The Taiwan Challenge, With Oriana Mastro and David Sacks (Election 2024, Episode 5)

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the fifth episode in a special 2024 U.S. election series here on The President's Inbox. From now until election day, I will be sitting down with experts to unpack some of the most pressing challenges in the next president's foreign policy inbox. This week's topic is the Taiwan challenge.

With me to discuss U.S. policy on Taiwan in light of talk that China might seek to compel the island's reunification with the mainland are Oriana Skylar Mastro and David Sacks. Oriana is Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and courtesy assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. She's also a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, International Security, and the New York Times. Her most recent book, Upstart: How China Became A Great Power, was published earlier this year. Last fall, she wrote a piece titled “This is What Is Getting Wrong about China in Taiwan” for the New York Times.

David is a fellow for Asia studies here at the Council. His work focuses on U.S. relations with China and Taiwan and on cross-Taiwan Strait politics. David co-directed the Council's 2021 Independent Task Force on China's Belt and Road Initiative, and he was the project director for the Council's 2023 independent task force report on U.S.-Taiwan relations. David previously worked on political-military affairs at the American Institute of Taiwan, which acts as the de facto embassy for the United States and Taiwan in the absence of official diplomatic recognition. David's writings have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Hill, the National Interest, and Time Magazine, among other outlets. One of his recent pieces was “Taiwan's Trump Conundrum,” which appeared on CFR.org. Oriana. And David, thank you very much for joining me.

SACKS
Thanks for having me, Jim.

MASTRO:
Yeah, thank you for having me.

LINDSAY:
First question to each of you, is either of you advising either the Harris campaign or the Trump campaign?

SACKS:
No.

MASTRO:
No.

LINDSAY:
With that out of the way, what I'd like to start with is the question of the precise nature of the relationship between the United States and Taiwan. The United States does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country, which is why Washington does not have formal diplomatic relations with Taipei. But the United States also does not recognize China's claim to having sovereignty over Taiwan. So David, help me understand the precise status that Taiwan has.

SACKS:
So, from the U.S. perspective, Taiwan's ultimate status is undetermined. As you noted, Jim, the United States does not endorse the so-called One China principle, which is that Taiwan is a part of the People's Republic of China, and nor does it recognize Taiwan as a sovereign independent country. So our relationship with Taiwan is governed under the Taiwan Relations Act, a law passed by Congress in 1979 and then signed into law by President Carter, which outlines how the United States will conduct what is usually termed unofficial ties with Taiwan.

So the United States has everything that looks and sounds like a U.S. embassy, but it's not an embassy. Rather than an ambassador to Taiwan, we have the director of the American Institute in Taiwan. But what I like to tell people who ask about this question is that even though our ties with Taiwan are unofficial, we have a closer bilateral relationship with Taiwan than we do with most countries around the world. Taiwan is a top-ten trading partner of the United States. Our security cooperation with Taiwan is far more robust than I would even argue some formal U.S. allies and the people-to-people ties, cultural ties are also quite deep.

LINDSAY:
David, let me just ask a follow-up question on that. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter tore up the Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan as part of the formal recognition of mainland China. What, if anything, does the Taiwan Relations Act that you referenced obligate the United States to do in terms of Taiwan's security and defense?

SACKS:
So there are a couple of pillars of the Taiwan Relations Act with respect to the security relationship. So, as you noted, the United States abrogated a Mutual Defense Treaty that was signed in 1954 in the Eisenhower administration, but the United States says that it will maintain the capacity to come to Taiwan's defense. And there you have what is known as strategic ambiguity. The United States does not say explicitly under the Taiwan Relations Act that it would come to Taiwan's defense, but the military must maintain the capacity to do so.

The second is to provide Taiwan with defense articles and services in such quantity that Taiwan can maintain a sufficient self-defense capability. So here we get into the U.S. to maintaining some semblance of a military balance in the Taiwan Strait. And another pillar of the Taiwan Relations Act is to consider any attempt to resolve this question by non-peaceful means to be a serious concern to the United States.

LINDSAY:
One last question for you, David, then I want to bring Oriana into the conversation, and that is, what does the term strategic ambiguity mean in this context? I hear it thrown around a lot. What does it precisely mean?

SACKS:
Yeah, so as I just mentioned, the Taiwan Relations Act does not commit the United States to coming to Taiwan's defense. So it's different than our relationship with U.S. Treaty allies like Japan, South Korea, Australia, and others in the Indo-Pacific. But at the same time, no U.S. president has said that the United States would not come to Taiwan's defense. And for decades, I think it was safe to say Beijing believed that the United States would defend Taiwan.

