly self-praising and seemingly formidable autocracy.

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The clue China is preparing for war

By Edward Luttwak

The first political blip did not originate in ancient China nor even in post-1949 Communist China — it only dates back to July 2023. It was then that the authorities stopped publishing the 16-to-24 unemployment statistic that reached 21.3% in June, a number both very high and also a gross underestimate by all accounts. What makes this unemployment potentially explosive is not the fact that June unemployment was actually much higher than 21.3% (expert estimates start at 30%), nor even the fact that the July percentage was not published because it was even higher, but rather Xi Jinping’s very personal responsibility for much of it.

It was Xi alone, in an expressly personal decision in the name of social equality, who abruptly shut down China’s vast private tutoring industry in July 2021, depriving new university graduates of desirable starter jobs; the seven largest teaching companies alone had to fire 250,000 graduates. Enterprising graduates tried to teach privately, but in October 2021 online tutoring was halted, while those who gathered a few pupils for lessons in parks of cafes were told to stop or face arrest when spotted by police.

Also very much Xi Jinping’s personal responsibility was the abrupt collapse in the demand for new graduates in the entire high-tech sector, which followed the disappearance of China’s most dynamic entrepreneur Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma. Dictators are well known for their jealousy. And the spectacle of Ma being serenaded by more than 25,000 utterly ecstatic Alibaba employees on his birthday (he himself was singing and playing the guitar) was just too much for Xi, who only receives a dutiful clapping from his corralled party underlings.

In November 2020, Ma was summoned to a Party office for having dared to question a lesser official’s remarks. A few days later, the record-breaking $34 billion stock-market listing of his new Ant Group, which was set to hire tens of thousands, was abruptly stopped, as was Ma himself, who disappeared for three months until he was trotted back out in humiliating circumstances. Then, instead of hiring 20,000 new graduates as it did in 2020, Alibaba had to fire 20,000 in 2021, while many other jobs were suppressed by other Chinese high-tech companies whose chiefs cancelled new projects to avoid attention.

Many in China also know that Xi is personally responsible for the spread of anti-Chinese attitudes around the world, which, in turn, has greatly reduced investment, affected employment, and made Chinese tourists and students feel unwelcome in many countries. And the educated know that it was Xi personally who promoted the “wolf warrior” diplomats who openly upbraided and even insulted the governments to which they were accredited, earning headlines in China and the contempt of the locals for all things Chinese. And it is widely understood that Xi has gone out of his way to encourage Chinese soldiers, sailors and pilots to act aggressively, causing incidents with India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as US ships and aircraft. (Xi made Colonel Qi Fabao, who was filmed inciting the 2020 Galwan incident that killed 30 Indian and four Chinese troops, a delegate to the Party Congress, China’s equivalent to the House of Lords.)

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With China in deep trouble, and finding himself in the cross hairs of any party boss who dreams of evading his “anti-corruption” goons long enough to oust him, might Xi be tempted to invade Taiwan to divert attention? The belief that leaders start wars to divert attention is common among cotton-wool-between-the-ears intellectuals, and in Hollywood it is gospel, but the real thing is very rare. Even the theory that General Leopoldo Galtieri invaded the Falklands in 1982 to divert attention from Argentina’s perpetually bad economy and the Junta’s torture chambers is rather shaky. For one thing, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington resigned to take responsibility for mixed messages that might have encouraged the Argentines instead of deterring them.

In any case, Xi’s talk of war — which is all about the “rejuvenation” of Chinese manhood, and the impellent necessity to redeem a very long history of defeats (the last in Vietnam in 1979) by winning a war, any war — started when China’s economy was still in splendid shape. If anything, it is the conflict in Ukraine that might encourage Xi to invade Taiwan, because it proves that wars can be fought without a nuclear Armageddon, and with many other limits too (a Russian will soon ascend to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral). Not even the collapse of Putin’s quick-victory plan might dissuade Xi, who will rely on treason within Taiwan’s astonishingly lackadaisical armed forces to win quickly. Last year, Taiwan reacted to sharply risen tensions by increasing military service to a measly one year from an absurd four months — and then delayed the start to 2024…

In the meantime, the entire world will pay a price for China’s economic downturn because it accounts for such a big slice of the world economic pie, though with a very welcome consolation prize: for the first time since 1949, it is possible to imagine a post-Communist China.

When, in November 2022, thousands of Foxconn factory workers ignored police orders as they spilled out of the giant plant in Zhengzhou because they did not want to be trapped by a Covid lockdown, and then actually attacked the policemen who tried to stop them, Xi did not order machine-gun fire. Instead, he capitulated unconditionally, abruptly stopping all Covid restrictions everywhere — leaving the Party’s authority in tatters. China has been in a state of post-traumatic stress ever since, now with rising bitterness for the lost jobs of youth and the lost savings of the old. Xi has created a world defined by interesting times, in which it is possible to imagine both a Taiwan war and a post-Communist China.

What distinguishes us from other animals is the diversity in how we live. There is a greater difference between a resident of Hanoi and a resident of Istanbul than there is between a rat in Hanoi and one in Istanbul. While so much modern discourse is about the universality of humanity, it is in fact the variation within our species that defines us as a big-brained species. Rats live rather similar lives, regardless of where they are born, because they are driven by their inborn instincts. But rather than being led by genetically programmed impulses, we use constructed tools, whether literal or figurative, to survive and thrive. And those tools are what comprise a place’s culture.

Your definition of culture might be different from an anthropologist’s. In his book of essays, The Interpretations of Culture, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that a human being is imbued at birth with “the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life” but generally ends up “having lived only one”. That one life we end up living is largely determined by what culture, and place in it, we are born into. “As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This,” writes Geertz, “is what we have in common.” Oddly enough, many of our subjects express this more clearly than we anthropologists. In Java, Geertz points out, the people quite flatly say: “To be human is to be Javanese.”

What anthropologists seek is not that different from what most people say they want to get out of travel: an understanding of a place. But most travellers’ grasp of culture is what Geertz calls a “thin description”. A listing of the foods, faiths, clothes, and customs that make it unique. For tourists, understanding a place is about figuring out what you need to do to “pass for a native”. That is, to know enough of the language, styles of dress and etiquette to be able to spend time in Lima without causing offence out of ignorance.

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While culture, to Geertz, does encompass the surface-level rules that “guide behaviour”, to him they aren’t nearly as interesting or meaningful as what lies beneath. Culture, he writes, is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life”. In other words, culture is about why we think we are here, and why we think it’s worth being here. Where the “thin description” asks “how do you live?”, the “thick description” asks: “Why do you live?”

That different cultures, and different places, have different answers to that question shows the depth of human adaptability. It is those differences that fascinate me as a traveller. For me, to travel is to learn how to be human, by observing the variety of ways you can be human.

Most of what passes as travel these days, though, is “thin travel”. It’s about selling an experience of a place, staging a version of its culture. The travel industry proffers package dinners, where you can drink traditional liquors, eat traditional food, watch traditional dances. If there is any meaning there, it’s buried so far beneath the glitz that it’s dead. Meaning isn’t staged. It is so interwoven into one’s sense of self that it’s often unacknowledged, like the water a fish swims in, or the air you breathe.

Every city has a tourist district, which bundles up a culture and puts it in one, easy-to-find, safe area full of quaint shops. These places are the hallmarks of “thin travel”. Sure, you are in Hanoi. Sure, the people here are Vietnamese. But they are not living their true life. They are performing, mostly as a job. Their intention might well be to educate people about their culture. But thick travel is about getting away from performances, and into neighbourhoods where people are going about their lives. People who aren’t trying to teach or sell you something.

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So, how do you travel in a way that allows you to understand a place’s meaning, as best you can, rather than travelling just to see its surface? Thick travel isn’t about intensity, or danger, or going to extremes; it is about seeking the normal, and often the banal. In ordinary places, people are in their default mode, and it is their default mode that people are most “genuine” to their culture. That is why, when I’m in a new place, I try to become a regular in a few average places. Not to blend in, but to let others blend out, by being themselves.

Taking risks, entering sacred or profane spaces against the wishes of residents, or going to the place with the most X or the least Y, isn’t necessarily thick travel. It’s not about trying to play-act as a native, or putting another check on a list of crazy things you’ve done for clout. It’s not about eating the weirdest dish served in that one restaurant highlighted by that guy on the travel channel, but about eating what’s most commonly eaten. It’s about going to 7-11s in the middle-class neighbourhoods of Taipei for breakfast.

Thick travel might not require hours of YouTube research, but it does require time. On my travel blog, I have a bad habit of posting my first thoughts on a place, after three or four days of walking it. I did that in Taipei, writing: “Taipei in many ways is like Seoul. Both have grown quickly, become relatively wealthy, and in the process jumped headlong into materialism while shedding a lot of their traditional culture.”

While that’s partly true, it’s also a “thin description”, because as I learned, after spending two more weeks in the city, religious traditions are central to Taiwanese culture, to people young and old. My epiphany came in a midtown temple. I was only there grudgingly, because I couldn’t book an earlier flight back home (something I had tried to do based on my first impressions).

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I entered the temple at the same time as a young man, a guy who on the surface seemed pretty secular. He was dressed like a kid from a western MTV video, with baggy clothes and a bucket hat. He had three tattoos on his forearms — a pile of US dollars, brass knuckles, and the Mercedes Benz logo. I watched him, figuring cynically that he was there for something other than the rituals. But no, he quickly took off his hat, then slowly worked his way around the circuit of altars and statues, performing all the ritual steps with the upmost reverence. The only scepticism was mine, and it quickly faded.

Faith plays a different role in Taiwan than in Western cultures. That’s not a value judgement, or even an “othering”. “Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity,” writes Geertz. The clearer your picture of another culture, the more rational it seems, while also remaining unique. That is, the teenager in a bucket hat going to the temple to do his daily rituals is, at both at a thick and thin level, very different from a young man in Lima going to the cathedral, but both are being very human. They are both seeking meaning, not through their animal impulses, but through their traditions.

Once you see how a thick description of culture provides people with meaning, you also see how lost we would be without it. “The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man’s innate response capacity means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete,” wrote Geertz. It is “a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions”. Or, to quote the philosopher Suzanne Langer: “[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.”

Thick travel has made me realise how much chaos we have here in the US, at a spiritual level, compared with the rest of the world. We are becoming a thin culture, obsessed with the surface, more and more in denial about the importance of what is beneath. We have forgotten that we need webs of meaning, eroding so many of them. People are left trying to cope with what we humans are not equipped to cope with — the isolation and chaos that follows from meaninglessness.

I spent over 10 years documenting poverty, homelessness, and addiction in the US. Now, I am walking around the world, writing dispatches. But my current project is not that different from my last one. My three years of thick travel, of trying to understand other cultures, has given me a much clearer picture of the problems here in the US. It’s made me aware just how deep they are. Our culture is harsh and transactional; it doesn’t respect the very human need for a deeper sense of meaning. The result is our epidemic of suicides, overdoses, and other early deaths.

Worse still is that culture, while easy to erode, is very hard to rebuild once gone. You can’t legislate back meaning. If thick travel teaches you anything, it’s that people don’t work that way.

A version of this essay first appeared on Chris Arnade Walks The World.

In reality, however, China produces more than enough rice, wheat and maize to feed its human population. So why the sudden rush? Xi Jinping, it seems, is preparing for war.

At present, China relies on colossal imports of soya beans, maize, wheat and other cereals to feed its pigs, cattle, chickens and ducks — more than 120 million metric tons last year. These are supplied by the daily arrival of bulk carriers into Chinese ports from Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the United States. If war were to break out, these imports would quickly dry up.

In China, there is no spare land for crops, leaving Beijing little choice but to uproot the trees recently planted by its costly and much-admired reforestation efforts — even though China’s forests are mostly on slopes, and new crop plantings are often swept away by the first serious rain. Local party officials executing Beijing’s orders  know this perfectly well, but disobeying means instant demotion at best.

After the colossal Yangtze River floods of 1998 destroyed 13 million homes, drowned thousands and swept away highways and rail lines, the CCP recognised that the floods had been made worse by uncontrolled deforestation. Orders were issued all across China to stop logging and to plant trees instead, with vast funding allocated to add up to roughly 90 billion trees over the next decade. Thousands of tree nurseries were established, and an army of tree-planters set to work on the bare deforested slopes, with local farmers hired to nurture the new trees. As a result, China became visibly greener in satellite images, as forest cover increased from 12% in 1998 to 24% in 2020 to then increase further — until last year. No figures have been published, but what has happened since greatly exceeds the rate of the Amazon’s deforestation, even though the West’s environmentalists have so far remained entirely silent.

There are no further forests to uproot; all that is left are the very small fruit orchards cultivated by individual farmers. And so, to the horror of the elderly peasants who planted each tree by hand, a local Party official will arrive one day with the People’s Armed Police in camouflage uniforms, and cut them down. Sometimes, this is not enough: many farmers raise ducks in their backyards to supplement their income, which the police then club to death, issuing orders to plant cereals instead. Even room-sized pigsties are destroyed to free up the few square yards of soil underneath.

Local officials know that it is madness to destroy so many livelihoods to produce a few truckloads of cheap cereals, but they have no way of changing Xi’s policies — especially when each official has juniors ready to denounce him in the hope of taking his place. It was this dynamic that produced the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward. Peasants were ordered to melt down their pots and pans to make steel in backyard furnaces, with the promise they would instead eat in the dining rooms of the promised new “communes”; they were also told to melt down their animal ploughs because new tractors were arriving. In a mere four years from 1958 to 1962, at least 30 million died of hunger — some to be eaten by those who survived — and hardly any usable steel was produced.

Now, there is no question that China has very little arable land, having lost some 4 million acres to urbanisation and industry between 1957 and 1996 — an average loss of 100,000 acres per year, which jumped to more than 1.5 million acres per year from 1997, with China’s explosive economic growth that followed the opening of the US and world markets. As a result, China now has less arable land per inhabitant than India.

But why should this matter? As a very successful exporter of increasingly advanced and costly manufactures, China can certainly pay for all its food and animal feed imports easily enough. And this is how we arrive at something much worse than the destruction of China’s new forests and the human tragedy of its destroying orchards and ducks: the reason for it all.

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The crescendo of Xi Jinping’s “rice bowl” speeches came on 21 June, when he claimed it was imperative to prepare for “extreme circumstances”, having previously warned on 6 May that China must be prepared “for worst-case and extreme scenarios” to survive “high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms” — all transparent codewords for “the danger of war”. He returned to the topic on 6 July when, on a visit to the Eastern Theater Command, whose jurisdiction includes the Strait of Taiwan, he called for increased “training under real combat conditions to raise the capability to fight and win”.

Xi’s incessant calls for “combat readiness” may mean that he actually doubts that Chinese military forces are ready for real combat. Its navy, after all, is brand new and inexperienced, while the air force is greatly inferior in its technology, mostly relying on Soviet jet engines, radar-evading “stealth” that is not really stealthy, and inferior missiles. But more importantly, Xi’s intense bellicosity and intense calls for “the rejuvenation of the Chinese people” suggests motives that we cannot even imagine. No, not Taiwan, which China could have had for the asking by merely treating Hong Kong’s freedoms with demonstrative respect, making “one country, two systems” very attractive to the Taiwanese.

Much more likely is his personal sense of shame that China’s history is a long sequence of defeats at the hands of badly outnumbered invaders — the Turkic, Mongol and Manchurian Jurchen tribespeople, and then the Japanese who might still be there if they had not attacked the US. As with Mussolini, then, Xi’s real aim may well be to turn his unwarlike people into warriors.

So far, China’s future war might appear to be all talk, but preparations are well underway. Already, catastrophic deforestation is harming all humanity while the destruction of orchards and the mass killings of ducks are impoverishing tens of millions. That is not just talk.

In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens famously called for his prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offences against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture”. For him, the Kissinger Doctrine was dangerously straightforward: the US reserved the right to intervene anywhere in the world in defence of its interest, including by conspiring against democratically elected governments.

This manifested itself in a number of ways: in Kissinger’s support for Pinochet’s violent overthrow of Allende’s socialist government in Chile and for the 17-year-long dictatorship that followed; in his approval of the equally brutal Argentinian military junta of Jorge Videla; in his enabling of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and the campaign of state-sponsored terror that followed; in his secret support for Pakistan as it committed shocking atrocities in Bangladesh; and in his encouragement of Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against neutral Cambodia and Laos, which killed an estimated 150,000 civilians. So wide-ranging was US interventionism under Kissinger that, in 1976, a 33-year-old Joe Biden accused him of trying to promulgate “a global Monroe Doctrine”.

Of all the offences committed by Kissinger, the Indochina bombing campaign is perhaps the most damning. In Kissinger’s Shadow, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin chronicled the scope of the destruction. The United States, Grandin wrote, dropped “a trillion pieces of shrapnel — either ball bearings or razor-sharp barbed darts” on Indochina. In Laos, American pilots deployed “a ton of explosives for each and every” citizen, which continue to maim and kill Laotian men, women and children to this day. As a portrait of Kissinger’s “grand strategy”, it is hard to disagree with Hitchens’s conclusion that his actions reveal a “a callous indifference to human life and human rights” — and to democracy, one may add.

With his reputation largely (and questionably) untainted by Watergate, Kissinger went on to found, in 1982, his own lucrative geopolitical consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, which he continues to run. We know relatively little of the work it carries out. Several attempts have been made, at the congressional level, to get the company to hand over its secretive “client list” — but all have failed. In 1989, Senator Jesse Helms unsuccessfully demanded to be shown it before he would consider confirming Lawrence Eagleburger (a Kissinger protégé and an employee of Kissinger Associates) as Deputy Secretary of State. In 2002, Kissinger chose to quit as chair of the 9/11 Commission rather than hand over the list for public review.

It is no secret, however, that Kissinger has used his extensive knowledge of and close relationship with foreign governments — including, one must assume, the several dictatorships he helped come to power — to advance the interests of some of the world’s largest corporations, including American Express, Coca-Cola, Daewoo, Heinz, Ericsson, Fiat and Volvo. As Grandin writes: “Kissinger Associates was an early player in the wave of privatisations that took place after the end of the Cold War — in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Latin America — helping to create a new international oligarchic class.”

Yet for every historian professing Kissinger’s alleged evil, there is another extolling his diplomatic genius. Perhaps the most illustrious representative of this second grouping is Niall Ferguson, who has published the first half of his authorised two-volume biography. For those such as Ferguson, Kissinger’s crimes were justified in the name of the Holy War against communism — which the United States, after all, won. As he wrote in his first volume: “Arguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries — and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor — must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected US relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?”. The burden of proof, Ferguson suggested, is on critics to show how different policies “would have produced better results”.

More convincingly, Kissinger’s defenders focus on his diplomatic achievements, which are hard to dispute. America’s détente with the Soviet Union; the normalisation of US-China relations; an Arab-Israeli truce following the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War — all brought more peace to the world, and all were masterminded by Henry Alfred Kissinger.

So, was Kissinger an arch-imperialist or an arch-peacemaker? In a sense, he was neither. Both sides of the Kissinger wars tend to overemphasise his influence on US foreign policy during the Seventies, ignoring the deeper systemic trends at play. Insofar as Kissinger’s aggressive interventionism is concerned, this should be situated within the grander picture of the “structural” violence that has characterised the American Empire — both before and after he was in office. On some level, then, Kissinger simply did what he knew was expected of him. After all, virtually every post-1945 American statesman could be accused of crimes against humanity — which is, of course, the very reason such accusations largely don’t stick.

