February 27, 2024 - 1:00pm
China is the greatest threat posed to the US in the latter’s history, according to Dr Sumantra Maitra, director of research and outreach at the American Ideas Institute.
Last night Maitra argued at an event at the UnHerd Club that, while it’s unclear whether China intends to go to war, such an event would bring American deaths at a scale not seen in generations.
“The total Chinese manpower is 1.6 billion people,” said Maitra. “They have a production capacity which is more than the combined production capacity of the US, UK, European Union, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The scope of the threat, if that goes on a war footing, is something which we haven’t even thought about or grappled with.”
A war with China to defend Taiwan would mean 12,000 dead Americans within the first hour, because the Chinese would immediately sink two carrier groups, according to Maitra. At the present moment, the US lacks both the capacity and the appetite for this type of fight. “The US has never faced a challenge to the scope of China, and this is not being hyperbolic,” he said.
This doesn’t mean China should take a successful invasion of Taiwan as a given, Maitra explained. It takes less to defend an island than to conquer it, and even a successful invasion would be followed by a challenging occupation.
“They’re never going to go toe to toe with the Chinese Air Force, but what they can do is have guns in every house. That changes that dynamic of Chinese invasion,” he warned.
Maitra’s work has gained influence in Donald Trump’s circles, and some have speculated that his calls for a “dormant NATO” could make their way into the former president’s agenda. This would mean gradually removing American troops from Europe as continental powers increase their defence spending while maintaining nuclear protection from the US. In the event of a second Trump term, that could lead to a shift in America’s focus from Europe to Asia.
“That amount of death we haven’t seen since the Second World War,” he said of a potential war with China. “I don’t think they have the appetite to do that.”
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SubscribeAs we’ve seen, the biggest threat they pose is through biowarfare. For instance, a gain-of-function chimera version of the hantavirus could potentially take 35% of the world’s population. Instead of limited territorial warfare with the new-gen nuclear arms, synthetic viruses would really do the job of that old vision of nuclear Armageddon if the US is developing equivalent war tech in their Ukrainian labs.
Currently the US has a problem sending imaginary magic debt money to fund a war fought on a different continent by a different nation. Are they really going to spill American blood for Taiwan? Let China have it. If America wanted to lead the digital age it should have started decades ago as China did.
There is no appetite for war. Good luck convincing people to fight when we couldn’t get them to wear a mask in a shop for five minutes.
Mutely wearing a mask in a shop is hardly evidence of a martial spirit. Notwithstanding China’s systematic theft of IP, America has done a pretty good job leading the digital age. Passively surrendering other people’s freedom and resources to a hostile power rarely helps preserve one’s own.
Why would China start a war? It has nothing whatsoever to gain.
The anti China shtick is just Western hysteria.
Because their leader is a leader for life and doesn’t want to be seen to fail. The Chinese economy is unravelling and the population will probably not take as kindly to more drastic measures post-pandemic. What better way to distract from the problems at home ?
Agreed, it’s all showboating, they wouldn’t risk economic sanctions with the west.
By that logic, there would never be a war. One is reminded of Thomas Cromwell’s observation in Wolf Hall: “No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re not affordable things. No prince ever says, ‘This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have’. “
Wars are usually fought to obtain economic advantage. China will gain none by having a war.
No they are not. By conquering Taiwan Xi will complete the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, putting him on a par with Mao. He will have unified the country, confounded the West and added the technological and economic resources of Taiwan to those of China. These are the things which motivate tyrants, not profit and loss accounts. What economic advantage did Putin gain by invading Ukraine?
The economic advantage of not having Russia broken up by Neocons. The 20% of Ukraine Russia has absorbed is also probably rather useful…
Dr Maitra is a renowned conservative thinker and mostly correct. He is very focussed on a reality check to the Russia versus NATO issue.
CCP is the bigger danger to the US- but there too, I don’t think CCP will risk a direct conflict with the US given its present economic troubles.
Instead it will try to provoke India( with which it has the longest land border), the Philippines, Vietnam or Japan. Or use North Korea against South Korea.