So the ambiguity here is that the United States, for decades, has not said that it would come to Taiwan's defense, but it has to essentially keep Beijing guessing and assuming that it would do so. Now, people have argued that that is a pretty good formula for the United States to follow because, on the one hand, it deters Beijing from using military force. And on the other hand, it would deter adventurism from Taipei, for instance, by unilaterally declaring independence and potentially triggering a conflict.

But what I've argued before is that I think we have to reassess whether strategic ambiguity is suited to today's world, where we have a much more assertive Beijing. The military balance has shifted in China's favor, and I'm sure we'll get into that. And there are questions, I think, in China on whether the United States would come to Taiwan's defense, and so that is something that I think should be debated. There has been a debate on strategic ambiguity versus strategic clarity, and that's alive and well.

LINDSAY:
I want to get to all of those questions, David, but I want to bring Oriana into the conversation at this point. If you wish to amend or contest anything that David just said, Oriana, you're free to do so. But I was hoping to draw you out on this question about China's intentions.
There's been a lot of supposition in recent months that Xi Jinping plans to forcibly reunify Taiwan with the mainland, perhaps as soon as the next few years. A lot of that conversation seems to be based on news reports that the United States intelligence community has concluded that Xi told the Chinese military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. How do you assess that news?

MASTRO:
So just like the political side of this issue, the military side is equally complex. So, first and foremost, I don't like to really put this in the context of a Xi Jinping issue. The military of China since the 1990s have been modernizing primarily with this goal in mind of being able to take Taiwan by force. So it's not the case that Xi Jinping woke up. He comes to power in 2013, he wakes up and he's like, "Taiwan's really important to me, and now I want us to focus on Taiwan." That 2027 date is just the end of the next five-year plan. But there have been many five-year plans before that that focused on getting ready.

So first, the Chinese military sought to have modern equipment. So in the 1990s, maybe their services had 0 to 4 percent of their equipment was modern. Once they modernized, now they have the vast majority of their equipment is modern. Then they built it up in numbers. So some of our listeners might have heard that the Chinese now have more ships than the whole U.S. Navy, for example. And then Xi Jinping embarked on this last stage of modernization, which was to reorganize the military to help it work closer together between the services. So it used to be very army-dominant, but it doesn't take a military strategist to understand that a war over Taiwan is not a ground war, it's an air and sea battle.

And Xi Jinping needed to give some priority of place to the navy and to the air force to make sure that plans and readiness were going according to plan if they were going to take Taiwan by force. So this is just the 2027 date is not a deadline. In my mind, it's a no earlier than date. He wants them to be ready. And the Communist Party's legitimacy is really tied up to a great degree in this Taiwan issue, not only because their opponents in the civil war fled to the island of Taiwan, thus leaving this civil war basically open and never-ending. But part of the Communist Party's legitimacy is standing up to foreigners and foreign aggression.

And Xi Jinping has really doubled down on this rhetoric that started with Mao Zedong about how China needs to stand up to the bullying of the outside world, and they really leverage kind of the U.S. support of Taiwan—what they call kind of a rogue island—as indicative of hundreds of years of humiliation of foreign powers not respecting China. So it is partially what Xi Jinping says, of course, and I don't think we should discount that because if you take a look at what Xi Jinping has said he was going to do from 2013 when he gave timelines to say, "I want this done by 2017. I want this done by 2020," he then did all those things.

So you have a good track record that he doesn't just say things without doing them. But as a military strategist myself, I'm also looking at the capabilities they're building, and that's not a bluff, the fact that they are actively preparing and then also exercising for Taiwan contingencies. And given something David said earlier that the United States, in some situations, is no longer prepared to defend Taiwan. I can definitely think of scenarios in which would be very tempting for Xi Jinping to go for it if he thinks he can take Taiwan quickly without having to engage with U.S. forces.

LINDSAY:
I take your point, Oriana, that China's interest in reunification did not begin with Xi Jinping's ascension to becoming party secretary. And I presume that interest on the mainland in reunification will persist even after Xi Jinping passes from the scene if it doesn't happen before then.

My sense is as I listen to the debate, certainly here in Washington, is that concern about the issue of a forcible reunification has increased substantially over the last several years. I don't know if you accept that assessment, but if you do, what is your sort of understanding or argument about why that has happened?