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Similarly, Kissinger’s diplomatic efforts also need to be situated within the wider “realist” consensus that dominated US policymaking during the Cold War. This framework took for granted that the US should pursue its interests, even ruthlessly so, but was also aware that the “multipolar” reality of the Cold War meant striking some kind of balance between America and other established (the Soviet Union) or ascending (China) powers, especially in the age of nuclear weapons.

From a different perspective, however, one could also argue that both camps are right: Kissinger was both an imperialist and a realist — an “imperealist”, one might say. Indeed, throughout his career, Kissinger has consistently warned against the dangers of America’s tendency to view itself as a unique nation endowed with a quasi-religious “manifest destiny” to spread its values — first and foremost democracy — to the rest of the world. Instead, he argued for an approach based on a hard-headed assessment of balancing the US’s national interests with those of other powers.

This, from Kissinger’s perspective, was even truer in the post-Cold War world. In his 1994 memoir, Diplomacy, he argued that in an international system characterised by five or six major powers, order could only emerge from a reconciliation of different national interests, with an acceptance of the legitimacy of opposing values. However, he recognised that America’s emergence as the single, most powerful global power made this unlikely; rather, it risked empowering those factions in the US establishment who aspired to unilaterally dictate the global agenda under the pretence of remodelling the world in America’s image.

This, of course, is exactly what happened. Since the Nineties, American foreign policy has been characterised by a perverse mix of aggressive imperialism, predicated on the view that the rise of any alternative power represents a vital threat to US supremacy, and moralistic democracy-versus-authoritarianism Manicheism. Particularly worrying is the fact that this zero-sum paradigm continues to dominate US foreign policy despite the emergence of two civilisational super-states — China and Russia — which openly challenge “Western values” and the US-led global order. This inevitably sets the world on a path of global conflict. Biden’s foreign policy, in this sense, is neoconservative through and through.

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It is therefore no surprise that Kissinger has grown increasingly at odds with the consensus in Washington. In recent years, he has repeatedly railed against America’s confrontational approach towards Russia and China, warning against the risk of a new Cold War — one that is now all but underway. In 2016, for example, he advised Donald Trump to accept Crimea as part of Russia as part of a negotiated settlement, and last year he suggested that incautious policies on the part of the US and Nato were partly responsible for sparking the invasion of Ukraine (though he also recently argued that, at this point, it would be in Russia’s interest for Ukraine to join Nato). Meanwhile, in a recent interview with The Economist, he called on America to rethink its policy vis-à-vis Taiwan and repair its relations with China. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” he explained last August.

The fact that even the words of a heavyweight such as Kissinger today go unheeded in Washington simply confirms the fact that he was much more a product than an architect of modern America. For better or for worse, Henry Kissinger’s century was the American century — and they are both coming to a close. Yet here, too, the US establishment would do well to meditate on Kissinger’s final warning: that America’s increasingly desperate attempts to preserve its dying hegemony won’t save the country. Rather, they will only accelerate its decline — and plunge the world into chaos.

This exchange captures an atmospheric truth about life: sometimes you come across certain places, and even certain countries, that are clean and well-lighted. They are pleasant and harmonious. They work. It is not always easy to say why, but like the deaf old man you feel that they do. They have a sense of national cohesion; of gentle order and prosperity. “Also, now, there are shadows of the leaves,” the older waiter tries to explain to his sceptical colleague. The point is, it is atmospheric.

What strikes me today is how impossible it is to feel this about the United States. As Robin Williams joked, Canada is like a nice loft apartment, but America is the party raging underneath. That party, though, is turning sour; something is rotten in the state of America. Even Williams later changed his analogy. Canada was still a nice apartment, but America had turned into the nightmare meth lab below.

The news that Donald Trump will be indicted for allegedly paying hush money to a porn star only adds to the mounting atmosphere of dysfunction. Not so much because of the indictment itself but because of the sense of foreboding that comes with it. On the one hand, it shows that no figure is above the law; proof, even, that America remains a great republic. Why shouldn’t Trump be indicted, after all? If he broke the law, he broke the law. There are plenty of other presidents and prime ministers outside the US who have found themselves prosecuted for criminal behaviour without it endangering national cohesion. In France, both Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac were prosecuted after leaving office. In the US, Bill Clinton avoided such a fate after striking a plea bargain on his last day in office.

Trump’s indictment, though, plays into existing fears about the future of the Republic: of democratic norms no longer holding; taboos being broken; dangerous precedents being set; even of a late-stage imperial decline becoming entrenched. Columnists wonder whether we are witnessing the kind of constitutional unwinding that doomed the Roman republic when the state became too big for its constitution. Perhaps this is the moment American presidents begin fearing for their liberty after office and start behaving as such. After all, it doesn’t require an overly tragic mind to wonder what lessons Trump will take from this should he somehow take back the presidency. And yet what is the grand jury in New York supposed to do if Trump has broken the law? Ignore it? Trump, as ever, is both a cause and a symptom of America’s great national crisis.

Look around and the signs of dysfunction are everywhere. Just as the scale of the country’s wealth and power are hard to comprehend for those of us outside the imperial homeland, so too is the scale of its violent disorder and dysfunction. Take homelessness. In Los Angeles today, there are approximately 42,000 people sleeping rough at the moment — and some 113,000 in California overall. In the whole of England, by contrast, there are around 3,000.

Or consider the scale of violence. Across the whole of the US, around seven people are murdered for every 100,000. This compares to around one in 100,000 in the UK, France and Germany — and half that number in many smaller countries in Europe. But even this masks the extraordinary ferocity of murderousness that is gripping some of America’s cities. In St Louis, the murder rate is 64 per 100,000. In parts of Chicago, it has reached almost 150 per 100,000. Such violent criminality is almost a social sickness. During the bloodiest year of the Troubles in Northern Ireland,1972, there were 31 deaths per 100,000.

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Examples of social breakdown are everywhere. There are the 131 mass shootings in America this year alone, on top of the 647 last year and 690 before that — a form of nihilistic terrorism that has been normalised to the point of acceptance. The opioid crisis in the States is also of a different order to anywhere else. More than 58,000 people died from fentanyl overdoses in 2020, compared with 97 in the EU.

Life expectancy, meanwhile, has collapsed in staggering fashion, in a way that is completely out of line with any other advanced country, down from 78.8 in 2019 to 76 today. This is not simply a case of poor Americans dragging down the overall figure either; all groups in America die younger than their counterparts in similar countries, whether old or young, rich or poor. And American children, for example, are less likely to live to age five than children in Europe. The banality of such failure is difficult to grasp, particularly for anyone who has been to the US and witnessed the extravagance of its suburban prosperity.

It is this tension, between suburban wealth and social breakdown, which catches you off guard when it appears on TV shows and movies. Every American sitcom or box set has some passing reference to prescription drug abuse. It is there in Modern Family; a small joke about popping a Xanax in with the evening glass of wine. And it is there in your face in White Lotus, with the American elite living secretly miserable lives, their children loaded with all sorts of drugs: uppers and downers, edibles and prescription pills.

This is part of the great paradox of our American order. Even as the US grapples with its own social and political dysfunction, it dominates our world culturally, economically and militarily. Right now, the United States is attempting to maintain its global hegemony by protecting both the European and East Asian security orders at the same time. To do so, it must hold at bay both Russia in Ukraine and China in Taiwan. It is easy to forget the scale of this challenge because we have accepted it as normal. And yet it is not. America is the most powerful nation state in history, not the new Britain but the new Rome.

Robert Kaplan argues in The Tragic Mind that America has entered a phase of its life in which it has become so big that it no longer controls its destiny. As a mere republic before the Second World War, it enjoyed a certain freedom. “Democracies and republics,” he writes, “give tangible expression to the idea of human intervention.” In democracies, we believe that the actions of individuals matter, that we have agency over our lives and our world, and are not buffeted by grand impersonal forces or fate. But once democracies become empires, “so many new and vast historical forces come into play that the idea of human agency weakens, and fate again edges in”.

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This, says Kaplan, is the American tragedy today. “While the world might be fixable here and there, as America strode into a larger canvas in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, that very same world proved more and more intractable… suddenly Americans learned that their power to change the world was circumscribed.” For Kaplan, who supported the Iraq war but came to bitterly regret his misjudgement, America then gave up any credibility to lecture the world by electing Trump. “Trump’s effect on our domestic politics laid bare the American system’s tenuousness,” he writes. In despair, Kaplan now wonders whether America’s very system of government is a productmatter of contingency, the creation of 18th-century events and ideas but one destined to disappear like every other empire. “Rather than the cohesion afforded by World War II and its Cold War extension, we now seemed headed into a messy, dangerous world, both foreign and domestic.” The cohesion has gone, impossible to measure, but there in the atmosphere of the Republic.

But, again, the paradox. Today, despite the chaos, the United States is not only maintaining its global power and wealth, but in many ways has deepened its dominance. Its economy is pulling away from Europe, while much of the democratic Western world is clinging ever more tightly to the legs of its big brother protector. Culturally, too, America remains the source of almost everything which defines our world, from its fashions and music, to its movies and even its political ideas. The truth is, even as we look on in alarm, we dress like Americans and think like them too. The progressive Left rails against the American imperial order only to copy almost all of the battle cries and slogans which burst out of the imperial centre.

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In the 16th century, the Florentine philosopher and statesman Francesco Guicciardini warned that the process of imperial decline takes far longer than is often imagined. “If you see a city beginning to decline, a government changing, a new empire expanding, or any such phenomenon — and these things are sometimes quite clearly visible to us — be careful not to misjudge the time they will take.” This is the situation we face today. America’s problems are clearly visible, yet so too is its enduring strength.

Guicciardini went on to warn of the dangers of underestimating a declining empire. “To be mistaken in these matters can be very harmful to you,” he warned. “Be very careful, for it is a step on which people often stumble.” This is the lesson that Vladimir Putin is learning today. He declared the American Century over and then found himself bogged down in hell in Ukraine, matched by a country a fraction of its size without a single American boot on the ground.

In Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, the deaf old man who liked to drink late on the terrace of his favourite café did so because he had lost his wife and was lonely. “Last week he tried to commit suicide,” the older waiter explained to his impatient colleague. “He was in despair.” The other waiter asked what about. “Nothing,” he replied. “How do you know it was nothing?” “He has plenty of money.”

This is America today. It is rich, but it is clearly in despair. It is indicting former presidents who may still go on to be future presidents. It is angry and divided, scarred by social breakdown and contagious outbreaks of violence. And yet its very chaos is still part of what makes it great, its riotous public clinging to the belief that they are not bound by fate — but the actions of individuals.

When we spoke earlier this week, he set out a radically different focus for the American military — away from Ukraine, and towards a conflict with China that he believes could come as soon as 2027. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

FS: You’re neither a full isolationist, nor a full maximalist — what’s your vision for American strategy?

EC: My perspective is that the right equilibrium for America, but certainly for a Right-of-centre political movement, is to ask what is in the American people’s concrete interest.

If you look at the voting bloc of the Republican Party — not to say that foreign policy should only serve them — but it’s made up of working- and middle-class Americans. I don’t think our foreign policy has served them. We’ve had this maximalist foreign policy that has proved disastrous. Americans are really tired of the “forever wars”. If you watch Fox News over the course of the day, the ad that leaves the most impressions, though maybe not the most common, is the one that’s for wounded warriors, people who were horribly wounded during Iraq or Afghanistan, or were killed in 9/11, or their widows. That is the mindset of a lot of Republican voters. I think there’s a real distrust and discontent about that foreign policy establishment, which is often the same people making the same arguments that got us into Iraq and the long war in Afghanistan. So what I’m saying is: let’s be unashamed in asking, “What’s in Americans’ interests?”

FS: And what is in their interests — let’s start by asking if America is too committed to the defence of Ukraine.

EC: The way you frame it is exactly the problem — we should be starting with China. It’s very revealing because a lot of not only the Biden administration but many Republicans of that above-the-waterline iceberg agree with you. I think that is the problem, because China is clearly by far the most significant challenge to the concrete, regular American interest. It’s far more formidable economically, but now also militarily.

The way I look at Ukraine is not in a vacuum or separate from China, but precisely through the lens of China, and through the lens of the recognition that we are neglecting the scale of the challenge posed by China. Through the defence strategy that I worked on, and other efforts, we have become more attuned to China, but it’s not a self-referential exercise. It’s more like a business. If you’re GM in the Seventies and you’re changing to adapt to Toyota, but you don’t do enough, you’re going to go out of business — or IBM vis-à-vis Microsoft.

In that context, I would say, yes, we are focusing way too much on Ukraine. I’m not in favour of just simply cutting the Ukrainians off. I think what Russia did and is doing is evil. That’s not the issue. But if our foreign policy is about Americans’ concrete interests, then we’re doing too much. We’ve already spent over $100 billion. We’ve sent equipment, which is not easily replaceable, which is relevant to the potential fight over Taiwan, and certainly the implications as it reverberates through our defence industrial base is very relevant. This stuff sounds arcane, but it’s not. For want of a shoe, the kingdom can be lost. Why are we taking risks on the most significant challenge to the US position in the world and our interest in the world in 150 years? We were a much larger economy than the Soviet Union. We alone were larger than the three Axis Powers, let alone with the British Empire and the Soviet Union. That’s the right way to look at this.

FS: But what does that mean, practically? If you were Senior Advisor to the President right now, what would you tell him to do?

EC: I would say, “I don’t want to talk about Ukraine right now. We’re going to talk about Taiwan and China and Asia first, and once we fix that problem to a satisfactory degree, we’ll spend time and political capital and resources on Ukraine.” I think we should put a lot more pressure and encouragement on Europe to step up and take the primary role. Why is the United States providing the vast majority of military and financial support to Ukraine — certainly in the military context, but also in the civilian area? That makes no sense. Europe is a vastly larger economic area than Russia. It has enormous latent military advantages vis-à-vis Russia. A lot of people have been celebrating US policy saying “American leadership is back” — I actually think this is bad. This is a failure, because if anything, it’s suffocated any effort by Europeans to stand up and say, “We’re going to take leading responsibility.” My basic attitude would be that Americans need to focus on China. We’re not just going to cut the Ukrainians off, but we are going to get the Europeans to do what we’ve been trying to get the Europeans to do since Dwight Eisenhower.

FS: But European countries have stepped up — Germany famously has torn up its postwar neutral position.

EC: No, the Germans haven’t, sorry.

FS: They are committing to vast amounts of increased expenditure on arms. Even if they were committing as much as you want, it’s going to take years or even decades for them to get the kind of military that you would need. You need American power there anyway, don’t you?

EC: Let’s get to the nub of the matter, which is: we don’t have time. It’s the assessment of the US intelligence community that Xi Jinping has ordered the Chinese military to be ready for a successful attack on Taiwan by 2027. It’s not a prediction, but that’s about as much warning as you can expect in the tough world of international politics. So we don’t have time. That’s four years away — in defence planning terms, that’s yesterday. We actually have very limited things that we can do.

The Germans deconstructed their military, not as a result of World War Two, but as a result of the end of history and the peace dividend. They had a very large and impressive military when the Federal Republic was seeking to defend itself against the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc. This has been a matter of policy, particularly under former chancellor Merkel — whose legacy will be ashes in her mouth. But the question is: can Germany do it? They’re not stepping up. Their military budget is going to be way below 2% of GDP again this year. The country that deserves applause, in this respect, is Poland, which is committed to almost 5%, and is actually putting its money where its mouth is.

FS: What about the UK?

EC: I give it a lot of credit for its ambition. Under Boris Johnson, it almost committed to 3% but I think that figure has been knocked down over time. My view is it’s great that Britain is more engaged on the continent, precisely because we are going to have to shift to Asia and the UK has very limited ability to project serious military power. if we’re looking at it from the enlightened, self-interested point of view invented in the United Kingdom, then we can’t get China and Asia wrong.

If China takes over Asia, in a hegemonic situation, which I think is its goal, our interests are going to suffer far more than they would suffer because Asia is a much, much larger economic area than Europe. China is a much larger and more formidable power than Russia is. So the question is, who’s going to bear the cost?

If Europe presents a future administration with “we just can’t do it, it’s going to take us too much time”, then, I’m sorry, you have to bear the consequence of that decision and inability. If you want to change that, we will help you, but we, the American people, are not going to allow China to take over Asia because you won’t take the steps needed to be able to defend yourselves. I think this administration is — and this is the point I made in UnHerd last year — actually not helping Europeans by providing a false sense of assurance about what the United States can and will offer in the future.

FS: Does that mean that attempting to keep back the Russian line in Ukraine or even push it further east is a dead project?

EC: I don’t think that’s true. Obviously, you can do things at the same time. The point is that at the political level, we need to make sure that everything that is even remotely needed for a Taiwan fight is allocated — that the resources go there. We gave a bunch of Abrams tanks to Ukraine — it is pretty hard to imagine Abrams tanks being useful in a fight with China. F16s and F35s are going to have trouble against the Chinese. So I don’t see why we couldn’t give F16s potentially to the Ukrainians. But also the Russians are having real trouble. They’re not ten-feet tall; this is not the Red Army of 1945. The notion that they’re just going to roll over the Ukrainians — you don’t have to accept that, Europe. You’re a huge economic area. The problem is that Europe is not stepping up.

FS: Where does Nato stand in this new world?

EC: During the Cold War, the relative balance of expenditures on defence between America and Europe was closer to 50%. I think we should go back to basics, which is: it’s not about the United States. And this is where that establishment and Europe’s interests do align, because the establishment in Washington loves to be the global leader — the Madeleine Albrights, George W. Bushes. “We stand taller; we’re the indispensable nation.” That’s great for that Washington establishment, but that is not what serves the people who are watching the wounded warriors. Why are the American people spending 3.5% of their GDP? It’s really insane when you think about it, that the Americans in Duluth, or Dubuque, or Denver are spending 3.5% while the Germans — who have more responsibility to provide for collective defence than anybody by orders of magnitude — spend 1.5%. And people say: “Germans don’t feel threatened.” Do you think Americans do? The only way to make this sustainable is to have a more balanced approach. I’m not advocating that the United States get out of Nato — to the contrary. I think the treaty is great. But if you go back and look at the ratification in 1949, this was not supposed to be the outcome — in fact, this was the concern.

FS: The treaty holds that “an attack on one is an attack on all”. That, if Russia invades Poland or Lithuania, it should be treated by America as an attack on America, and therefore would call on all of its defence capabilities.

EC: That’s not actually what the treaty says. And, of course, we would not treat an attack on a European ally the same way as an attack on the United States itself. The whole Nato strategy during the Cold War was explicitly about not doing that. That was why we developed flexible response, because there was a difference between an attack on Western Europe and an attack on the American homeland. Obviously there’s a rhetorical level at which that happens. The good thing is the Russians are not sufficiently threatening to make that a problem, because they can’t threaten European Nato, given the attrition that they’ve had in Ukraine, at least for some time.

