After creating beachhead on Taiwan in 2020, the Marines are now expanding presence to train local troops.
(Originally published Feb. 24 in “What in the World“) The United States has quietly invaded China.
The Wall Street Journal broke the story—last October. While the public was distracted by the global impact of the war in Ukraine and its contribution to a looming food crisis, the Journal broke the story that the U.S. had quietly slipped about 30 special forces from the U.S. Marines into Taiwan in 2020 to train local troops.
This week, the Journal reported that the U.S. plans to more than quadruple its forces in Taiwan, sending as many as 200 in the next few months to expand its training program and help Taiwan develop what has become known as a “porcupine” defense against attempted invasion by forces from mainland China.
The U.S. hadn’t had any troops in Taiwan since 1979, when, as part of the normalization of relations with Beijing, the Administration of then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter agreed to withdraw U.S. forces and recognize Taiwan as part of China, albeit a self-ruled one. This “One China” policy ended decades since the end of Japanese rule in 1951 when the U.S. hadn’t recognized Taiwan as part of China. That rankled governments in both Beijing and Taipei. The Kuomintang, who then ruled Taiwan, still considered themselves the rightful rulers of all China despite having fled to Taiwan in 1949 ahead of Communist forces establishing the People’s Republic of China. Beijing has since classified Taiwan as a “renegade province” of China. Washington has merely acknowledged its claim.
The U.S. has since maintained commercial relations with Taiwan and supplied its democratically elected government with arms to defend itself, while promising under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act to maintain sufficient force to repel any attempted invasion. But the U.S. has all the while recognized the government of Beijing as the legitimate government of China, which includes Taiwan. Reunification may be inevitable, the U.S. acknowledges, but it must be allowed to happen on Taiwan’s own terms in the fullness of time.
That gave rise to a policy known as “strategic ambiguity” under which the U.S. kept mum on whether or not it would actually come to Taiwan’s defense against any attempt by Beijing to reunify it by force. President Joe Biden made headlines last May when he explicitly pledged to defend Taiwan against invasion from the mainland. Biden’s pledge was made in response to increasingly aggressive actions by China’s military around Taiwan, suggesting to Washington that Beijing was either planning an invasion or trying to bully Taiwan into submitting to a reunification plan.
But it turns out that the U.S. had already inserted forces to aid Taiwan’s resistance before Biden’s impromptu policy switch. In February 2018, the Administration of then-President Donald Trump drafted a classified policy document called the “U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific.” It predicted that China “will take increasingly assertive steps to compel reunification with Taiwan” and resolved to “enable Taiwan to develop an effective asymmetric defense strategy.” Trump declassified this document on Jan. 5, 2021, the day before his Jan. 6 attempted coup to remain in power.
China was already stepping up military exercises around Taiwan in mid-2020 as the pandemic raged, with increasing intrusions by Chinese military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone that prompted protests by Taipei that Beijing was preparing an invasion. Reports at the time suggested that China’s increased activity was a way of diverting public attention from the pandemic. But its more assertive actions may also have been in response to the re-election in January that year of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, who campaigned on a platform of resisting growing pressure from Beijing to accept reunification under a Hong Kong-style “one country, two systems” model amid the 2019 crackdown on democratic protests in Hong Kong. Tsai took office promising to modernize Taiwan’s military.
It was apparently around this time that the Trump Administration send U.S. forces into Taiwan, which Washington still officially regards as a self-ruled Chinese province and not, like Ukraine, a sovereign nation. These U.S. forces would already have been in Taiwan last August, therefore, when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi inflamed tensions by traveling to Taipei to pledge support for Tsai. Pelosi’s visit stirred up a hornet’s nest of Chinese saber-rattling that included a record number of intrusions into Taiwan’s airspace and the launch of missiles towards Japan and South Korea.
As unjustified and disastrous as a mainland invasion of Taiwan would be, stationing U.S. troops on what Washington agrees is domestic Chinese soil, even if self-ruled soil, is unlikely to convince Beijing that Washington isn’t agitating for Taiwan’s independence. Beijing denies it plans to invade and its own documents suggest it recognizes an invasion would be unsuccessful. A U.S. troop presence in Taiwan will certainly serve as further disincentive. But it also seems likely to heighten the kind of regional tensions that could tip China and the U.S. into an accidental military confrontation. It also risks pushing Beijing into a corner where it concludes it cannot afford to let the U.S. bolster its position in Asia further and must therefore also offer explicit military support to Russia.
As the world marks the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. is reportedly considering releasing the intelligence U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited when he said Washington was concerned that Beijing is considering providing lethal weaponry to Moscow to use in Ukraine. What isn’t clear is whether this intel consists of actual Chinese plans or just another request for military aid from Moscow as it scrounges for ammunition amid a fresh offensive. It may be nothing more than reported discussions by a China drone manufacturer, Xian Bingo Intelligent Aviation, to sell Russia 100 of its drones, each capable of carrying a warhead weighting up to 50kg.
Washington is still under the misapprehension that such public shaming discourages its opponents, rather than dares them to do precisely what Washington accuses them of plotting. Shaming Moscow about its troop movements around Ukraine last year didn’t prevent invasion, after all. On the contrary, it may have turned what was an elaborate bluff into a political imperative. Washington’s accusations about China arming Russia may also be a tactic to divert attention from Beijing’s 12-point peace proposal, which calls for upholding territorial integrity of all nations while calling for security guarantees for Russia.
Japan, it should be noted, concluded that it was in a similar corner when it made the fateful decision to attack Pearl Harbor in an attempt to destroy the U.S. fleet while simultaneously attacking Manila and British Malaya. America’s war in Vietnam, moreover, famously began with the commitment of special forces as “military advisors” after the fall of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
China isn’t the only potential enemy feeling antagonized by the U.S. North Korea has responded to U.S.-South Korean military exercises by launching several cruise missiles into the Sea of Japan, only days after it fired an intercontinental ballistic missile there.