MASTRO:
Well, I think it has happened because of the change of balance of military power. So when we had the third Taiwan Straits crisis in the 1990s, and China was lobbying some missiles near Taiwan and the United States and an aircraft carrier battle group in the vicinity of Taiwan, at that period of time, the military of Taiwan was more powerful than that of China. Part of the reason, and David alluded to this, we had strategic ambiguity, is it was a real concern that Taiwan would declare independence and then fight a war against the PRC.

If we had a visual for our listeners, one thing I often show is this balance of power. How much stuff China had, how much stuff Taiwan had, how much stuff the United States had, and Taiwan and the PRC, Taiwan had more, and the United States far outgunned China. And then you flash forward today, and if you put a bar graph together of China's equipment and Taiwan's equipment, you can hardly see that Taiwan component. It's so small. And so I think part of the sense of urgency was really, "Oh no, wait a minute." No matter what we do about strategic ambiguity, and hopefully, we'll have that discussion. But even if the United States says very clearly, "We are committed to defending Taiwan," operationally we cannot in a lot of contingencies. So then the Chinese, the question is it doesn't take a genius to figure that out. We know what they know it. I read the Chinese assessing our capabilities. I talked to the PLA, and they'll say they have superiority in the Taiwan Strait.

And so the concern is, unless the United States military changes its presence in combat radius of Taiwan, it will be hard to convince Xi Jinping. Once the PLA comes to him in a couple of years, hopefully, from their perspective, they've got their command and control set. Logistics are finally set, and they say, "Okay, chairman, we're ready to go." He's going to have to question whether or not the United States can stop him. And I think the United States has to do a lot more to make sure that his assessment is, "No, the United States can stop me, so it's not worth the hassle."

SACKS:
If I could just come in for one second, I mean, I think that we shouldn't assume, though, that this is an easy task for the PLA if Xi Jinping decides to go down this route. I mean, just to underscore, I think this would be the most complex, difficult, modern military operation in history, something that would make Normandy look small by comparison. We're about crossing seventy miles of pretty treacherous waters in the Taiwan Strait, potentially with the U.S. Navy as well as Taiwan's military targeting amphibious vehicles and things like that. The weather is a huge issue. China would have to establish a beachhead and sustain troops on Taiwan.

This would be something very difficult. And it's also something that the United States military contemplated during World War II, and the conclusion was, "This is too difficult. We're going to look at other options for winning the war against Japan." And so, this is to just underscore that the PLA has a lot of capabilities. I don't want to downplay that, but at the same time, we should recognize that they haven't fought a war since 1979 that didn't really go as planned or as they expected. And so the challenge of seizing Taiwan by force is quite daunting, and I don't think that we should just assume that at the snap of their fingers, China can present us with a fait accompli and conquer the island. So I just want to cast some doubt on that side of the ledger.

MASTRO:
I have to jump in on that because I'm not making an assumption here, right? This is based on pretty rigorous military analysis. A few points on what David said that I think are important for our listeners. The historical analogy people always bring up Normandy is not very useful. One, the Taiwans are not the Germans. Two, because we now have precision-guided munitions, and China has the most advanced cruise and ballistic missile programs in the world, they're going to take out a lot of those defenses before they even try to land. So it's like if it was Normandy, but you got to take out all the bunkers before you tried to land. And the Germans had what?

There's like one hundred thousand people that are going to defend Taiwan versus the millions of Chinese people. And the bottom line is the United States, given all those challenges, still did it because it was important to us. So, of course, the PLA doesn't think this is going to be easy, that's why they haven't done it yet. Probably, casualties would be up to ninety thousand people, but that would be acceptable to them. So we can take a look at that issue, and we can say, "That's not worth it to us. From an American perspective, we wouldn't do that." But for deterrence, the important thing is what the Chinese think.

And the last thing I would say is David's absolutely right. If we were poised, if the navies of the United States and Taiwan were poised to sink those ships as they were making their way across the strait, I could sleep better at night. But I would ask David with what? Because the bottom line is most of the things that we have in our arsenal cannot hit ships while they're moving. And the stuff that we do have that can hit ships while they're moving, we don't have a lot of it. So maybe we sink a dozen, two dozen ships and then it takes us weeks to go back to Guam and Hawaii to replenish.

So I think David's rationale is absolutely right. If it were the case that we had a denial capability and we could sink a large quantity of that invading force, China would never consider this. But I guess what I'm saying as someone who's looking at the force posture of the United States and what we've got going on in the only two areas that are in combat radius of Taiwan, mainly the southwest Islands of Japan and the northern Philippines, I don't think it's enough at this point. We don't have enough maritime strike to create that calculus that David is talking about.