That is a problem, much more of a problem, with China, which is, in a sense, the new Soviet Union. The point about Nato is that it’s got this post-Cold War model. We need to go back to something closer to the Cold War model, not the post-Cold War model, which is, basically, America takes care of everything. That benefited the Washington old guard, and benefited a lot of Europeans who could disarm. That doesn’t benefit the regular American people. If Nato continues in this direction, it risks breaking. My approach is designed to sustain Nato over the long term.

FS: What makes you so sure that China is actually planning some kind of attack on Taiwan?

EC: I don’t think it’s much of a debate anymore. The leader of the most unified Chinese government since Mao Zedong has explicitly given instructions to the party-army to be ready to attack Taiwan by 2027. And the Chinese pretty much assume that the Americans would come to Taiwan’s defence. That would mean war. That’s not a prediction, but if you go back to some old British wisdom represented in the Crowe Memorandum before World War One, usually aggressive powers won’t give you a precise date and time on which they’re going to move. And Xi Jinping has actually given us that. So we can never say we haven’t been warned.

The other thing is: it ain’t just rhetoric. Look at the military they’re building: it is obviously designed to take on, not just Taiwan, but the United States, Japan. They’re clearly developing a global military that looks like the American military: aircraft carriers, space satellites, nuclear powered submarines. Their basing architecture: Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, which is on the Atlantic coast of Africa. This is the future. I don’t make any predictions; I have no idea what Xi Jinping is going to decide to do. But if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, maybe it’s a duck.

FS: Do you think it would actually be an attack rather than just a blockade?

EC: One of the lessons of Ukraine is: don’t screw around; don’t pussyfoot around. If you’re going to do something, do it right. If you’re going to send two missiles, send six. I think the Chinese are clearly developing the capability to do just that. Yes — it’s difficult to mount and sustain an amphibious and air invasion across the strait, 100 miles. It’s not impossible. We’ve been able to do it over the last 75 years. With the exception of the Persian Gulf War, we haven’t, but everybody knew that we could drop marines pretty much where we wanted in large parts of the world, and that nobody could do anything about it. That’s one thing we have in our favour, the difficulties of such an operation.

To go back historically: the Wehrmacht was much more powerful than the remaining British Army after Dunkirk, but the Germans couldn’t find a way to get across the Channel and sustain it. That’s the model to think about. But the reason I think they’re not going to do a blockade — which I think they could, it’s not impossible, and that could succeed — is that it would leave a lot to chance. It leaves a lot in the hands of the Taiwanese; it leaves a lot in the hands of the Americans. It cedes the initiative, it cedes the element of surprise, and I just don’t think the Chinese are likely to do that. I think they’re at least as smart as we are — probably smarter given our foreign policy over the last 25 years — and so I would expect them to take the most advantageous approach: something that would move below the threshold of our response.

FS: But China is actually quite a cautious state. Why risk plunging the whole world into war?

EC: I don’t know how the Chinese have gotten this reputation. They won the Civil War through the most brutal means possible. Then they seized Tibet through invasion. They invaded Hainan Island as part of the conclusion of the Civil War, and they were planning on invading Formosa before they directly intervened in the Korean War with huge amounts of troops and fought the Americans and the British to a standstill. They also directly attacked Vietnam in 1979 — their ambitions were to go a lot further.

Why would they do it now? I think they actually feel that they need to. Xi Jinping is saying that the United States is trying to strangle China. You see what he’s doing with Vladimir Putin and Russia — they regard us as being in an almost existential struggle, which is very dangerous. The reason they would use military force is to secure their place as the world’s top economy, and a large guaranteed geo-economic sphere, because they can see what’s happening with things like Aukus and so forth. There’s a lot of balancing behaviour to check China’s overweening ambitions, and if they want to get out from under that, they have a strong incentive to use military force, and they’re preparing to do so.

FS: Let’s say that attack does happen. What do you want the American response to be?

EC: This is a situation where being “half-pregnant” is almost the worst approach. My preferred policy — which is, of course, designed to deter and avoid a war, rather than get into it — is for the United States to act decisively and expeditiously to defeat a Chinese invasion, which would involve anti-ship, anti-air, attacking Chinese ground forces that land on the islands. It almost certainly would involve selective attacks on the Chinese mainland that would be constrained to try to help manage escalation, which would be an uncertain endeavour. The best thing in this situation is to be as prepared as humanly possible, and not to get close to the marginal edge of a conventional fight — and that’s what we’re not doing right now. I think the problem is that if we half-bake it, we could get a situation in which the Chinese do it, and we offer an unsatisfactory or unavailing response, which means we’re at war with China, but we’ve lost. That’s the worst outcome, and that’s actually going to be worse for Europe, because in that situation, there’s going to be a giant sucking sound of every US resource going to the primary theatre.

FS: And that means greater investment in military hardware and deterrence around the South China Sea?

EC: No, actually the reverse. I’m in the “speak softly and carry a big stick” department. I think we are peacocking right now, and probably with the strength of a peacock. It’s mostly for show. Forgive the analogy: if you remember the movie Rocky 4, but Dolph Lundgren is the Soviet boxing star who was all business and quiet, and then you have Apollo Creed in the American flag dancing around, then Dolph Lundgren kills him in the ring. That’s my fear of the situation that we’re heading into.

I actually want us to really focus on sharpening that stick, making it a bigger stick, if you will, and doing less in the way of publicity. All these people are on the island and making all these statements about Taiwan — “the CCP is evil” and all this stuff. Sure, the CCP is evil. I sympathise with Taiwan’s freedom. But we are in a super dangerous situation and should focus on hitting the gym. In Europe — I’m not picking on Ukraine — we’re not anywhere near as disciplined as we want. There’s waste in the defence budget. There are difficulties in resuscitating the defence-industrial base. But that’s the world we have to live in. We have to live in the world of now. By the way, the American people are not showing a lot of interest in dramatic increases in defence spending. This is not 1980.

FS: Isn’t that a problem? If the American people aren’t interested and regard this as another “forever war”, they may not be with you on Taiwan.

EC: That’s exactly the problem and that’s one of the reasons I’m so worried about Ukraine. People say we can walk and chew gum — no, we should be husbanding the voters’ resolve. We should be very careful with their money. I think we can do it. We’re already spending almost a trillion dollars on the defence budget. But then, if we’re going to do that, we can’t think we can fight a proxy war with Russia indefinitely. I’m acutely conscious of whether the American people will support a defensive Taiwan. And the Taiwanese are not helping the cause by spending less per capita on defence than the American people do, which is insane. We are really on a knife edge.

FS: And you don’t buy the reverse argument that weakness on Ukraine would signal weakness on Taiwan?

EC: It’s such a tendentious argument. There’s a group now, particularly more on the Left, of people who are Ukraine hawks, who are starting to call for détente with China. I actually appreciate that, because at least we’re seeing a choice. You find this particularly among hawks, who say, “We’re going to do Ukraine, and it’s going to show China and then we’re going to pivot.” It’s a “we’re going to win the lottery” sort of strategy.

Obviously China is looking to some extent, but China’s main calculation is going to be the balance of military forces vis-à-vis Taiwan, and how resolute the American government and the American people are vis-à-vis this specific conflict. It’s the same argument that defenders of the Vietnam War used: that, if we don’t win in the rice paddies of Vietnam, we’re not going to win in Europe. Europeans at the time were saying: “We actually think this is a waste; we think you’re eroding American people’s support.” And in the wake of Vietnam, initiatives like the Mansfield Amendment tried to pull US forces back from Europe. You have the Robert Kagans of the world, who just constantly harangue the American people to “fight the jungle”, and about “global liberal hegemony”. And they’re tuned out. Of course they’re not going to do that kind of thing. So what we really need to do is be much more careful and respectful and husbanding of the American people’s resolve.

FS: Is there a chance you could make conflict more likely by anticipating it?

EC: It’s a very serious worry. We are now in a situation, because of our neglect of Taiwan, where the Chinese clearly want to subordinate Taiwan. That is not the issue — we are not going to catalyse something that they did not already want. They’ve been working, since the Third Taiwan Straits Crisis, assiduously and carefully and ruthlessly to develop a military to do this. By neglecting our defences there, we’ve now brought it into the realm of the possible. So now we’re in the situation, frankly, that Britain faced in the late Thirties, where you’re understrength in the primary theatre. Your choices are: to be weak and essentially ensure failure — you might avoid the war, but at the cost of all your important interests. Or you can arm — but then you might precipitate, at more of an operational and tactical level, a Chinese response to get out from under this. This is a problem I take very seriously.

FS: The alternative historical analogy is the First World War, which some historians would say that we would have been better off not having and was the worst case for everybody.

EC: The worst case was what happened. The second-worst case would have been German dominance of Europe, which would clearly have turned against British interests very quickly. The best case, and it is directly analogous, is that Britain — and I think Britain actually behaved really admirably from a strategic perspective — reoriented its whole military and strategic policy. The historic enmity with France — it settled that issue. It settled the enmity with Russia; it cut deals with the Japanese. It cut deals with the Americans, who — for all this Special Relationship stuff — saw Great Britain as our primary opponent in the 19th century. Britain settled that as well and focused on Germany.

The problem is it didn’t go far enough. In the decisive moment in the July Crisis, instead of Britain saying clearly it was committed to the alliance with France, it equivocated and hedged. And, more than that, if the British had the military forces already generated and ideally deployed on the continent — that’s the lesson Nato learned in the Cold War — I think the Germans could have been dissuaded. The lesson here is that getting 90% of the way there, or 85% of the way there, is not the same as getting 100% of the way there. You have to get 100% of the way there.

FS: How would you position the two leading Republican candidates — Trump and DeSantis — on these foreign policy questions?

EC: Both Governor DeSantis and Trump are with strategic reality, and where the voters are, far away from that traditional blob, that traditional foreign policy establishment. You have other candidates, like former ambassador and governor Nikki Haley, who are clearly running in that lane. Of course, President Trump was the first not to just talk about China, but really do something about it. Governor DeSantis has been very clear on the primacy of the China threat. I think that that’s very telling.

FS: Is there a difference between them?

EC: I’m not going to characterise their positions. You can go ask them. What I will say is, if you look at what they’ve said, for instance in response to the Tucker Carlson questionnaire, I think they’re both focused on China and they’re both concerned about overexposure in the Ukraine context.

I think that the strategy that I’m advocating for is the natural one for a future Republican administration, hopefully one that would win in 2024. Bear this in mind: the next presidential term is going to include the year 2027. So if you are the president, then you are going to really face the issue: am I going to be the first president to lose a major-power war? The United States withdrew from Vietnam or withdrew from Afghanistan, but we have never lost a major-power war. That is going to be a very sobering bucket of cold water to pour on the presidential administration as they transition, or if it’s a continuation of this administration or another Democrat.

In that context, you need to be super-real, super-practical, because you can’t do the walk and chew gum. But you also can’t take the Rand Paul approach, because then China’s going to take over Asia. That’s clearly going to be bad. So my argument is not going to catch fire in the US Senate necessarily. But what you are going to see is, I think, a future administration saying:  “We’re living in a really tough world and we can’t afford the old shibboleths, the old religion.”

FS: Would you work for either Trump or DeSantis?

EC: At the end of the day, anybody who’s working in a presidential administration is a servant of the people, but, of course, is working as staff to the person who has been elected. But if somebody wanted to put something like the approach that I’m advocating for, I would be honoured to work for them. If they’re not, then I think it’s pretty clear, I’m probably not the right guy.

John McCain used to say that we were living in the most dangerous time, and that was in 2006. And I used to think to myself, actually, that’s probably about the safest time we’ve had since before World War One. I think today is genuinely a really, really dangerous time. Look at what Xi Jinping was caught saying to Vladimir Putin on video: that changes are coming which have not been seen in 100 years. I don’t question this man’s resolve, his seriousness, his ruthless brutality. And I think that’s the kind of attitude that we need to take — obviously not the same attitude or same approach — but that level of sobriety and seriousness is what we need as we move further into this century.

The plan will involve not only the upgrade of Japanese weapons but the procurement of at least 400 US-made Tomahawk cruise missiles. It is a decision some have interpreted as effectively superseding the pacifist constitution and putting Japan on the road to becoming a military superpower.

The initiative shows how seriously Japan’s government takes the threat of an invasion of Taiwan. A Chinese takeover would be calamitous, as it would endanger the shipping lines that supply much of the country’s manufacturing materials and nearly all of its oil. With an American response far from guaranteed, the Japanese clearly feel they need to take their own precautions and signal their intentions unambiguously.

At present, Japan has a unified military structure, the Japan Self-Defence Force (JSDF), founded in 1954. With nearly a quarter of a million personnel, its original purpose was domestic security, logistical (non-combat) support for international peacekeeping missions under the auspices of the UN, and reassuring the population that Japan wasn’t completely defenceless.

Japan was obliged, under Article 9 of the 1947 constitution, to renounce war as a “sovereign right of the nation” — the only country ever to do so. The exact wording stated that Japan would never again maintain “land sea or air forces”, but over time the JDSF has developed from its initial Dad’s Army-style and scale into a significant military force, with license to operate overseas, albeit in limited circumstances. The rearmament plan marks a significant step towards Article 9’s further reinterpretation, this time into virtual meaninglessness.

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Japan’s defence from external threat has long been the preserve of US forces stationed in the country, sanctioned under the Security Treaty signed in 1951 and renewed periodically thereafter. A reorientation of this arrangement would liberate the US from much of its responsibility in the region and a good deal of the cost. The UK is also set to gain, as witnessed by the trinational fighter jet deal with Italy and new defence agreement signed in January.

How do ordinary Japanese people feel about it? The majority, it seems, are pleased. In an opinion poll published by public broadcaster NHK last month, 51% supported increased spending on the military, with 36% opposed. Where once any move to increase the radius of Japan’s military aegis would have seen thousands marching through the streets; now, there are only a few forlorn-looking protesters in Shinjuku station. The press is onside too, with even the Left-wing Tokyo Shimbun newspaper seemingly reconciled to the new direction.

The war in Ukraine has been a powerful catalyst in this change of mood. Nightly coverage of devastated Ukrainian cityscapes has reminded the Japanese that they have had their own quarrels with Russia in the past (over the Kuril Islands), and the threat of a nuclear option sends a chill down the spines of citizens of the only country to have suffered atomic destruction. Kishida himself is from Hiroshima and several members of his extended family were killed in the atomic bombing.

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As for energy, Japan imports 90% of its supply — with 9% coming from Russia — and so is especially vulnerable to disruptions to supply chains. Last May, Kishida announced the restart of the country’s nuclear energy programme, partly suspended as a result of the Fukushima disaster. This, too, was met with little opposition. The anti-nuclear energy movement, once formidable, has weakened considerably in recent years in parallel with the anti-Article 9 revisionists. It was reported in August that 60% of Japanese supported the restart, fuelled by concerns of a winter energy crunch if the Russians were to cut off supply.

The personality of Kishida may be a significant factor too. It is ironic that the current Prime Minister, seen as a milder, more Left-leaning figure than his predecessor Shinzo Abe, should be the one to reposition Japan as a significant military power, realising his forebear’s lifetime goal. But Abe, whose father had volunteered to be a kamikaze pilot and whose grandfather was a Class-A war criminal, was too closely associated with the war, and with the far-Right, for his arguments for reforming Article 9 to be accepted without suspicion. He was seen by many, fairly or unfairly, as an ultra-nationalist who sought to restore Japan to its pre-war glory and military dominance.

Kishida, by contrast, isn’t viewed with such animosity. The mild-mannered former banker is part of the moderate Kōchikai faction within the ruling party, which has generally supported a dovish foreign policy. He has acquired a reputation as being broadly supportive of the pacifist constitution, or at least lukewarm about revising it. For this reason, the Japanese seem more willing to believe his argument — that, in an increasingly dangerous world, the rearmament is necessary and defensive in nature, and not part of a secret plan to return to the dark imperial past.

But can he pull it off? This is the big question. Germany has made similar promises about bolstering its lacklustre armed forces in recent months and so far, they have yielded few concrete results. Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a €100 billion increase to its defence budget nearly a year ago, with promises to make a significant contribution to Ukraine. But apart from a few military vehicles, little has been forthcoming from the Federal Republic. There have even been hints that Germany may resile from its spending pledge altogether.

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The rearmament plan could unfold in a similarly nebulous fashion in Japan. Announcing a major new policy direction is one thing, turning it into a reality quite another. Kishida’s once impressive approval ratings have plunged since his controversial decision to award Shinzo Abe a state funeral. Beset by scandals that have seen four cabinet ministers resign in the last year, and with the fallout from revelations of his party’s close relationship with the cultish Unification Church ongoing, his political capital is low.

As for actual capital, it is unclear how the rearmament will be funded. Koichi Nakano, Professor of Comparative Politics at Tokyo’s Sophia University, says it is “most likely unaffordable”, without adding to Japan’s already-colossal public debt. The Japanese economy is in terrible shape; 2022 saw a disastrous current account deficit, the Yen has tumbled, and that once-peculiar foreign phenomenon inflation has begun to manifest itself. Signs have gone up in shop windows apologising, in exquisitely formal language, for even modest price increases. Tax rises are the obvious answer, but polling suggests the Japanese are resolutely against higher taxes to pay for an increased military in times like these.

This leaves Kishida in danger of overpromising. For along with the military buildup, he has committed himself to dealing with Japan’s demographic crisis by huge increases in welfare spending. The world’s oldest country is losing hundreds of thousands of citizens every year as the old die off and the young stubbornly refuse to procreate. By some estimates, on this trajectory, the Japanese will cease to exist in a couple of hundred years. The obvious quick fix is a massive increase in immigration, but that is still anathema to most Japanese who view their culture as a unique and delicate artefact that wouldn’t survive the rough touch of legions of imported citizens. Many Japanese are asking themselves: will it be babies, or bombs?

TSP Chairman Chen Yi-chi is diminutive, spritely, and much more youthful than his 50 years. Inspired by his time in the Netherlands, where he studied for a PhD in political economy, he sees the country’s “progressive, tolerant society” as a model for Taiwan. Resting on his desk is a plastic fan featuring the image of the TSP’s candidate in Saturday’s local elections. Wu Hsin-dai, a 35-year-old cardiovascular surgeon, is running in Taipei’s Nangang district. Chen is not optimistic about her chances. “It’s hard to break the grip of the two big parties,” he says, referring to the pro-China KMT and the ruling nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Attention for Saturday’s midterm vote is focussed on constituencies in the north, where the KMT hopes to wrest control from the DPP. Despite the prospect of a KMT reinvigoration, the vote largely seems insignificant to international observers. News about Taiwan is usually pegged to China’s sabre-rattling, particularly after outgoing US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August. While they might give a sense of public attitudes towards Beijing ahead of the 2024 presidential election, these local polls are largely irrelevant to cross-strait relations.

However, amid the din of campaign-truck loudspeakers, news of a concurrent referendum to lower Taiwan’s voting age from 20 to 18 has been drowned out. And while an unfeasibly high threshold makes passage unlikely, the plebiscite highlights Taiwan’s ontological dilemma: the existence of an alien constitution, imposed by a colonising power.

Promulgated by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist party (KMT) government in Nanjing in 1946, the Constitution of the Republic of China derives from the political philosophy of Sun Yat-sen. The teachings of the KMT founder and “Father of the Nation”, as he is known in Taiwan, are emphasised in the constitution’s preamble. To combat the corruption and lawlessness of early-20th century China, Sun espoused an enhanced separation of powers, into five branches — or yuan. In addition to the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial yuan, he proposed the creation of Control and Exam yuan modelled on China’s old imperial censorates. These latter two organs would be tasked with supervising official performance and overseeing civil service exams.