It will also continue to provoke non State actors to move against US allies in Asia and the Middle East.
China as threat is one viewpoint. Another is recognizing that the US and China need one another, for economic purposes if nothing else. I don’t see where Xi is itching for combat; the Chinese have built a fortress, not an empire-seeking military.
Also, China’s stance re: Taiwan is the same as it has always been. Without attacks. Without blood. I think the mainland sees the island as part of the whole and as something that will occur without people being killed. Why some in the West so gung-ho for war?
Well this is refreshing, someone that does maths and makes judgements based in reality.
This man talks a lot of sense.
Let’s hope people listen to him.
Neither China nor the US wants to go to war with the other. China has a very good shot at improving its geopolitical status without war and perceives Europe and the US in a self-generated decline that plausibly will continue even without Chinese involvement. Plus, the Chinese in three millennia of history have initiated few offensive wars against foreign powers. While periodically defending against invaders–the Mongols, Manchurians, Japanese–China has rarely embarked on conquest beyond the Middle Kingdom; the support of Korea with Chinese troops in the 1950’s is the most recent exception and that was under Mao, a highly idiosyncratic despot to say the least. Never in its past has China demonstrated the kind of military imperialism associated with Imperial Spain, Britain, or Japan.
China has no interest in occupying territory in North America and, no matter its numerical advantage would never send its troops across the Pacific to attempt it. Xi wants Euro-American markets and technology and is playing the long game to have both. When the current round of anti-globalism subsides the titans of Western finance and industry will push hard for resumption of economic rapprochement with China. For evidence of that check out Jamie Dimon’s (head of JP Morgan) most recent Davos statements.
War with China in Asia would be a fool’s mission for the US and likely end catastrophically. If the US persists in making Taiwan inviolate, it will end at best in the kind of humiliation the USSR experienced in the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviets were never going to start a nuclear war over an island in the Caribbean and were not going to attempt a conventional maritime-based offensive against the US thousands of miles from Moscow and 90 miles from the Florida. The US is even farther from Taiwan and China more formidable industrially than the Soviets.
The West’s best game against China is also a long game that bets on the likelihood that Xi’s reimposition of communist ideology on Chinese business will kill its dynamic; that his nascent meddling in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East will prove naive and end as badly for China as it has for all the powers that preceded it; that the one-child Chinese generation that has little interest in procreation will produce a demographic catastrophe.
Great post. To my mind, the US has two major objectives in the Taiwan scenario. Objective one is to ensure than any American and other technology in the hands of TSMC as a chip manufacturer does not survive the invasion to be reverse engineered and/or used by the PRC. Objective two is to provide a significant deterrent to an invasion by formalizing a policy of permanent decoupling as a consequence of military aggression in the South China sea. In short, the US should implement a policy of complete economic severance with China that will set the boundaries for a second Cold War that will minimize the risk of military confrontation by severing economic and political entanglements.
The first goal is fairly straightforward. Plans should already be, and I suspect already are, in place for a scorched earth withdrawal that eliminates TSMC as a usable asset should an invasion/occupation attempt be launched. I strongly suspect it was the American CIA that blew up Nordstream 2, and doing something similar with TSMC should be well within America’s covert espionage capability.
The second objective is more challenging due to opposition both foreign and domestic. A successful invasion of Taiwan must be understood by the Chinese government to be commensurate with permanent economic consequences to China, including but not limited to the immediate and possibly permanent closure of the US domestic market to Chinese manufacturers, the immediate cancellation of any and all US government debt and federal bonds held by the Chinese government, the seizure of American assets held by Chinese corporations in the US. Naturally, the Chinese would be expected to reciprocate, and the economic consequences would be catastrophic, but if it were easy and there were no consequences, it wouldn’t be much of a deterrent. In other words, make the Chinese eat their own words. If you invade Taiwan, you invite the second cold war you say you want to avoid, but if you instead negotiate with the government of Taiwan and treat them as legitimate even as they remain a “part of China” and pursue exclusively peaceful and consensual means of reunification, then this second cold war and the economic pain can be avoided.