After he lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong’s Communists, Chiang, his KMT forces and roughly a million refugees fled to Taiwan, transplanting the ROC Constitution to the island in the process. The Taiwanese were given no say in this, and those who called for political participation were imprisoned or murdered.

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Fast forward 75 years to a democratic country around 267 times smaller than China, with a population less than 4.5% the size of China’s back then, and it is obvious these supervisory bodies are unnecessary. Taiwanese politics may be plagued with corruption, but these extra layers of oversight don’t help. If anything, they’re part of the problem. Appointments to the Examination Yuan have been labelled “fat-cat patronage” by opponents, with academics vying for the exorbitant salaries of the positions they carry. Control yuan positions are similarly cushy: members are frequently friends with the politicians they should be monitoring. It’s hardly surprising cross-party support for the abolition of the two yuan has increased in recent years.

But there is a more fundamental problem with the constitution. Having remained intact during the KMT’s five-decade dictatorship in Taiwan, it has undergone minimal revision since the country’s democratisation. As such, it continues to enshrine the One-China principle in law, legitimising the CCP’s otherwise spurious claims over Taiwan.

Saturday marks the country’s first constitutional referendum since the 2005 abolition of the National Assembly — a detested symbol of KMT cronyism. Nicknamed the “old thieves”, the assemblymen nominally represented constituencies in China for decades, drawing huge salaries, and maintaining the fiction of the KMT’s continued authority over the “Mainland”. By the Nineties, a democratising Taiwan had had enough, and the “10,000-year assembly” was wound down.

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Yet the amendment that abolished the assembly replaced one undemocratic element of the constitution with another, albeit less egregious, one. Until then, constitutional amendments were ratified by the assembly. Now, a bill must be initiated by 25% of Taiwan’s legislature. After that, approval from three-quarters of voters with a quorum of three-quarters of legislators is required. Finally, the amendment must be ratified within six months by an absolute majority of the eligible voting public. Before it even gets to the legislature, a proposal needs signatures from 1.5% of the eligible electorate — currently about 180,000 people.

It’s a credit to Taiwan’s civil society activism — particularly the efforts of youth NGOs — that we’ve got this far with the voting age amendment. Still, the prospect of its passage remains dim. And if this relatively uncontroversial amendment can’t be passed, what hope for root and branch reform?

“The constitution is both procedurally and substantively undemocratic,” says Lin Chien-chih, an associate research professor of jurisprudence at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s preeminent research institute. “The hurdle to amending the constitution is unreasonably high — the highest among non-federalist countries.”

The procedural obstacles are even more disconcerting when considered alongside the constitution’s content. Article 11 of the additional articles from 2005 refers to the “rights and obligations between the people of the Chinese mainland area and those of the free area [Taiwan]”. National unification is also specified as a goal. “In other words,” says Lin, “our constitution still bizarrely argues that the PRC is part of the ROC or at least that the territory controlled by the PRC is part of the territory of the ROC.”

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Not only is this “undemocratic in the sense that it defies what the Taiwanese people think or hope for”, but it also bolsters Beijing’s One-China narrative. Chinese officials regularly cite these provisions as confirmation of PRC sovereignty, a situation that Lin has described as “embarrassing and actually hard to gainsay”.

Does this mean the cause is lost? Not entirely. Social movements are one avenue to so-called “Taiwanisation” of the constitution. The 2014 Sunflower Student Movement was a notable success in this regard. After occupying the Legislative and Executive yuan, protestors managed to block the KMT government’s sleight-of-hand passage of a trade bill with China. But, as Lin notes, such protests cannot fundamentally alter the One-China bent of the constitution. The same goes for judicial review by Taiwan’s constitutional court, which avoids “the political thicket of controversies concerning national identity, operating at the margins rather than the centre”. A further possibility is constitutional desuetude — where provisions that fall into disuse are informally abandoned. With pro-unification politicians in Taiwan continuing to invoke the constitution’s One-China articles, Lin sees this as doubtful.

The best hope in the short term might be a return to the incrementalism that accompanied Taiwan’s democratisation. “This referendum could be a first step,” says Lin. “You start with less politically sensitive issues, and if successful, you move to things like the Control Yuan.”

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Despite a reputation as a radical with a penchant for hurling flip-flops at adversaries and paint at dead dictators, Chilly Chen agrees with this approach. From his 11th-floor office, a view onto the Control Yuan building is a daily reminder of everything he rejects. As director of the Taiwan Republic NGO, Chen agitates for an end to the ROC and independence for Taiwan under that name. But he is pragmatic. In the face of Chinese threats, Chen accepts international recognition under the ROC rubric as a temporary compromise. “The end goal is to build a country called Taiwan,” he says. “But we have to keep this island safe. We’re democratic. We follow the rules. Nobody wants a bloody revolution, and nobody wants to see a war. So, we’ll go step by step.”

Yet in a climate of heightened Chinese aggression, many analysts believe that wholesale constitutional overhaul must wait. Even the groups behind Saturday’s referendum share this view. “Most Taiwanese won’t accept just ending our constitution immediately,” says Michelle Wu, director of Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy. “It can be adjusted softly.” While Lin agrees that enactment of a new constitution is “neither feasible nor necessary in the near-future”, he fears that failure on Saturday could convince radicals that incrementalism is doomed. This, in turn, could destabilise Taiwanese politics. “I’m pessimistic, but I do hope it passes.”

Back at TSP headquarters, Chen Yi-chi expresses similar sentiments. As he escorts me to the elevator, we pass the wall of shame again. Shaking his head in frustration, Chen says Taiwanese have been reduced to “self-censorship” for fear of enraging China. The constitution, he believes, should never be sacrosanct. “Revising the constitution represents protection of democratic freedom,” Chen says. “If Taiwan wants to decide its future and China says ‘no’, they are attacking the practice of democracy.”

On paper, Biden’s words appear to be an encouraging sign of thawing tensions. The truth, however, is that the US-China relationship is at its lowest point since they established diplomatic relations in 1979. And much of the blame for that lies with the Biden administration.

While tensions between the two superpowers have been simmering for years, the new administration has taken the confrontation with China to a whole new level. Since he was elected, Biden has taken a much more hard-line approach to Taiwan than Trump, further boosting ties with the country and undermining the “One China” policy, under which the US acknowledges that “China maintains there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China”, but doesn’t recognise China’s sovereignty over Taiwan.

Biden has also made clear he believes the US should come to Taiwan’s defence if China were to launch an invasion — irresponsible remarks that have led the White House to clarify this would fall short of American military intervention. And yet, the presence of US warships in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea has increased significantly this year, to which China has responded by launching extensive military exercises around the self-ruled island. Admiral Michael Gilday, US Chief of Naval Operations, last month went as far as saying that the United States should be prepared “for a 2022 window or potentially a 2023 window” for war over Taiwan with China.

Despite such inflammatory statements, the chances of an all-out war between the US and China remain remote — just like those of a US-Russia conflict. Yet one cannot help but find the notion of a US administration openly raising the possibility of conflicts with the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers at the same time, and acting in ways that make such conflicts more likely, deeply alarming. Even more worrying, the Pentagon’s recent Nuclear Posture Review opened the door to the possibility of a first-strike attack by US nuclear forces.

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Taiwan is not the only issue on which Biden is escalating tensions with China. Last month, he also launched what Edward Luce has appropriately called “a full-blown economic war on China”, by introducing a vast array of restrictions on the sale of semiconductor chips to Chinese firms, as well as on the equipment needed to make them. Given the US controls some of the most critical nodes of the global semiconductor supply chain, such as advanced chip research and design, and that China still relies on imports for much of its high-end chip consumption, the impact on the country could be significant — affecting not only the production of goods that require semiconductors but also China’s ability to produce its own chips.

The potential impact of these measures becomes apparent when we consider the extent to which semiconductors have become the lifeblood of modern societies. As the historian Chris Miller writes in his new book Chip War: “Microchips are the new oil — the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips.” All of which means the US embargo could potentially hinder China’s ability to produce a large swathe of goods — not the best news for the world at a time of high inflation driven, in part, by supply chain bottlenecks.

The overlapping nature of the economic and military dimensions of the measure becomes apparent when we consider that more than 90% of the world’s supplies of advanced chips are produced by a single company, Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which happens to be located in Taiwan. This partly explains the heightened tensions around the island. It also means the ban could have serious geopolitical implications, potentially prohibiting Taiwan from selling semiconductor manufacturing equipment and advanced chips to Chinese companies.

That said, China already produces about 15% of semiconductors globally, and it’s only a matter of time before it figures out how to produce more chips on its own, even at the higher end of the technological scale. Some analysts even believe the move may actually end up hurting the US and its Western allies more than China, in a way not dissimilar to the way in which anti-Russian sanctions have ended up dramatically backfiring on Europe, further disrupting global supply chains that were already severely unsettled by the pandemic and then the conflict in Ukraine.

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Yet such economic reasoning has its limits. Many in the US establishment view war with China as inevitable, and so the move could be understood as a way to primarily weaken China’s military capabilities in view of the “big one”: a US-China military confrontation. As US Strategic Command head Admiral Charles Richard recently said: “This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warm-up. The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested in a long time.” This may be seen simply as an attempt by the Pentagon and to ramp up fears in order to increase their bloated budgets. But ballooning defence budgets also tend to be self-fulfilling, increasing the demand for actual wars.

The most appalling aspect of all this is that there’s nothing inevitable about a US-China war. If China represented a security threat to America’s survival, this might be the case. But it does not. The problem with China, as the recently released US National Security Strategy emphasised, is that it is the only competitor of the US with “the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favour of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit”, meaning the US should aim to “out-compete” China. The Pentagon’s latest National Defense Strategy also concludes that China “remains our most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades”, due to its “coercive and increasingly aggressive endeavour to refashion the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to suit its interests and authoritarian preferences”.

In other words, China is not a threat because it undermines US security interests, but because it will want to shape — and indeed is already shaping — the global political and economic order in a manner that serves its own interests, rather than just those of the US and other Western nations, as has been the case since the Second World War. The real threat, then, is not to America but to America’s hegemonic unipolarist ambitions and those who benefit from it. Recognising this is not about being “anti-China” or “pro-China” — it’s about acknowledging that a peaceful world order rests on our ability, as Westerners, to accept a more equitable distribution of global resources, and to tolerate different national cultures, institutional arrangements and practices, even if we find them disagreeable.

And yes, this will also depend on Western countries becoming less reliant on far-flung countries and overstretched supply chains for the provision of a wide range of industrial goods. But the current trend towards deglobalisation and reshoring — in itself a positive thing, given the disastrous consequences of hyperglobalisation on Western workers and manufacturing bases — is not driven by the desire to create more just, sustainable and self-sufficient economies, but rather by the desire to crush China’s rise, even at the expense of the well-being of Western citizens.

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Take, for instance, Biden’s focus on boosting America’s chip-making capacity. While semiconductors may be strategically important in “out-competing” China, they’re not particularly labour-intensive. Reshoring traditional manufacturing sectors would benefit US workers much more — but it’s not their needs that are driving policy. As the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik writes: “It is good that we are now moving away from [hyperglobalisation], given how damaging it was to our social fabric… Unfortunately, the great powers seem to have chosen a different, even worse path. They are now handing the keys to the global economy to their national-security establishments, jeopardising both global peace and prosperity.”

The good news is that the Ukraine crisis has shown that the days when the US could single-handedly dictate global politics are long gone: most countries have not followed America in slapping sanctions on Russia. On the contrary, more than a dozen countries have formally applied to join the BRICS grouping, following its decision to allow new members earlier this year. If accepted, the new BRICS members would create an entity with a GDP 30% larger than the United States, over 50% of the global population and in control of 60% of global gas reserves.

And when it comes to the prospect of engaging in a Cold War 2.0 with China, the US appears even more isolated — even vis-à-vis its closest allies. Recent reports suggest that Washington failed to convince its allies to take part in the sanctions and had to proceed unilaterally. This is unsurprising, considering the devastating consequences of Europe’s ill-advised decision to join the US in waging a proxy war against Russia. Thus Rishi Sunak recently hinted he will abandon plans to declare China a “threat” to national security as part of a major review of British foreign policy, while Emmanuel Macron, following a face-to-face meeting with Xi at the G20, made clear (according to Beijing’s readout) that he “hopes to continue working with China and deepen cooperation in areas such as trade, economy, aviation and civilian nuclear energy”.

But the country that has most openly defied US consensus on China is also the one that is suffering the most — Germany. A few days after America imposed its sanctions, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stated that decoupling from China was “the wrong answer”; earlier this month, he went to Beijing and met with Xi Jinping, accompanied by a business delegation of powerful German CEOs. In an essay in Politico, Scholz later explained the reasoning behind his trip: “No country is the ‘backyard’ of another. What is true in Europe regarding Ukraine is also true in Asia, Africa or Latin America. It is here that new centres of power are emerging in a multipolar world, and we aim to establish and expand partnerships with all of them. Thus, in recent months, we have carried out in-depth coordination at the international level.”

Understandably, many interpreted this as a rebuttal of America’s new Cold War, bloc-minded strategy. It remains to be seen whether this signals Germany’s intention to rebuild a trans-Eurasian geopolitical corridor. But it does show that it’s not China that is becoming increasingly isolated from the world — but the United States. The latter would do well to accept that the days of American unipolarity are over, and its attempts to drag the world into a war with China will only accelerate its decline.

***

The definition of “One China policy” has been amended for clarity.

This is an acute problem because, as is now quite clear, the United States is struggling to keep up with the military advances China is making to prepare for a conflict in the Western Pacific — the most plausible locus of such a war. Indeed, many of the most respected voices on US defence matters openly question whether the United States would prevail in a conflict with China centred on Taiwan. And while the Biden Administration’s rhetoric has been in many respects good and there are some promising initiatives underway, Washington does not appear to be taking the kind of dramatic steps needed to match China’s ongoing military buildup, which US defence officials term “unprecedented”.

At the same time, as the Biden Administration made clear in its 2022 National Defense Strategy, the United States does not have the capacity to fight both such an exceptionally stressing war with China and another significant conflict, such as in Europe against Russia or the Middle East against Iran, on even roughly concurrent timelines. This military scarcity confronting the United States is felt not so much in overall number of soldiers or total expenditures, but rather in the critical platforms, weapons, and enablers that are the key sources of advantage in modern warfare — heavy bombers, attack submarines, sea and airlift, logistics, and precision munitions. It is not clear America has enough systems just to win a war against China alone. Moreover, redressing this gap will be difficult, expensive, and take time. Just witness the challenges the US defence industry is facing in restocking the weapons donated to Ukraine.

In the meantime, there is a growing chorus of credible warnings that China might seek to move against Taiwan and precipitate a major conflict with the United States, possibly in the coming years. These warnings are not merely coming just from the military and conservative members of Congress (although they are). Rather, senior Biden Administration political appointees, such as Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Bill Burns, have issued warnings over the previous months that together seem to indicate an assessment that is something like the following: Beijing is resolute about solving the Taiwan issue in its favour; it has moved up its timeline doing so; it regards the most reliable way to do that as through the employment of overwhelming force; and an invasion of Taiwan in the coming years is a distinct threat.

There is an active debate about just why Beijing might seek to move sooner rather than later. Some point to Beijing’s potential assessment that the 2020s might be its most propitious opportunity in terms of its relative military advantage over the United States, Japan, and Taiwan. Others point to Xi Jinping’s own personal calculus; Xi has explicitly linked the resolution of the Taiwan issue to his central project of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and generally gives the distinct impression of being in deathly earnest about the issue. Finally, some argue that China faces profound looming macroeconomic and demographic challenges, and thus must move before it is hobbled. To be clear, we do not know whether China will move against Taiwan in the coming years; it is quite possible that Xi does not know yet himself. But together these factors have resulted in a very distinct increase in the level of concern that Beijing might do so. And given that China appears to assume that the United States will come to Taiwan’s defence, such an assault would very likely embroil America — whether we like it or not.

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How such a war would unfold cannot be known in advance. It is possible that China’s forces would prove as underwhelming as Russia’s, as many in America and Europe suggest. But there are compelling reasons to fear China’s armed forces would be far more effective in pursuit of their goal. China’s economy and population are an order of magnitude larger than Russia’s, while China dwarfs Taiwan in population by almost two orders of magnitude. China, while separated from Taiwan by the Strait, is far closer to Taiwan than the United States or its allies are, and Taiwan lacks land borders with US partners. Moreover, even as the Chinese have reportedly been improving their ability to operate jointly, the simple advantages of quantity and proximity may allow even a poorly performing PLA to overwhelm Taiwan, whose military appears woefully ill-prepared for a defence against China. As a result, it is simply a matter of prudence to anticipate that such a war would be at best a very stressing and consuming challenge for the United States, and that America could very well struggle — or even fail.

In light of this, how would America react to the outbreak of a war with China? Now, if the United States could handily defeat China as it could for many decades, there would be little problem. But this is now very much in doubt. And this is where the issue becomes very pointed for allies, including in Europe.

First and foremost, such a conflict would almost certainly suck away high-value US forces everywhere else in the world, including in Europe and the Middle East, and might do so very abruptly. US platforms, munition stocks, and key personnel would be depleted, relocated, or withheld for the priority fight. If the United States were locked in a desperate and uncertain fight over the world’s most important economic area (Asia) against its only peer rival (China), how could it sensibly keep forces locked up elsewhere rather than dedicate them to the main struggle? Iran, North Korea and even Russia pale in comparison to China’s power — so the United States would, rationally speaking, need to ensure it won the “biggest battle in the decisive theater”, as Churchill put it.

This would create vulnerabilities in other theatres — to Russia in Europe, Iran in the Middle East, and North Korea on the Peninsula. And such vulnerabilities could be lasting, whether because US systems had been depleted or because the United States needed to keep those forces in Asia, either in the context of a protracted war or to hold the line following the end of a conflict with China that had bloodied the American military. As a result of simple necessity, US allies in Europe and the Middle East would have to handle the threats posed by Russia and Iran much more on their own as the United States was consumed with taking on China.

Has Washington frankly and clearly prepared its allies in Europe for this reality? It certainly does not seem like it. In fact, US allies in Nato seem like they are betting on America maintaining its current high level of engagement indefinitely. This is a deeply imprudent approach — on both sides.

Second, the United States — especially if it does not adequately prepare its forces and posture in the Pacific for a fight with China — is likely to rely heavily on economic warfare against China in such a conflict. If the US military and its allies could handily defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the role of economic sanctions would be secondary since the main focus of American defence strategy in such a conflict would have been achieved. But if the conflict is more evenly matched — let alone if China seizes Taiwan and otherwise gains the advantage over US forces in the Western Pacific — then the United States will need to generate enough coercive leverage over Beijing to prevail. Since in these circumstances America would not be able to rely on its military to generate enough such leverage, it would have to turn to non-military sources, of which the most salient is economic power.

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Clearly the United States could not generate anywhere near enough such economic leverage over Beijing to even hope to shift its calculus without also having a lot of other important countries join its economic warfare effort. The natural candidates would include the important economies, and especially Washington’s traditional allies such as Japan, South Korea, Australia — and Europe. Europe’s market power is a vital ingredient to make this strategy even remotely plausible. Without it, such an economic warfare campaign would obviously be feckless.

This is not merely speculation. Washington’s behaviour indicates its revealed strategy is likely something like this. The Administration is not significantly increasing defence spending, nor is it sharply shifting US forces’ focus to the Pacific. In contrast, Washington has actually increased its forces in Europe. At the same time, the Administration has given off the distinct impression that it regards economic tools as a vital part of its strategy to deal with China, as evidenced by its recent move on semiconductors. Indeed, one might be forgiven for observing that the Administration appears to think that economic sanctions, international pressure, and diplomacy are the more sophisticated, “nuanced” approach to dealing with China, rather than a passe focus on hard military power.

At the same time, the Administration talks about allies — a lot. This seems nice and reassuring at first glance. But, put in this context, it takes on another complexion. The Administration is saying allies are America’s “centre of gravity”, its source of strength, the elixir of Washington’s strategy. What does this mean? Well, for this to make sense as a strategy, it must mean that these allies will step up and actually do more in confronting what the Administration itself is saying is the priority challenge: China — especially in the context of a desperate battle in the Pacific.

Washington’s actions on Ukraine — its leadership of the Nato response, its disproportionate degree of funding, its increase of forces on the continent — take on a different complexion in this context as well. It begins to look like a down payment. Washington has been there for Europe. Now it will expect Europe to be there for America if the balloon goes up in Asia. And it will be a big ask. Because our forces in Asia are not adequately prepared, our economic sanctions will have to do a lot more — and that will require heavy involvement by Europe in them.

Now, are Washington’s key allies ready to join such an effort? In Asia, probably yes, especially Japan and Australia. They are directly and fundamentally affected by how a war in Asia turns out.

But in Europe? I think scepticism is in order. Perhaps there is no more fundamental signal than the Chancellor of Europe’s largest economy explicitly saying last week that Germany would not decouple from China, and then his taking a trip with multiple CEOs of Germany’s largest companies to China. And that’s not even mentioning the sale of a big portion of Hamburg’s port to China. But, to be fair to Germany, most European countries seem to give little if any evidence of a greater willingness to decouple their economies from China, let alone join a massive economic warfare effort against it.

This has only become more apparent with the war in Ukraine. The bien pensant line is that the Ukraine war shows that aggression must be resisted. But the much more likely outcome is that the intense economic pain that Europe will feel as a result of the war will make it less, not more, likely to join an economic warfare campaign against China, which is such a significant part of European trade and investment. How likely are European capitals whose economies are taking body blows as a result of the war to dramatically intensify that pain over something happening halfway around the world? Not very, it must be said — and certainly not to the degree needed to make a difference in Beijing’s calculations about a war it would indubitably consider absolutely central to its interests.

Where is all this going to leave us in the transatlantic relationship if war breaks out in Asia? Nowhere good. Americans will feel they have been betrayed by ungrateful and perfidious Europeans. Europeans will feel put upon with ridiculous demands by Washington when they are already bearing the brunt of the pain of decoupling from Russia.

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Even worse, such economic warfare is unlikely to work even if countries do join it. The reality is that China has enormous economic capacity and thus could weather much of the effects of such a campaign. Moreover, Xi is focused on strengthening China’s resilience to precisely such an effort through initiatives such as Dual Circulation. At the same time, Beijing could reduce the efficacy of such an effort by exploiting sympathetic or profiteering third parties, ranging from Russia through the Middle East and even, to be frank, parts of Europe. The reality is that the prices of intercourse with the Chinese economy will be far too attractive for many nations to ignore. Further, as famously nationalist China is likely to be highly motivated over such a conflict, especially over Taiwan, it is likely to be willing to put up with quite a lot of pain. It is worth bearing in mind that economic warfare has essentially never worked as the primary route to victory in major wars in the past.

This is where things are heading, and it is not good. It will not result in success in Asia, and it will create fierce tensions — if not crisis — in the transatlantic relationship. There is, though, a better path. It is one that is keyed to where Americans’ and Europeans’ respective interests are most directly implicated and what would most effectively deal with the potential for Chinese or Russian aggression, and thus where each side of the Atlantic should realistically best focus. This is more of a “division of labour” model, rather than what we are implicitly pursuing today — which is more akin to a Three Musketeers approach: all for one and one for all. This sounds inspirational. But it is not realistic.

Instead, America should laser-focus its military on Asia, reducing its level of forces and expenditures in Europe. This will allow America to hopefully deter and, if necessary, defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan and other US allies in the region, using military force to defeat Chinese aggression rather than substantially relying on economic warfare. Meanwhile, Europe should focus on taking the lead on Ukraine and, more broadly, assuming the primary role in its own conventional defence. In this model, the United States can continue to provide more focused military contributions and support to Nato, but only consistent with a genuine prioritisation of the first island chain necessary to ensure prevailing there against Chinese attack.

In this approach, economic warfare would play a distinctly secondary role in dealing with an attack on Taiwan. This would impose far less political pressure on the transatlantic relationship. Indeed, in such a model the United States and Europe could continue trading with China. They would only need to decouple to the degree needed to avoid being brought to their knees by Beijing — for instance, in areas such as semiconductors, medicine, and PPE. Although they might well decide to decouple more for other valid reasons, it would not be strictly necessary from a strategic point of view.

This strategy correlates better both with what works and countries’ real interests in a Taiwan defence. We cannot expect Europe to do things for Asia that it will not do, and we must together adapt accordingly. There is a way to do so, but it requires Europe taking much more leadership and responsibility for its own security. Our current path risks not only defeat in the primary theater but a terrible crisis in the transatlantic relationship. Greater realism will help us avoid both awful outcomes.

Instead, Truss’s dash for growth spooked the markets, which disbelieved her tax cuts could ever create enough growth to pay for her massive borrowing, and in a desperate attempt to mollify them we’ve been suddenly plunged back to the grim economics of austerity. Learning nothing from the last time, public spending will be slashed, along with investment in research and development, hobbling prospects of future growth. At this stage, and in such a deteriorating international climate, a return to stagnation would seem almost like a blessed relief. But there’s another way of looking at the problem, as the MP wondered out loud: “do normal people even care about growth anyway?”

It’s a good question. As the authors of The Future is Degrowth remind us, despite being taken for granted by economists and ordinary people alike, GDP growth as a measure of economic health is a very recent phenomenon, the product of the need to measure the success of investment and to track industrial capacity during the Second World War. As they observe: “Before 1950, there was almost no interest at all in economic growth as a policy goal in political statements or economic literature.” Rather, full employment, stability and reconstruction were the government’s priorities.

The one-off conjunction of spectacular growth rates and rising living standards following the Second World War led, they argue, to a folk association of GDP growth and personal prosperity. As they argue: “The fact that key democratic, social, and cultural rights were… fought for in the context of expansive modernity, and that within the growth paradigm societal progress became conflated with GDP growth, has laid the foundation for a powerful common sense, based on lived experience, that social improvements do indeed require economic growth and the development of the productive forces.”

It’s not an unreasonable deduction: of course, post-war “high growth rates did translate to a certain democratisation of prosperity”. Yet the relationship between GDP growth and prosperity is far from exact. Britain’s economy grew 7.5% last year as we came out of lockdown, dwarfing the post-war boom, though few would claim we’ve never had it so good as in the halcyon days of 2021. The highest ever upward GDP swing came in 1939 as Britain pivoted to a war economy, though the Second World War was hardly a golden era of mass prosperity. At the peak of Britain’s industrial, economic and political might in the 19th century, growth rates averaged 1.1% — significantly below GDP growth during the 2010s, commonly experienced as an era of stagnation and falling living standards. The unsettling prospect of an imminent nuclear exchange would, after what would admittedly be a sharp fall in GDP, surely unlock a great deal of potential for long-term economic growth as the survivors rebuilt Europe’s irradiated ruins. Most people would, nevertheless, prefer it not to happen. There are, simply, many more aspects to prosperity than abstract GDP growth: the map is not the territory.

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So much for the abstract: in the real world, living standards are dropping sharply, as public spending cuts have led to a collapsing health service, creaking transport infrastructure and the police’s withdrawal from their basic functions of providing law and order. The stratospheric upward rise in housing costs functions, on paper, as GDP growth, even as it erodes actual prosperity. Desperate attempts to make the line go up on the chart — whether through Thatcher’s sell-off of public assets, the shifting of industrial production to the Far East, or the conversion of Western economies to debt-fueled speculative bubbles — have all brought temporary bursts of GDP growth even as they made the economy’s fundamentals weaker and brought lower living standards in their wake. We need a different way. The problem is, no-one agrees what that way is.

It is reasonable to assume, as has now swiftly become common opinion, that just as the economic crash of the Seventies swung the pendulum of economic orthodoxy away from Keynesianism towards free-market capitalism, so is the pendulum now swinging violently back away from what it is politically useful to term “libertarianism”. But to what?

The Labour Party, after some prevarication, seems to have settled on a modest version of the Green New Deal, an attempt to revive economic growth through massive investment in sustainable technologies. In doing so, it has emulated Biden’s Green Neo-Keynesianism, emphasising that once again, where American politics leads, economic orthodoxy eventually follows. Whether or not such a course of action will save the planet — and the reality is that there is no obvious replacement for fossil fuels without massive expansion of nuclear energy — the Green New Deal can be understood as an attempt to restart the stuttering engine of GDP growth through a second industrial revolution, this time undoing the unintended consequences of the first.

Will it work? Whether or not the markets will look as favourably on a Starmer government’s push for green industrial investment as it does those of America remains to be seen. There is a great danger that Truss’s botched push for growth has queered the pitch for any future radical attempt to escape stagnation. But then, if we disentangle the quest for prosperity from that for GDP growth, the answer is that it almost doesn’t matter.

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If the country has a reliable energy supply, has the industrial capacity to sustain the levels of technological sophistication to which we are accustomed, and can provide secure food and housing to its population, the hard years we are entering may still be experienced as an era of basic comfort. As a number of economists have declared, the age of growth may, in any case, have already gone for good, with all the advanced economies following Japan into a long cycle of secular stagnation, at best a broadly comfortable steady state economy with no dramatic peaks or troughs. As the “post-growth” economist Tim Jackson observes: “Low (and declining) rates of economic growth may well be the ‘new normal’.”

Such a vision accords with the vision of the sociologist Michael Mann, who, in the 2013 book Does Capitalism Have a Future?, breaks sharply with the predictions of his co-authors that global capitalism will collapse some time between 2030 and 2050. Instead, he argues: “Why should a growth rate of 1% be a capitalist crisis? Why cannot capitalism continue as a low-growth global system, which it was for much of its history? The 20th century — more precisely, the period 1945 to 1970 in the West and the end of the 20th century in the East — would then be seen as exceptional.” Even China’s spectacular growth rate “might be reduced down to the 1% level of the historic British success story” so that “all of humanity might live in an almost steady-state economy”. The future of capitalism, he suggests, “might not be tumultuous, but boring”.

But in the current international climate, steady and boring would look like an almost unattainable win. In general terms, despite every desperate attempt for a quick fix, the global economy has never recovered the sustained growth rates of the post-war era, and probably never will. Battered by the Seventies’ oil crisis, the global financial crash of 2008, the response to Covid and now by the war in Ukraine, the world economy still has the effects of the looming conflict between the US and China to prepare for, along with the increasingly tangible consequences of climate change.

It is just as possible, indeed probably more likely, that we have entered an age of growing, compound crisis. Almost a decade ago, the authors of Does Capitalism Have a Future? warned that “something big looms on the horizon: a structural crisis much bigger than the recent Great Recession”. As we await the blackouts and disorder of the coming winter, and try not to think about the prospects of nuclear war, it would be reasonable to act on the assumption this crisis has already begun.

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In these bleak circumstances, a focus on shoring up near-term national resilience ought to take precedence over the prioritising of long-term growth. When the confrontation between the United States and China begins — and the US government is now briefing that the invasion of Taiwan can be expected sooner than we thought — none of the current market orthodoxies will still apply. Whatever economic plans are laid now, no matter how palatable they are to the markets, will not survive.

In planning his invasion of Ukraine, Putin evidently priced in Western sanctions and Russia’s ejection from the international banking sector, gambling that its vast mineral resources and energy resources would count for more in the world today than the economic commonsense of yesterday. As winter approaches, it is not yet clear that Putin has lost this bet: like the First World War, the conflict in Ukraine makes no conventional economic sense, but has created its own new reality. Similarly, to win a protracted Pacific war against the greatest industrial power in human history, the United States would have to reorient its entire economy around the war effort. The panicked reactions of the market to Truss’s mini-budget no more reflect the approaching colossal reordering of the global economy than Westminster lobby gossip and Downing Street psychodrama reflect the great geopolitical trends already reshaping the world around us.

At times like this, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the End of History. Like youth, it will not come again. It would have been far better if the decades of bad decisions that brought us here had not been made. But they were, and now we must suffer the consequences as best we can. Even the years of austerity following the 2008 crash now seem a lost hinterland of wasted opportunity: we could have invested in state capacity to see us through the hard years we have now entered. We could have expanded gas storage facilities, instead of shutting them down. We could have built nuclear power plants, high-speed rail, and all the infrastructure on which modern life in a developed nation depends, at a time when borrowing costs were practically non-existent.

Instead, we feel the absence of investment just when we need state capacity the most, and are least able to afford it. Like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, we frittered away the summer without providing for the winter to come, and now we shudder as the first cold winds begin to whip around us. But at least the line on the chart went up, a little, as the government of the day reassured the markets.

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Just as we now perceive that we should have used better times to prepare for today, so it will swiftly become clear that we should be using the time we have now to prepare for the worse ones fast approaching. What we perceive as crisis is still a period of relative normality. At a time when the international situation is as menacing as it is, it would be comforting to have, at the barest minimum, a functioning government. Instead, we have Liz Truss, sitting on the front bench staring blankly into space as her party and country crumble around her.

Is she in charge? Is anyone? It ought to be impossible for Truss to blame the deteriorating international situation for her political woes without also proposing some measures to mitigate Britain’s exposure to the global crisis. But instead she broke her premiership and the country’s government chasing GDP growth it may never have been in her power to attain.

When Starmer wins the next election, he will be required to spend vast sums of money in rebuilding Britain’s decayed infrastructure, fixing the roof while the rains lash down. Given the international situation, Labour is correct in framing its proposed investment in infrastructure as much as a question of national security as a path to economic growth. Debt will grow, and it will have to: survival comes first, and abstract economic growth must be subordinated to this very basic goal. When even Europe’s economic giant, Germany, is trying to stave off industrial collapse, the idea that growth can be attained in the current circumstances seems entirely divorced from reality.

As eminent American economists now emphasise, near-wartime situations such as ours are not won with peacetime economies: the old rules do not apply. In any case, the feeble growth we experienced in recent years accumulated at the top, without bringing mass prosperity: voters are unlikely to punish a government that offers them higher living standards through redistribution, even without GDP growth. In the absence of growth, Labour must provide the basics of common comfort: if people can still eat, heat their homes and shelter themselves from the weather, they will count themselves prosperous, even if the GDP charts say otherwise.

Put to one side the fact that the impetus for al-Qaeda terrorism was not “our democracy” but America’s liberal hegemony and military interventionism abroad — the exaggerations in this dramatic piece of historical revisionism echoed a speech Biden had made in Philadelphia mere days earlier. Speaking in an eerie set-up at Independence Hall, Biden had warned against the threat of a different terror, closer to home — from “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans”, who “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”. According to him, they promote “political violence” and “undermine democracy itself”.

After 21 years, it appears we have gone full circle: the War on Terror’s “you are either with us or against us” mentality has come home. Where George W. Bush used American exceptionalism as a basis for militarism and political absolutism, Biden has leveraged democratic exceptionalism — weaponising the mythos of democracy for partisan gains.

Seen together, Biden’s speeches highlight the often-overlooked synergy between domestic and foreign policy: his rhetoric depicts his administration’s war against the amorphous spectre of  “MAGA fascism” at home and its stated goal of militarily defeating autocracies abroad as two sides of the same coin. These speeches could ensnare sceptics on all sides of the spectrum, enmeshing them in false equivalencies. Deny the Establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy and risk being brandished as one of the “extremists” at home; defend America’s civil liberties and due process toward January 6 rioters, and you are in league with Vladimir Putin. This is troubling for any critic of US policy in Ukraine or Taiwan right now, especially the voices of anti-interventionism on the Left. Such voices are already under pressure to conform to the party line and self-censor their restrained positions for fear of being associated with Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

Admittedly, the military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year was a breath of fresh air. But the Biden administration still exhibits decidedly hawkish attitudes, as showcased by the Alaska summit, the rhetoric around toppling Putin, and the recent security pledge to Taiwan. And to justify them, it spins an ideological narrative, centred on the existential clash between democracies and autocracies. What’s more, this invented Manichaeanism can be used to browbeat political opponents at any time. Put simply, in addition to creating a moralistic concept of statecraft to use abroad, this existential framework is used to silence those critical of American military interventionism and liberal hegemony, such as the foreign policy realists and restrainer critics of the Blob in Washington.

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This form of language game is designed to coerce critics into feigned obeisance, valorise the liberal hawks as the crux of the Democratic party, and undermine the remnants of the Anti-War Movement on the Left. It is perhaps ironic — if always inevitable — that the global Democracy Crusade would come home to haunt Americans. The abstract and ominous nature of “authoritarianism” is a convenient way to dismiss Trump supporters en masse as sympathisers with global tyranny — and to disingenuously equate realism and restraint with Trumpism.

This is an absurd equation. The Trump administration housed many globalists such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who used their tenure to advocate for “maximum pressure” against Iran, call for regime change in Venezuela, and facilitate the bombing of Syria. Moreover, criticism of US liberal imperium, and the “liberal international order” it has masterminded, comes from both sides of the political divide; it is neither partisan nor the exclusive domain of populists. While the logic of democratic exceptionalism has been routinely — if selectively — applied to justify liberal interventionism abroad, this agenda has an atrocious track record. It should remain open to criticism from all quarters, particularly in a democratic republic.

After all, the conventional wisdom underpinning the promotion of democracy as a foreign policy objective has now been seriously challenged. Such policies have routinely failed, especially because they tend to focus on the performative and procedural elements of democracy, rather than strengthening effective governance — an approach that masks profound systemic dysfunction. America’s failed policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti are perhaps the most notable examples, but so too are challenges in West Africa, where the US has been compelled to devise a new approach. The failure to prevent an anti-democratic coup in Myanmar, meanwhile, underscores the limitations of US geopolitical reach.

In a different era — at the height of the Cold War, perhaps — Biden’s Manichaean rhetoric might have been a rallying cry for many nations in the developed and developing world. But today’s era is multipolar. Nations, especially in the Global South, are unshackled from the ideological straitjacket of the Cold War and its perception of shared global threats; they are driven instead by the pursuit of economic prosperity and recovering their regional and civilisational strength. America’s democracy agenda rings hollow.

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The same is true at home. American public opinion has grown weary of the activist and internationalist posture of US foreign policy, embodied by decades of endless wars. Democracy promotion is no longer seen as an effective way to advance core US geopolitical interests. The US ruling class has therefore sought to adapt and reframe America’s global adventures and interventionism in terms of a domestic threat that would presumably be more easily marketable to the American public.

This logic has now become the operating principle behind what may be called the Biden Doctrine, which is expected to be unveiled in the administration’s forthcoming National Security Strategy. It holds that the fight for democracy is incessant, totalising, and all-encompassing. That neutralising the alleged threat of fascism at home, personified by MAGA and former president Trump, is part of a larger apocalyptic struggle to defend the liberal international order abroad.

The Biden Doctrine elevates “democratic exceptionalism” as the ideal trope with which to advance its foreign and domestic agenda, while using it as political mallet to normalise any efforts to silence, cancel, and discredit dissent. The latter has long historical precedents with the US ruling class in the 20th century: it echoes the US. establishment’s support for anti-German hysteria in the First World War, the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War, and the persecution of American socialists during the McCarthy era.

The underlying conviction is that in the increasingly polarised America, securitisation and weaponisation of threat, through its identification with domestic enemies, is a viable galvanising force — one that justifies and maintains the imperial controls of the state. In this neo-Jacobin milieu, democratism offers a crucible with which to meld and cohere domestic preferences with foreign ambitions.

During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden stressed the importance of building an “alliance of values” based on democratic principles. After two years on the job, his goal of democratic resurgence has become double-edged: to defeat political opponents at home and confront hegemonic challengers abroad. Biden might consider this double-edged agenda “a battle for the soul” of the United States and the “challenge of our time”. But this existential, ideologically-charged language only underscores the need for a sober assessment of this worldview — particularly at a time when America’s credibility as a model democracy is in doubt and its ability to lead remains uncertain.

The live fire military drills around Taiwan that China launched in response to Pelosi’s visit — which included the firing of ballistic missiles over the island — were scheduled to end on Sunday. But on Monday morning, this dress-rehearsal of coordinated manoeuvres for a potential future invasion had shown no sign of stopping. China also announced on Friday that it was cancelling high-level military consultative talks with the United States, and suspending cooperation talks on illegal immigrants, narcotics and climate change, among other things.

We can probably expect military matters to cool off in the coming weeks, ahead of the 20th Congress of the CCP in autumn. But for the moment we can be sure of only two things. First, China is bound to take further opportunities to put pressure on Taiwan using both commercial sanctions and military or diplomatic tactics. Second, for the time being, China is likely to avoid anything that might push its own faltering economy into a tailspin.

Any serious escalation of the tension could have grave implications for Beijing. Not only would it limit or cut off China’s access to semiconductors and Western technology, but it could see Chinese firms subject to further sanctions. It could also compromise trade with China’s biggest markets, namely the United States, the EU and developed Asia. China is dependent on the rest of the world for more than 80% of its semiconductor demand, three-fifths of which comes from the US, Japan and the EU. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces almost all of the most advanced varieties.

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The Chinese economy, meanwhile, is in bad shape. The target for economic growth this year cannot be met, and the property market, which accounts for over a quarter of GDP, is in disarray. Youth unemployment has shot up to 20%, and the labour market is far weaker than official statistics portray. Zero Covid policies, rigorously pursued both for public health and social control purposes, are stifling demand and turning foreign firms away from future investment in China. The nation’s development model is failing, but the government has no plausible strategies to re-energise it — or at least, none that is politically acceptable.

Beyond its borders, China faces the most extreme challenges since Mao, partly due to the imposition of commercial controls, restrictions and sanctions by foreign governments, and partly because of its own policies of disengagement and self-reliance. Its “no limit” friendship with Russia has only made things worse, and its behaviour towards Taiwan could also go awry. China may end up alienating not just the usual suspects — Japan, India and Australia — but also nations that prefer to stay above the fray, such as South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam. They could be drawn further into security alliances championed by the United States — which is exactly what China’s Global Security Initiative is meant to stop.

Given these circumstances, there’s little chance China will stage any form of assault on — or wage all-out war with — Taiwan anytime soon. But that’s not to say it will end the so-called “grey-zone” warfare that began before Pelosi’s visit. China could pressure or occupy any of the 100 islands that belong to Taiwan, especially the populated ones in the Taiwan Strait such as Matsu, Kinmen and Penghu, the first two of which are just 10km off the Chinese coast. It could from time to time warn off air and sea traffic in the form of a quarantine, trying to regulate the inflows and outflows of people and goods. In extremis, it might even try to blockade Taiwan, restricting its access to imported energy (which meets about four-fifths of the island’s demand for energy), LNG (which provides most of Taiwan’s electricity), or even certain foodstuffs and raw materials.

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The aim would be to force the Taiwanese government to in some way cede autonomy to the CCP. The likelihood of this happening is about nil — and Beijing knows it. Local Taiwanese elections later this year, and national ones in 2024, may further strengthen the country’s backbone and remind Xi Jinping that bullying and coercion are leading China down a blind alley.

At every point, then, China runs the risk of incurring greater economic and political pushback by putting further pressure on Taiwan. As it is, global firms are starting to reconsider their supply chain structures and investments in China, and a deepening Taiwan crisis would create major strategy headaches for foreign firms. No company wants to be caught in the crosshairs of conflicts, sanctions, higher insurance costs and conflicted legal positions. Decoupling, and the rebuilding of global supply chains, are both likely to increase as a result.

For the same reason, China’s desire to de-Americanise its own supply chains, sanction-proof itself, and re-orientate markets towards domestic firms, will likely increase. But following this path would probably take China further away from its quest for higher productivity and undermine the nation’s lofty economic aspirations. Engagement with the global economy was the essential handmaiden of China’s economic eruption; disengagement is likely to reverse that process.

Besides, if China decided to introduce something as severe as a blockade, in an attempt to sap Taiwan’s political will and stifle its economy, it would almost certainly trigger not only sanctions but also resistance. Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the United States would consider boycotts and embargoes a threat to both global and domestic peace and security. This doesn’t guarantee American intervention to break the blockade, or tit-for-tat measures, but there is a strong chance that Washington would react — and that other Asian nations would fear for their security.

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Short of outright invasion, therefore, it does not seem that China could really mount any campaign that would force Taiwan to capitulate. With every move to escalate tension, moreover, Beijing would confront political, commercial and perhaps even low-level military pushback — and significant economic consequences.

But what if circumstances changed? What if Xi went all in, and ordered an assault on the island? Even then, his chances of a successful occupation are slim. Whether China has the military capacity and logistics, now or in the future, is almost beside the point. The issue is whether it has the political will. As we know from Russia, the best laid plans can go awry, and in Taiwan an invading army would meet with spirited local resistance from 23 million people. Suppressing them would make China a pariah state for years, if not decades. The Chinese Dream would become a nightmare.

The CCP has placed huge importance on “reunifying” the renegade province of Taiwan with the mainland, but it would exhaust its political capital by mounting an invasion — successful or not. No one can dismiss the possibility that it might one day happen — especially if domestic pressures caused CCP rule to fray. But the party may well take a leaf out of the Western playbook by kicking this can down a long road, risking unknowable consequences at home.

Think of Taiwan as China’s Ireland. Even the timelines are similar. In the late seventeenth century, just a couple of decades after Oliver Cromwell brutally suppressed the Irish Catholic Confederation, the Qing Empire invaded Taiwan, bringing part of it under colonial rule for the first time. Even after its partial annexation in 1684, the Qing treated the island as a dangerous frontier, notable mainly for its wild “aborigines” and deadly diseases.

Some parts of the island were never conquered; upland areas with difficult terrain were left alone, so long as they did not interrupt the peace of the lowlands. The Qing regarded these areas in much the same way as British India regarded its Northwest Frontier: places of savagery in need of management and occasional punitive expeditions.

Taiwan only formally became a distinct province of the Qing Empire in 1887, two years after the end of a war with France, in which control of the island’s ports had become strategically important. The new provincial administration made a display of bringing the benefits of civilisation from the mainland: railways, medicines and taxes. Local reactions were mixed.

The island remained under Qing control for just eight years before it was snatched by Japan at the humiliating end of the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War. The treaty signed in the port city of Shimonoseki granted Japan control of Taiwan “in perpetuity and full sovereignty”. Taiwan became a colony again, this time to a different master. There was some resistance on the island, but it was rapidly snuffed out. Another set of railways, medicines and taxes were introduced.

Within a few years, people on the Chinese mainland forgot the cause of Taiwan. There was no agitation to “restore” the country to mainland control. Even the nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen ignored its plight. He used the island as a revolutionary base during his campaign to overthrow the Qing Empire, but did nothing to try to foment anti-Japanese activity there. For the Nationalists, Taiwan had been lost and that was that.

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This loss was then written into the country’s new constitution after the Nationalist Revolution of 1911-12. Article 3 stated simply: “The territory of the Chinese Republic consists of 22 provinces, Inner and Outer Mongolia, and Tibet.” The choice of “22” provinces explicitly excluded the former province of Taiwan. This vision of China’s territory, one limited to the mainland, was printed on all the country’s maps throughout the Twenties and Thirties. Taiwan was not part of the country.

This view was also shared by the Communist movement. At its sixth congress in 1928, the Communist Party recognised the “Taiwanese” as a separate nationality. In November 1938 the party plenum resolved to “build an anti-Japanese united front between the Chinese and the Korean, Taiwanese and other peoples”, implicitly drawing a distinction between Taiwanese and Chinese. Both Nationalists and Communists regarded the “Taiwanese” as a distinct minzu — which can mean both “nation” and “ethic group”.

It was only in the middle of the Second World War, once it looked like Japan was going to lose, that the rival Chinese leaderships “rediscovered” Taiwan. From mid-1942 onwards, the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek went to great lengths to redefine Taiwan as truly Chinese and to stretch the “national geobody” to include the island. This was, in large part, motivated by the idea that Taiwan was vital to the defence of the country.

A few months after Japan’s surrender, a nervous group of Chinese officials arrived on the island and began to set up a new administration. But there were many in Taiwan who had no wish to be incorporated into the Republic of China. Some had benefited from the Japanese occupation, some objected to the corruption of the Chinese government, while others were simply hostile towards incomers from the mainland. Protests finally exploded on 28 February 1947 and were met with extreme violence. By the end of March, at least 5,000 Taiwanese (some say 20,000) had been killed by the mainland forces.

These colonial attitudes towards Taiwan are clearly displayed in Chiang Kai-shek’s 1947 book China’s Destiny. There, he writes that “Formosa [meaning Taiwan], the Pescadores [the islands just west of Taiwan], the Four Northeastern Provinces [Manchuria], Inner and Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang [Xinjiang], and Tibet are each a fortress (or strategic area) essential for the nation’s defense and security.” For Chiang, these outlying areas must be attached to China purely to protect the core areas of the ‘motherland’ from foreign attack.

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Ironically for Chiang, Taiwan became a shield that protected him not from foreign attack but from communist control of the motherland. In 1949, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, the Guomindang government fled to the island. Initially this was only intended to be a temporary redoubt, a place to regroup before the recapture of the mainland. The Guomindang continued to present itself to the world as the legitimate government of the Republic of China and occupied China’s seat at the United Nations until 1971.

This fiction obscured the basic fact that Taiwan had only been ruled as part of the mainland for four years, from October 1945 to late 1949. But during this time the Guomindang brought, in effect, yet another colonial administration to the island. The party acted as if it were a Chinese government ruling the entire country including the mainland. With the force of military dictatorship, it imposed Mandarin over the local languages of Hokkien and Hakka and those spoken by the upland peoples. They imposed mainland norms under the banner of Chinese nationalism and attempted to impose a homogenous ‘Chinese’ identity.

The legacy of these impositions, and the resistance towards them, still divides politics in Taiwan today. The ranks of the Guomindang are still largely filled by the descendants of those who came to the island with Chiang Kai-shek. The current ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party, represents that part of the population that resists the idea of mainland control. The family of Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, is of Hakka origin, for example. Just like Ireland today, the country’s politics divide over relations with “the mainland”. Even the use of that term raises hackles in Taiwan, just as it can in Ireland.

Over the 77 years since Taiwan was reincorporated into the Republic of China, the political and demographic situation has changed radically. Only a very few diehards believe the “Republic of China” will ever recapture the mainland and “reunite” the motherland under non-communist control. The island is a de facto independent state, albeit one that is not formally recognised as such by any other country. If you visit the British “Representative Office” in Taipei, you’ll discover that it has exactly the same crockery as every British embassy around the world, except that the royal coat of arms is missing from the plates. The UK, just like everyone else, treats Taiwan as an independent government, but doesn’t want to advertise the fact.

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Taiwan’s non-existence has not prevented its businesses from exporting or its people from enjoying a standard of living equivalent to that in the United States, one that is vastly higher than China’s. Its passports (issued in the name of the “Republic of China” in Chinese but ‘Taiwan” in English) grant visa-free access to 145 countries, almost double China’s number. But turning this de facto independence into constitutional reality would, in the eyes of Beijing, be grounds for war.

Most Taiwanese — let’s call them that — enjoy the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. The PRC is Taiwan’s biggest trading partner, many Taiwanese are related to families living on the other side of the water, and in normal times the island benefits from the relatively free flow of people and trade across it. Aside from a few fantasists, no-one in Taiwan wants a war with the PRC, but nor do they want to be “reunified” with an authoritarian state that appears to be on a political journey from “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Xi Jinping learnt his history from the simplistic nationalistic books of his youth: just like Chiang Kai-shek, he is a colonialist. As the people of Tibet and Xinjiang can testify, he has a “steamroller” view of national unity. He orders homogeneity in the name of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. He will not rest until he has ‘restored’ every rock and reef in the South China Sea and barren Himalayan mountainside to the motherland. Taiwan would be the jewel in his proletarian crown.

The tight-lipped statement didn’t mention Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. But that’s hardly surprising. For much of Europe, the outcome of the war is existential: all eyes are currently on China to see if it will back Putin. Just days before Russia’s invasion, Xi Jinping and Putin announced that the friendship between their two nations had “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation”. Yet in the weeks since, Xi has been distracted: he has far more pressing issues to worry about than war in far-off Ukraine.

While bombs rain down on Mariupol, Covid remains the main story in China. Much of the rest of world has opened up, including India, but China and Japan remain major outliers. This week, the mega-city of Shanghai, with a population nearly half that of the UK, is being locked down; first, its futuristic eastern zone of skyscrapers and towers, and next week, its western half defined by its British-style art deco waterfront, the Bund.

Stories of commuters emptying shelves in supermarkets fill the headlines, just as in Britain in spring 2020. Hong Kong’s politics is no longer dominated by the struggle for democracy. Instead, public anger, still more freely expressed than in the mainland, has attacked Chief Executive Carrie Lam for a policy that has seen the city isolated from the world and the Chinese mainland for weeks, but still ravaged by growing deaths, particularly among the unvaccinated and elderly.

The economic and social turmoil that Covid has brought to China has shaped its reaction to Ukraine. It is certainly true that China will seek to strengthen its geopolitical position where it can — as indeed does every other major power. However, right now, any decisions on Ukraine will almost certainly be filtered through a domestic lens first and foremost. What will any decision do to the economy? How will it affect the march toward a third term in office for Xi, a decision unprecedented in the modern era but likely to be achieved this autumn at the Party Congress? These are hard questions to answer: no wonder that Xinhua readout was so short.

China’s relationship with Ukraine is part of the equation. Since 2019, China has been Ukraine’s largest single trading partner. And Ukraine is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, along with Russia. For years, Ukraine was proof that European powers at odds with the EU could find friends in Beijing; Serbia being another example.

China also imports grain from Ukraine, not in a way that makes it dependent on that supply in the way that some Middle Eastern countries are, but usefully nonetheless. And it has invested heavily in projects in Ukraine such as a metro rail system and wind energy farms, which it would presumably want to keep going in the event of a peace deal. A settlement that allows China to restore Ukraine to its existing place in its economic matrix would be welcome; whether Putin will permit that is another matter.

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There are also small, but significant opportunities for China to burnish its global image in its handling of the Ukraine crisis. It has plenty of peacekeeping experience via the UN, and actually has more peacekeeping troops trained than any other permanent member of the UN security council. In theory, then, its troops could be part of a UN force that keeps order, assuming that Russian soldiers would be unacceptable to the Ukrainians.

However, this remains unlikely, even if the UN does play a central role in any potential settlement. Past experience shows that China is uncomfortable with the political aspects of peacekeeping — particularly post-civil conflict resolution in sub-Saharan Africa — as it involved bringing civil society and opposition groups into authorised dialogue with government, something which China does not do at home.

Overall, China is much more comfortable talking about physical and economic reconstruction, as it did when it offered to build roads for the Taliban regime last year. But cash alone is not going to settle the Ukraine situation. As its relative distance from the current talks in Istanbul have shown, China is not yet ready to step up as a prominent mediator with a democratic state, just as Western actors have sometimes struggled in the past to deal with hybrid or semi-authoritarian states.

There is another area where China may use Ukraine for political rethinking: on Taiwan. It is far too simple to read Taiwan as a direct analogy to Ukraine, and Beijing does not do so. It has been thinking about the Taiwan issue for years, and regards it as a matter of internal politics, not an external breach of sovereignty. However, one revelation from the past month should surely have set alarm bells ringing: the massive miscalculation by Russia’s political and military elites about the nationalist sentiment and will for resistance of the Ukrainian people.

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The case of Russia suggests that a propaganda echo chamber does not produce good intelligence; if you only listen to your own propaganda, you can’t be surprised when it turns out to be wrong. There are thoughtful voices in the Chinese foreign policy world, muted but audible, that have suggested that China should take its own rhetoric about the decadence and weakness of the West with a pinch of the delicious weijing that makes much Chinese food so sharp.

The Chinese Communist Party has reportedly introduced a programme in selected universities and schools to educate children on the correct approach to understanding the “tragedy” of the Ukraine situation. The overall message is that the crisis is the fault of the West, and Chinese sympathy should take Russia’s feelings into account. Yet the programme still pulls its punches, and it’s still a long way from all-out support for Moscow.

According to the South China Morning Post, one university pledged to provide “positive guidance to ignite their learning passions as the Russia-Ukraine situation remains a hot topic for students,” while another addressed “the fundamental causes to Ukraine’s national tragedy.” But a clear direction on who is right and who is wrong is singularly lacking.

Like the rest of the world, China is going through a period of maximal uncertainty. Just as in recent years the British have adopted the term “permacrisis” to describe the endless rolling news cycle, the Chinese now speak of the world “going through major changes not seen for a century” (“bainian weiyou zhi da bianju”). China may have a five-year plan for its economy, but right now, regarding Ukraine, it appears that Beijing is as uncertain as the rest of us as to what the next five minutes might bring.

Today, China has something different, and more sinister, in mind under President Xi Jinping. In speeches Xi and other party officials have repeatedly emphasised the need to “tell China’s story well.” That responsibility — until very recently — has been outsourced beyond the parties propaganda agencies.

The Communist nation sees film not as a weapon, but as the ultimate in soft power. A way to assure citizens and woo skeptics alike that China’s way of life is superior. Obey the state. Never think for yourself. Silence dissent. Is it any wonder it needs glamorous stars to spin those bleak messages?

But which stars? The answer for most of the 2010s was: Hollywood’s. The studios are only too happy to play along with China, assuming all those checks keep clearing. Erich Schwartzel’s Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy is a terrifying portrait of a slugfest for hearts and minds around the world. It’s one the West is losing. Badly.

Casual observers know how Hollywood genuflects to the Chinese film market. They chuckled over John Cena’s apology, in Mandarin, for suggesting Taiwan was a nation. Others noted that the upcoming Top Gun sequel removed a patch from Tom Cruise’s iconic jacket for the same reason. Those with longer memories will recall Paramount changing 2013’s World War Z to ensure China wasn’t the source of the zombie outbreak, like it was in Max Brooks’ novel of the same name.

These humiliations only hint at the geopolitics in play, and the long game enacted by China. Schwartzel fleshes out the bigger picture, revealing a nation keen on weaponising pop culture’s ability to impact thought on a global scale. It’s also the world’s biggest bully, using its fiscal might — and enormous market of movie watchers — to turn capitalism against itself. “Propaganda” doesn’t do justice to the thought control aimed at by Chinese policymakers.

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They first opened their borders to U.S. films in the 1990s, without ever losing sight of the prime directive: Chinese supremacy. China’s cinematic market exploded in the 21^st century, pulling U.S. film studios towards them in the process. Think of all the money you’ll make from our film-frantic citizens. Stateside flops became hits after opening in China — remember the World of Warcraft movie? It sank in every market other than China’s, where it banked nearly half a billion dollars for Universal Pictures.

How much extra coin did Disney earn by opening Avengers: Endgame in China? Try $629 million. Stars have sold their souls for far less.

Except not just any film is allowed into Chinese theatres. Gay themes are quickly excised, as is any excessive violence and nudity. Puritanical censors are one of the many hurdles American films have to jump before they are screened in China. Films defying authority or suggesting the CCP is incompetent are verboten. It’s a miracle anyone suggested a Red Dawn remake where China is the villain, as MGM did in 2008. So China became North Korea before the film was released in 2012 — one of many examples of China’s ability to warp storytelling that  criticises the party.

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China is by no means the first country to put pressure on Hollywood. A fascinating chapter in Red Carpet looks back at 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The German government cajoled Universal to restructure Front to make it less critical of their efforts in the war. Universal did as it was told in order to access German theatres.

Decades later, Hollywood is once again ceding to a foreign power’s requests, but on a far larger scale than in the past. No US studio could ignore the fact that, before the pandemic, at one point China was building around 25 movie screens every day. So they censored their products. And it wasn’t just the studios. A-listers will lecture the American public on any topic that comes to mind — recall Robert De Niro’s splenetic interventions during the Trump era — except China.

It adds up to a chilling indictment of Western capitalism. When uncoupled from moral scruples, it plugs smoothly into China’s mainframe.

Authoritarians are usually afraid of their own citizens. If their leadership was so good, and so effective, they wouldn’t need to fiddle with every film that enters the country. But it goes further than censorship. The saga of Chinese actress Fan Bingbing’s fall from grace is deeply unsettling. This rising star had it all … until she incorrectly reported her film income, and the story went viral. The government erased her face from movie posters and placed her under house arrest, going so far as to observe her around the clock — even in the bathroom.

Her appearance this year in The 355, a girl-power actioner with Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz and Diane Kruger, came via digital trickery. Bingbing wasn’t allowed to be on-set during the shooting due to her banishment, so she was summoned on screen via green screen technology. You either play by the party’s rules, or your career is vaporised.

This authoritarian approach to cinema — a blend of puritanical censorship and pro-state cheerleading — is spreading. “If you want to change a nation, change it through stories,” the head of Kenya’s Film Classification Board tells the author in another segment of Red Carpet. Since 2006, China has loaned Kenya the best part of $10 billion for infrastructure projects — but Chinese influence is now more than roads and bridges. It’s culture, too.

In moviemaking, as in diplomacy, China is increasingly striking out on its own. Hollywood’s slavishness is no longer as effective as it once was. Some US movies now don’t get a Chinese debut despite endless diplomacy and backpedaling. And China is accepting fewer Hollywood imports than it has for years. Last year it blocked all four of Disney’s Marvel movies from release in its theatres.

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American fare that does get past the censors is regularly rejected by Chinese audiences who a decade ago lapped it up. Blockbusters like Wonder Woman 1984 now generate a fraction of the cash they once did in China. (2017’s Wonder Woman generated $90 million compared to $25 million for its 2020 sequel.) The recent Matrix Resurrections belly-flopped in China with an $11 million haul to date.

Instead Chinese audiences are turning to more blatantly nationalistic movies. Take The Battle of Lake Changjin, made in co-operation with the CCP’s propaganda department, and the most expensive film ever made in China. It tells the bloody story of Chinese soldiers thwarting American forces during the Korean War, with a cast of China’s biggest stars.

Luo Changping, a journalist famous for his corruption investigations, critiqued the film’s historical accuracy on Weibo as it stormed the box office. He vanished after was detained by police in October last year. In the end, this patriotic gore fest made over $900 million, making it the second largest global release of 2021, behind Spider-Man: No Way Home. Never has party propaganda been so effective, and so frightening.

Such brash patriotism is no longer the American style. We are a long way from the days of Capra and Ford. Hollywood stars routinely apologise for perceived sins, past and present. The wrong joke, the wrong political statement or just sharing the wrong virtue signal can spark an apology tour. When can we expect some mea culpas for an entire industry doing China’s bidding, while ignoring the country’s authoritarianism, militarism, and human rights abuses? Don’t hold your breath.

Red Carpet ought to be parachuted into the mansions and villas of Beverly Hills. Stars ought to emulate the courage of Richard Gere, who abandoned his mainstream movie career to speak up for Tibet. “Hollywood, once America’s most persuasive evangelist, remains beholden to another country,” Schwartzel writes late in the book. Ironically, that country is less and less interested in Hollywood. Gone are the days when American imports dominated China’s box office charts.

It’s a disturbing picture for US studios. Did Hollywood sell its artistic soul for nothing?

Recently, I found myself in an intelligent conversation with a minister in the present government. That itself was something of an achievement: one reason why the government is so bad is that the present prime minister has as far as possible surrounded himself with yes-men and deep mediocrities. His hope, perhaps, was that they would be slow to recognise his laziness, unseriousness and inability to cope with his job; and that their inadequacies would distract the electorate from focusing on him. My interlocutor slipped through the net — and had been thinking about the wider world quite deeply.

His conclusions were depressing. They were, in short, that it is an exceptionally dangerous place, far more so than most realise; and that however grim 2020 and 2021 were, 2022 could be the most perilous year, particularly for the West, since the end of the Cold War.

We talked through his reasons for this gloom, beginning close to home. Since it was at the forefront of most people’s minds, we discussed the fear, promoted by the government, that the National Health Service could collapse as a result of the supposedly highly-transmissible Omicron variant. Before the NHS reached that stage (with its inevitable effects on public morale), action would have to be taken that would badly affected the economy here, with the promise of a renewed taxpayer-funded furlough scheme if businesses were forced to close. The Conservative party was divided over the need for such measures, not least because the lethality of the Omicron variant had yet to be proved. Now, although the rate of infections has reached record levels, the rate of hospitalisations and deaths lag far behind. This is encouraging a substantial cadre of MPs to argue that we must learn to live with Covid, supported by a vaccination programme. Should Boris Johnson remain prime minister, such dissent in his own party would, if his form is any guide, lead to an unclear and confused response by the government and therefore by other agencies. That, too, would be costly, but it would be only the start.

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The new wave of Covid has attacked Europe, disrupting “normal” life. Even “rich” nations such as Germany (where the cost of the pandemic now exceeds €2 trillion, and inflation is above the EU average of 2.2%) are feeling the financial effects of a long period of subsidising non-productivity; in poorer countries in southern and eastern Europe, the prospects are even more stark, and tempers are fraying. Italy has a budget deficit of around 10%, and a new wave of restrictions will cause growth targets to be missed. Inflation will drive up interest rates across Europe, and the higher cost of servicing debt would put pressure on everyone with a bank loan or a mortgage: a factor behind, it seems, the Bank of England’s reluctance to raise rates in Britain, a reluctance that cannot be maintained indefinitely.

Poland and Hungary have both been sniping with Brussels over what they consider to be undue EU interference with their internal affairs — Poland about its justice system, Hungary about migration. Both countries, with an eye on the money that Brussels contributes to them — stress in public their commitment to a future within the EU, but an internal debate is being cranked up in both countries about when a breaking point will come, as it did in Britain in 2016. The EU has learned nothing from Brexit — quite the reverse, it seems — which is always a sign that history may repeat itself.

On the eastern, western and southern fringes of the EU, there is a respite in illegal immigration, brought on by the fact that, even in the balmy Mediterranean, it is winter. But the constant traffic (and trafficking) of predominantly economic migrants from Africa into Greece and Italy will keep up and doubtless expand during 2022, with the EU apparently as incapable of restricting it with a coherent policy for all 27 of its members as it was to fight the arrival of the pandemic.

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In the East, with the cynical and mischievous support of Vladimir Putin, Belarus has been allowing illegal migrants to mass on its borders with Poland and Lithuania in the hope of destabilising the Union still further. And Anglo-French relations have, according to various historians, reached a low not seen since Waterloo (the less hysterical might point to the results of the Royal Navy sinking much of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940, before the Nazis could get their hands on it), because of France’s willingness to allow its own illegal migrants easy passage out of its jurisdiction while attempting to enter the United Kingdom. This has now been compounded by President Macron’s decision (made with an eye to grandstanding before his attempt at re-election) to close his borders to visitors from Britain for fear of importing more Omicron — a disease with which his country is now, in any case, swamped.

The divisions in the EU over the management of the pandemic exploded the myth that the only difficulties in the bloc were over Brexit, and once Britain had gone all would be serene. That serenity has turned out to be elusive, with fissures opening up not just between eastern and western states, but between southern and northern ones.

And there are other aspects of politics within the European Union that make matters seem highly unstable, and inward-looking, as 2022 arrives. Olaf Scholz, the new German Chancellor, has a near-impossible act to follow after Angela Merkel’s 16 years in office. One of his difficulties is that the man who would succeed Merkel as the leading political figure in Europe, Emmanuel Macron, must fight a presidential election in April and May; and despite being notionally of the centre is engaging in straightforward Gaullism — or rather populism — to get himself back into the Élysée palace.

With another five-year term under his belt, Macron could successfully pull rank on the novice Scholz. There is nothing in Scholz’s political DNA that suggests he is remotely interested in such a virility contest; instead, he is likely to assume that because Germany has a significantly larger population, and significantly larger economy both in absolute terms and per capita compared with France, that leadership of the EU is his by right. Macron had no choice but to defer to Merkel; he would defer to Scholz only with insincerity and ill-grace. Suddenly, however, he faces a highly plausible Républicain candidate in Valérie Pécresse, and an off-the-wall populist in Éric Zemmour, who shares many of the views of Marine Le Pen but has none of her movement’s baggage. The French election is one of the least predictable in the history of the Fifth Republic: an outcome that destablises not just France, but the EU, is not beyond possibility.

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Yet it is in wider geopolitics that my ministerial friend believed the real dangers lie. Until recently, these were questions that attracted the interest only of foreign policy wonks, but they have started to force their way out of the foreign pages and into the front parts of newspapers and home pages of websites. Might Russia continue to unsettle Europe, and especially Germany, with threats to limit gas supply, and so push up energy prices during the coldest months of the year? Perhaps not, since those higher prices wouldn’t compensate for the loss of business, and Putin needs all the money he can get. But is Russia massing 100,000 of its troops on the border with Ukraine purely to twist the tail of the West, or does it propose to invade and raise its flag over Kiev? The answer to that, given Putin’s populist tendencies, is less predictable.

Similarly, have China’s naval exercises off Taiwan been merely a show of strength, or does it intend to attempt re-incorporating into the homeland the island that resisted the Communist takeover in 1949, and has flourished by comparison ever since? And if you were an aggressive power that has either little idea of western democratic standards, or little interest in emulating them, what better time could you choose to engage in lethal provocation than when an under-performing Joe Biden is, nominally, leader of the Free World?

Recently Biden admitted that if either China or Russia were to engage in acts of aggression the United States would be unable to intervene. Contrast this with the highly ambitious rhetoric of our Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who has warned Russia of “severe consequences” were it to invade Ukraine. But both Biden and Truss feel economic sanctions would bring Russia to heel, which would seem to be the triumph of hope over experience. Sanctions have been operating on Russia since Putin’s first attack on Ukraine in 2014, and have been tightened progressively. However, they have had no effect on the behaviour of the country’s kleptocratic leadership, whose management of rivals to Putin ensures that the “electorate” in Russia has nowhere else to go, despite the existence of courageous resistance groups. All gung-ho threats of sanctions need to be tempered by a recognition of Russia’s indifference to the views of tens of millions of its people. Recent protests by the West about the treatment of Alexei Navalny, one of Putin’s highest-profile opponents, have done nothing to get him released from his corrective labour camp just over 100 miles from Moscow.

No-one expects America or any other western power to send troops in to resist an invasion of either Ukraine or Taiwan. But the West has forgotten one Cold War lesson, which is that neither of these potentially aggressive powers — Russia very much one in decline, in terms of its population, wealth and demand for its resources, whose international last hurrah this might conceivably be; China very much one in the ascendant — gives the slightest respect to other “powers” they consider decadent. And decadence in this case has been the determination of the West, and particularly of Britain and of EU nations, to run down their armed forces since the end of the Cold War. Again, the purpose of these forces was not aggressive: it was to observe the old truth that no nation can engage in serious diplomacy unless it has force as a last resort. When Russia and China spot so-called powers that take a relaxed view of defending themselves, they act accordingly.

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Biden could take a detached view of the Ukraine problem (as the Obama administration did when Russia helped itself to the Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine in 2014) because no NATO power was involved. But what if Russia were to engage in further provocation, by demanding permit- and visa-free travel across Lithuania from its puppet state of Belarus to its exclave of Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg in East Prussia, a spoil of the Second World War? If Putin really wants to turn ugly, he would demand a 100km land corridor across the Suwalki gap, which runs from Belarus along the border between Poland and Lithuania. Both are members of the EU and NATO. What would Biden, or for that matter the EU, do then?

It could be that we sail through 2022 with vaccination programmes bringing down Covid, with the West’s economies reviving rapidly, stability reasserting itself in its democracies, America establishing a new authority in the world and the bullies of Beijing and Moscow abandoning their aggressive designs. For good measure, inflation could suddenly fall, and the West’s ambitious climate change policies could be implemented without some of the feared economic consequences. Sadly, however, the alternative to each of those conjectures appears the more likely short-term outcome.

But what should perhaps worry the West most of all, at the dawn of this dangerous year, is that none of its constituent nations has a leader of the experience, the clout and the moral authority required to deal with this bouquet of challenges if, or when, they arrive.

Over the past year, the question of whether or not the United States will defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion has shifted from abstract speculation to an almost existential question for America’s foreign policy elite. For decades, the US has pursued a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on this question — an ambiguity arguably heightened by Biden’s recent claims that it will defend Taiwan, swiftly followed by the State Department’s corrections that US policy on the matter has not changed (whether or not Biden’s personal ambiguity is intentional is of course another matter). 

In a new book, The Strategy of Denial, the American strategist Elbridge Colby aims to resolve this ambiguity once and for all: not only should the US defend Taiwan, it must — for the crucial reason that the integrity of the American empire depends on its winning or preventing this looming conflict. As one of the writers of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which reset America’s defence posture away from the greater Middle East and towards strategic competition with China, Colby is an influential voice: and if followed, the policy prescriptions within this book will affect Europe perhaps more than European policymakers realise.

A foreign policy Realist, Colby aims to bury the atmosphere of triumphalist liberal imperialism which has served America so badly since the fall of the Soviet Union. “The generation of post–Cold War primacy unmoored some Americans, or at least some of their leaders and eminent thinkers, from underlying realities, giving them a highly exaggerated sense of what the United States could and should accomplish in the international arena,” he notes at the beginning. But “that world is gone. The fundamental reality is that there are now structural limitations on what the United States can do — it cannot do everything at once. Thus it must make hard choices.”

Stripping away all the accretions of “defending liberalism” or “promoting democracy” with which American politicians are accustomed to shroud their defence of empire, Colby breaks down the raw facts of power to their essentials. Asia is the most important economic sphere in the world, and thus, to maintain its global preeminence, America must maintain hegemony in Asia. 

Europe is of secondary importance, and with no realistic hegemonic challenger to American dominance, can be relegated to a second-order priority. The rest of the world is of very limited importance: there is no challenge in the Western Hemisphere, and Africa, if of interest at all, will likely be dominated by whoever wins hegemony in Asia. 

To prevent China dislodging America from hegemony in Asia is, therefore, the central task of US foreign policy: but it is not an easy task. As Colby notes: “Restoring military dominance over China is infeasible, given its size and growth trajectory.” China’s economic growth has been of such historic, transformative proportions that “in purchasing power parity terms it is already larger than America’s, and China has been vigorously turning this economic strength into military power”.

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As Colby notes, the result is that a simple Cold War arms race to maintain military dominance is out of the question: China currently spends far less of its GDP than the US on defence, and can potentially vastly outspend any American increase. Moreover, he adds, “given the enormous demands of attempting to attain dominance against a power like China, the economic costs could be crippling, seriously stressing the US economy, the ultimate source of America’s military strength”.

Instead, the US must pursue a role as “cornerstone balancer” in International Relations terminology, the central linchpin of a vast multinational alliance which, when combined, will outweigh China’s military might. Rattling through the list of potential allies, Colby observes that Japan is central, and India, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia highly desirable, along with the militarily insignificant but geographically useful island nations of the Pacific. Other countries, such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, should be armed so that they can mount a solid defence of their own territory, without the US extending them a security guarantee it will find itself unable to fulfil. 

But for Colby everything centres on Taiwan: exploring all the potential rationales and options for China, Colby settles on a military fait accompli by China — an invasion — as the most likely course of action. Taiwan, internationally recognised as part of China even by the US, is politically the most obvious target, as the ratcheting up of bellicose Chinese rhetoric makes clear. Strategically, not taking Taiwan will prevent Chinese expansion in the wider Pacific, and taking it will offer China greater ability to project its power in the region. And invasion it must be: strategic “Greyzone” tactics short of war like a blockade, or “punishment” tactics like bombardment, are unlikely to succeed, he argues, as they would firm up Taiwanese and international resolve against China without delivering victory to Beijing. 

Having focused on the most likely Chinese course of action, Colby war-games how to defeat it. Allowing China to invade Taiwan is highly undesirable: to wrest back control of the island once the Chinese have gained a foothold and erected defences would place the US at a great structural disadvantage, forcing it to escalate the conflict into something akin to the great amphibious campaigns of the World War Two Pacific. This would, Colby notes, be “a highly costly, risky, and arduous venture for the United States,” in which America and its allies “would need to redirect their economies to develop and sustain the forces needed for such a conflict, which would likely involve high rates of attrition,” and in a situation, unlike World War Two, where “the United States would not enjoy a decisive advantage in industrial capacity”— indeed, where industrial advantage has already passed to China.

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With recapture out of the question, the American focus must be one of denial: denying China the ability to seize Taiwan, and preferably, dissuading it from even attempting it. Colby suggests that the US and its allies “seek to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft before they left Chinese ports or airstrips,” to “try to obstruct key ports; neutralize key elements of Chinese command and control and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance networks; or attack other critical enablers, including other targets on the Chinese mainland, so that surviving assets were more vulnerable to interdiction when they entered the Taiwan Strait” — and then disabling or destroying any ships that made it through.

Yet here we enter the most contentious aspect of Colby’s strategising. As he himself observes repeatedly, once the shooting starts, it will be very difficult to prevent a Taiwan conflict between the American-led alliance and China escalating into a broader war. Colby is bullish at the prospect of avoiding a nuclear exchange, reasoning that the consequences would be as catastrophic for China as they would for the US. Instead, he argues, America should make clear that it is interested only in fighting a limited campaign centred on the defence of Taiwan. 

But such a campaign would not be limited to the Taiwan Straits, with Colby observing that “if the United States forswore the ability to attack targets on the Chinese mainland that were materially involved in the war, it would gravely weaken its ability to defend Taiwan. After all, treating mainland China as off-limits would raise questions about American resolve.” And yet the consequence of such an approach would surely be retaliation, which “would likely include at least some air and naval bases in the United States as well as cyber and space assets. The defenders should therefore propose and seek acceptance only of rule sets, Colby argues, “whose implications they can live with”. How much bombardment of the American mainland the American public can live with for Taiwan’s sake is, of course, an open question.

The essential thrust of Colby’s argument is that America is unlikely to win an all-out war with China: the costs for America will be too high, and China’s geographic and industrial advantages are too great. In his words, “The plain reality is that China is too powerful for the United States simply to make it cease fighting; the United States and any engaged allies and partners would therefore need to persuade it to do so.” Ultimately then, it is on America’s diplomatic and military powers of persuasion that his strategy stands or falls. Firstly, he proposes to “bind” American partners and allies into a web of Pacific alliances, through treaties and joint military basing and operations in the region (we think here of AUKUS). Even if, for European allies like ourselves, our military contribution will be marginal to any Pacific campaign, the moral shock of being targeted by the Chinese in a pre-emptive strike might “bind” us further into the American-led system, Colby argues, as the outraged public demands a response to Chinese aggression.

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Indeed, such political considerations are essential to maintaining the great, if loose, alliance system to maintain American hegemony in Asia. China must be provoked into initiating any escalation of the conflict, so that it will always appear the aggressor; it must be permitted to strike as indiscriminately as possible (Colby urges the US not to provide potential civilian targets with air defences, reasoning that collateral damage will whip up the public anger against China necessary to winning a war); at every stage, China must be manoeuvred into situations where it is forced to escalate the conflict and so lose world sympathy, or back down. Over time, he reasons, the Chinese leadership will realise that the costs of seizing Taiwan will outweigh the benefits, and will be reassured enough by American pledges that the US will not aim to launch a wider war or dismantle their state that they will sue for peace.

Perhaps. It is a strategy that involves a great deal of careful, narrowly applied violence, which depends on what is ultimately the hope that China agrees to fight a war on America’s terms, playing to America’s advantages and negating its own. His hope is that by forcing Beijing to escalate the conflict beyond Taiwan, the American public, along with the publics of its allied nations, will fling themselves into support for a war to deny an aggressive China mastery of Asia; and that by forcing China to escalate, the war is, paradoxically, kept limited to the narrow bounds in which American victory is, though far from certain, at least possible.

This is a difficult balance, as Colby himself makes clear, “it is hard to overstate the scale and sophistication of the resources Beijing can bring to bear to subordinate Taiwan,” and even fighting a war against China on America’s chosen terms “would be exceptionally challenging”. And yet, Colby argues, it is necessary. Will the American public agree? It is difficult, from where we stand, to see that they agree on anything much. As Colby himself observes, “Americans may not be convinced that taking a leading role in denying another state hegemony over a distant region, however key, is worth the sacrifice and risk entailed”. Colby argues his case well, but there are a lot of ifs to think about here, not least for modestly capable allies like Britain plunging headlong into an Indo-Pacific tilt.

Colby himself argues that European countries such Britain would serve the American war effort more effectively by taking a greater role in the defence of Europe itself. Unlike British and German defence analysts who, for their own different reasons, are aghast at the prospect of American diminution of its commitment to Nato, Colby stresses that America’s interests in Europe are by a long way secondary to its interests in Asia, and that European countries — particularly Germany — should be obliged to take up the slack.

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A foreign policy Realist, Colby rightly urges America to give up its draining Middle Eastern commitments, to force Europeans to defend themselves, to extricate itself from the web of defence guarantees it has given to nations of no meaningful strategic importance and to focus all its efforts towards maintaining its global dominance through the defence of Taiwan against a rising China.  Colby’s strategy rightly roots itself firmly in a clear-eyed understanding of America’s diminished global reach following its unchallenged period of post-Cold War dominance, and indeed, Biden’s foreign policy so far has followed Trump’s (and Colby’s) Realist lead. Yet even after its pragmatic listing of all the ways it could fail and the great odds stacked against victory, Colby’s analysis seems to glide over what is surely America’s greatest weakness. 

Which actual or potential ally can be certain that an internally-divided America, whose chaotic politics is beamed daily across the world, has the solidarity and wherewithal to maintain even a limited shooting war at the other end of the world against the most powerful rival it has ever faced? How well-placed is 2021 America to walk such a narrow political, diplomatic and military tightrope, where the prospect of success is so slender, and where the risks of escalation are so great? Colby places great emphasis on the difficulties the US will find in holding together a fractious alliance in East Asia: yet whether it can hold itself together long enough to fight and win a costly major war is surely the greatest question challenging the empire’s survival.

But after an autumn of absolutely pathetic numbers — for a while we were barely jabbing 40,000 a day, first and second doses combined, down from ten times that number and more in the spring and early summer — the programme does appear to have picked up a little. There were hundreds of thousands of booster jabs alone given over the weekend.

The Government has pinned its entire winter strategy on those boosters. Sajid Javid, the health secretary, has said Plan B, will not be introduced because of them. Plan B is a milquetoasty set of minor interventions, including greater use of vaccine passports, and legally requiring masks in some places. They may ask for people to work from home if things get worse. It’s not exactly Protect and Survive.

And we’re not going there. Yet.

But there is a problem, which is that Covid-19 in the UK has become really hard to predict. Last year, whatever you looked at — cases, hospitalisations, deaths — the numbers followed a simple pattern. They started going up slowly, then they went up quicker, then quicker, then quicker. Then the Government imposed a lockdown, and, a little while and a few thousand more dead people later, the numbers crashed back down again.

But this year, the pandemic is no longer doing nice straightforward exponential curves. If you look at hospitalisations over the last six months or so, you’ll see that they started a familiar-looking rise in about June, and they clambered up to about 1,000 a day in late July and then – they just stopped, and went back down a bit. Then they rose again, and back down. Now they’ve started going up again, but … will that carry on? Will the curve fizzle out again? Unlike last year, it’s not easy to tell what will happen next.

Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist, explained why winter 2021/22 is trickier to model than 20/21. First, he says, in any epidemic, “When R is near 1, it’s a headache.” R is the number of people that each infected person goes on to infect, on average. So if your initial 100 cases lead to 200 subsidiary cases, then your R is 2. If R is above 1, your epidemic is growing exponentially; if it’s below 1, it’s dying away.

When R is well above 1, it’s fairly easy to predict what will happen: cases will go up, faster and faster, until it runs out of susceptible people or until policies and behaviours change so that R goes below 1 and the epidemic declines again. That’s how it was last year.

But now, thanks to vaccines and natural immunity, the number of susceptible people around is lower — we’re close to herd immunity — so even with essentially no restrictions, R is close to 1. And when it’s close to 1, smaller things can affect the course of the epidemic much more. “It bounces around,” says Kucharski. “Schools reopening, or closing for half term. The vaccine rollout and boosters. If the epidemic is increasing or decreasing, some small change can knock it the other way.”

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One way to think of it is that if your R is 2.5, and, for instance, schools close for half term, then your R might go down to 2.3. It’s the difference between an epidemic that’s spreading quickly, and one that’s spreading not quite so quickly. But if R is 1.1 and you knock it down to 0.9, then it’s the difference between a pandemic that’s growing and one that’s shrinking.

It also means that individual behaviour becomes important. Around our way, it recently became very obvious that lots of schoolchildren (and their parents) were getting the disease. So when ours got the sniffles we were quicker to take them out of school, and more wary of going to shops. Presumably millions of people have behaved in similar ways. It wouldn’t have made much difference last year — the disease was spreading so rapidly — but it could be enough now to change things from an up-arrow to a down-arrow.

There’s a more interesting dynamic at play as well, says Kucharski. Imagine the first two waves of the pandemic as a forest fire in a virgin forest. Once a tree starts burning, it easily spreads to the trees around it, and, left to its own devices, the fire will carry on until the forest has burnt away. An immunologically naive population is the same. “When you have a fully susceptible population,” says Kucharski, “the simple exponential curve models will give you something sensible.”

But we no longer live in a virgin forest. Vaccinations and acquired immunity means that the large bulk of the population is less susceptible to infection. In our analogy, you could imagine that it’s a far sparser forest, with occasional clumps here and there representing groups with lower vaccination uptake. Now, if a tree catches fire, it might not spread to any others. Or it might be in a clump, and spread around that clump quickly, and then burn out. Or a spark might make it from the clump to a nearby clump. It’s much more dependent on luck and randomness.

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“You have a much patchier network for the virus to spread in,” says Kucharski. “A lot more dead ends, and surges in younger groups and places with lower vaccination cover; you get pockets of susceptibility, and you get large outbreaks, but it has to work its way from one pocket to another. When you’ve got lots of these happening in parallel, you have a much bumpier dynamic, more conducive to a bobbling-along plateau than one that has clear growth or decline.”

All of which makes the epidemic much harder to predict. But there’s another layer of difficulty on top of that, which is that you’re not just predicting an epidemic: you’re predicting human behaviour. More specifically, you’re predicting the behaviour of the current government and parliament. There is not an algorithm which says “At 1,500 hospitalisations a day, we re-enter lockdown” or anything.

Other countries do have something like that — in Taiwan, for instance, there are four levels of restrictions, which are imposed on a specified set of conditions. Level 1 is imposed if there are cases imported from overseas that result in “isolated community transmission”; Level 2 is imposed if there are “domestically transmitted cases from unknown sources”, etc. If you could predict the behaviour of the epidemic in Taiwan, you’d have a pretty good basis for predicting the policy response to it.

But not in the UK. Plan B, or any further restrictions, will be imposed if the Government decides to impose them. I think that’s a bad system, and the Taiwanese method of removing the decision as far as possible from political pressure would be better. But that’s the system we have. So as well as predicting what the virus will do, we have to predict how 361 Tory MPs will respond to the virus, and how Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid will respond to them. So predicting whether we’ll end up in a lockdown is hard.

But perhaps there’s a more interesting question, which is: should we act as though we might have to, and start doing something about it now? Should we impose Plan B?

For all the current doom and gloom, we are in a better place than even the most optimistic of the government’s SPI-M-O models projections from early September. And those models now tend to forecast a decline in cases from later this month, even if we don’t impose Plan B. We’re not facing an immediate crisis.

Oliver Johnson, a mathematician at Bristol, says an autumn decline is plausible: “The key thing is it has been so crazy in schools, with 7% or 8% of schoolkids infected at any one time,” he says. “You can’t have that forever: you’ll run out of people. So it’s a case of working out when you’ll run out of people.” The little clumps of forest will burn down eventually.

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The pandemic, though, has been consistently hard to predict and the great failings of the British Covid response have been trying to be too clever, doing things too late, and not thinking about risk-benefit calculations or worst-case scenarios.

This feels very much like one of those situations. It’s true that, probably, if we leave it and do nothing, things won’t get that much worse, and may soon get better. But there’s a non-trivial chance that they will get worse. Given that the costs of imposing Plan B restrictions are minor, why not take simple, low-cost steps now to avoid the unlikely, but plausible and very bad, future shit show.

We have a suite of tools available to us – not just Plan B, but also things like increased rapid testing – that can avoid future disruption. But, also, if we impose them now, we can undo them later easily if they’re unnecessary, or tweak them if they’re not quite right.

For instance, there are concerns that vaccine passports will damage the entertainment industry and have only a small impact on the virus. If that’s true, we can reduce their use once that’s clear.

And we should be able to avoid stringent restrictions being imposed again, and another catastrophic Christmas lockdown. “Given the tools we now have available,” says Kucharski, “it would be completely absurd if we got to that point.”

I agree. We absolutely should not need to consider a Plan C, one in which we shut stuff down, stop people seeing their loved ones, close the pubs, ruin Christmas. And we can make it all but certain that we don’t have to do that if we take small, sensible precautions now. Hopefully enough elderly people will stand in cold car parks to get their boosters; but let’s not rely on it entirely.

Since then, while there have been proxy wars (notably Vietnam) and local conflicts, no big, powerful countries have gone to war with one another. But there are still tensions, and if you were betting on a war between two great powers now, China and the US would again be the most likely.

The Korean peninsula is probably not where you’d bet on it starting, though. Instead, you might look to Taiwan, the self-governing island off the south-east coast of China. Just this week, a Chinese magazine published a video showing a simulation of a ballistic missile attack on Taiwan, disabling its defences ahead of an invasion. A week before, China sent 28 warplanes, including nuclear-capable bombers, into the air defence zone around Taiwan. At the same time, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping gave a speech promising to “utterly defeat any attempt toward ‘Taiwan independence’.”

The US is an ally of Taiwan’s; it would be expected to defend it, should China attempt to invade. But just as in Korea, two-thirds of a century ago, the question is: would it? And will China invade?

Recently, a group of anonymous superforecasters have tried to answer that question, and shared their work with me. They previously had a go at forecasting the outcomes of the rise of various Covid variants; now, they are interested in whether we ought to worry about Chinese aggression over Taiwan.

Most people are rubbish at actual, falsifiable forecasts. If you ask questions like “Will there be a conflict between China and Taiwan in which at least 100 people are killed before 2026?” or “Will the US defend Taiwan in the event of a conflict between Taiwan and China?”, and ask them to give percentage likelihoods of each eventuality (60%, 20%, 99%), then most people do no better than random guessing. But some people do a bit better, and superforecasters do exceptionally well.

My six forecasters who were considering what would happen with Taiwan were asking several questions, but the key one is probably the one I mentioned above: how likely is it that we will see a conflict between China and Taiwan in which at least 100 people are killed?

The first thing they do is to look at base rates. This is also known as taking the “outside view” on a problem, as opposed to the “inside view”. In a classic example: you’re at a wedding and you’re asked whether the marriage will be a lifelong one. If you look at the couple and think “they look very much in love” and base your answer on that, then you’re taking the inside view.

If, instead, you look at how many marriages in general end in divorce – about 40%, in the UK – and start from there, you’re using the outside view. You then use the inside view to adjust from there: if you know that the couple are well-suited to each other, you adjust your estimate up; if you think they’re not, you might adjust it down.

Regarding Taiwan, one wrote: “An elementary application of base rate thinking means that we have to put the probability of China going for Taiwan within the next five years at below 50 percent.” Since 1949, when the nationalist government was defeated in the Chinese civil war and its leaders fled to Taiwan, mainland China has never invaded the island. If the odds of an invasion in any given five-year period were above 50%, then the chance of making it to 70 years without one would be about one in 16,000.

But, then, they take inside-view considerations into account. For instance: China is catching up on the US in terms of military might. It “is serious about taking control of Taiwan”, which it sees as a threat, and is making more aggressive noises. 

Taiwan itself is very badly defended and the defence it does have is ill-suited to the task (its military has “pursued a suicidal procurement strategy of expensive boutique US kit that will be no use in the crisis, like fighter jets that will be killed on the ground by the opening Chinese missile barrage”). The US military is aimed at fighting the War on Terror, not defending overseas territories against invasion. US public opinion might not support shedding blood over defending Taiwan. 

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On the other hand: a war would be a huge risk for China; “every Chinese leader has an incentive to leave such a risky endeavour to his successor,” another forecaster writes. In the short term, the balance of power is still with the Americans, and China can afford to be patient and wait until the middle of the century. The forecasters use facts like these to adjust their initial base-rate estimate. 

The six forecasters estimate the likelihood of a significant China-Taiwan conflict at between 8% and 23% in the next five years, with a median estimate of 14%. That doesn’t sound all that bad, but it’s worth adding something.

If we’ve learnt anything from Covid, it should be that preparing for the most likely outcome is not enough. The odds of a global pandemic in any given year is probably only about 1%. But if one happens, it turns out, it’s really bad, and it would have been worth investing a significant amount of resources to avoid or mitigate it. One of the superforecasters told me that  “a 14% chance of a proper conflict by 2026 is quite a big deal. If someone says there’s a 10% chance of a really bad outcome, the expected value [the impact multiplied by the probability] is still really bad.” So you might not think a particular bad outcome is very likely, but if it’s bad enough, then you ought to prepare for it anyway.

In the case of Covid, it’s understandable that the UK government didn’t foresee in February that a global pandemic was coming in March. Lots of people were saying it was, others were saying it wasn’t. But they should have foreseen that a global pandemic was highly plausible, that there was a non-trivial chance of complete disaster, and that quite drastic early steps to prevent it would have been justified.

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And a Chinese invasion of Taiwan has the potential to be really bad. The superforecasters put together some conditional forecasts as well – that is, predictions of the form “How likely is event X if event Y happens?” So, for instance, if there is a conflict between China and Taiwan, how likely is the US to come to Taiwan’s defence, and how likely would China be to preemptively attack US forces?

The median estimate for how likely the US is to come to Taiwan’s aid if there were an invasion is 83%. So we are talking about a very high probability that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would lead to armed conflict between the world’s two superpowers. They also think it’s about 75% likely that the US would try to sink Chinese invasion ships, and say it’s reasonably likely that China would preemptively attack the US forces in the region if they did attack.

What might the knock-on effects be, if the world’s largest economies end up in a shooting war? Well: the US imports about $470 billion’s worth of goods from China a year. The superforecasters’ median estimate is that that would drop by 20%, or, roughly speaking, $100 billion. That’s the equivalent of the entire economy of Ecuador or Kenya. It would mean a huge blow to the world economy and probably push millions of people back into poverty. Huge US firms such as Nike or Apple would most probably stop manufacturing goods in China, again undoing decades of economic growth that has driven the rise of the Chinese middle class.

And what’s more, it’s very far from obvious that the US would win. If a war were to break out over Taiwan before 2026, the median estimate is that there’s a 57% chance of Chinese victory; if the war were to break out between 2031 and 2035, when China has had another decade to build up its military relative to the US, the estimate is 66%. “Once committed, China would need to prevail in order to save face and not have their government topple,” writes one. “I don’t believe China will start a hopeless war, so the likelihood of winning is over 50% if they start it, says another. 

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I asked the forecaster I spoke to if they’d talked about how likely it would be that a US-China conflict might escalate to a full-scale war or even nuclear war, and they hadn’t; they may readdress the question in future. 

The Korean War started because great powers misjudged other powers’ willingness to defend allies and honour their treaty obligations: China and North Korea didn’t think the US would defend South Korea; the US didn’t think China would enter the war directly if the 8th Army crossed the 38th Parallel. It could easily happen again.

And the experience of that war shows that even a limited conflict between two great powers can be terrible – millions dead, years wasted, a country devastated for decades. Taiwan probably won’t spark a US-China war in the next five years, but it might, and if it does it would be a disaster.