LINDSAY:
I understand that we can debate the effectiveness of an American effort to stop a Chinese invasion, but I'm wondering if thinking of the issue with Taiwan purely in terms of an invasion is actually the right frame. I mean, it strikes me that Beijing has options besides either directly invade Taiwan or not.

You're both familiar with so-called gray zone areas of potential for China to impose a blockade around Taiwan. Maybe just argue that it's imposing a custom regime that's required because of health and safety needs, and then dare the United States and Western powers to try to break it. So help me think about it, maybe, David, you can go first, how one thinks about these so-called gray zone actions.

SACKS:
Yeah. So Taiwan's chief of the navy recently gave an interview with the Economist where he described China's strategy as an anaconda strategy of attempting to squeeze Taiwan into submission. And this ranges the military, economic, and political dimensions. And so, to give a few examples. In the military realm, China is sending aircraft through Taiwan's self-declared Air Defense Identification Zone on a near daily basis. It has ships parked around the island of Taiwan, close to the contiguous zone twenty-four nautical miles outside of the coastline of Taiwan. It is doing a lot of other things to pressure Taiwan's military in the vicinity of the island as well.

Economically, we've seen since President William Lai took office in May of this past year, Beijing has imposed tariffs on Taiwanese goods. They've also nabbed Taiwanese businessmen traveling to the PRC. And politically, they've really tried, and this isn't a new thing for Beijing, but they're trying to isolate Taiwan internationally, wherever they can. So this is excluding Taiwan from as many international organizations as they can, from the International Civil Aviation Organization to Interpol to the World Health Organization and others. And it's really trying to make life difficult for the Taiwanese people and ultimately make them lose trust in their government that they can provide for them. And if they break that trust between the government and the governed, then I think that Beijing believes it's in a position to negotiate from a position of strength and basically dictate the terms of Taiwan's surrender.

So some people believe that you can ramp up the gray zone pressure on Taiwan, get it to the point where it's unbearable, and then, at some point, Taiwan will break. I don't really see that happening. I think that Taiwan has seen the example of Hong Kong and that has had a real effect on their psyche and their perception of what life would be like under PRC rule. And they essentially reject "one country, two systems" overwhelmingly, which is the model that Beijing proposed for Taiwan and then applied to Hong Kong.

So I don't think that you can ratchet up the pressure enough to get twenty-three million people to say, "You know what? Living under the PRC is better than living under a democracy and a free society with these kind of inconveniences and hindrances." So eventually, I do think I come down on the side that Beijing would have to take some sort of kinetic action if they wanted to compel unification with Taiwan, and we can argue about whether a blockade or an amphibious invasion makes more sense from China's perspective. You also could think about a crippling cyber attack paired with missile strikes and other things Oriana was alluding to. But it's very difficult for me to see how the gray zone pressure ends up with the PRC ruling over Taiwan indefinitely, which is the ultimate political objective of the CCP.

LINDSAY:
Oriana, How do you think about, so-called gray zone activities?

MASTRO:
Yeah, I'm really with David on this one, and I'm not an expert on domestic politics in Taiwan, but I'll just lay out my assumption, which I think based on what David said he would agree with. I really don't see the people of Taiwan conceding to being fully controlled by the CCP without some sort of direct use of force. So I think things like cyber attacks, you mentioned a quarantine, kind of administrative blockades, disinformation campaigns, all of that is happening and will happen and probably will happen to greater degrees in the future.

The Chinese are hoping...People always say to me when I say I'm worried about China taking Taiwan before they said, "Well, surely the Chinese prefer to have Taiwan without using force." And to me, that's kind of an obvious statement. Sure, of course, we'd all love to have everything we want in the world without paying the costs for it, but that's not really the interesting point. The question is, if it's impossible to have it without using force, will they then use force? So the Chinese, the term they use for this current campaign of the increased military pressure, the exercises, and activities around Taiwan, they still say they're pursuing peaceful reunification. But when I ask them to clarify what that means because it obviously no longer means social, economic, and political ties, they say it means backed by significant military force that they are trying to convince the people of Taiwan that it's hopeless, defense is hopeless, and so they should just concede without a fight.

But like David said, I don't really see that happening. I think the amphibious assault is really the only "reunification campaign." The other ones, I'm sure every time China gets upset about something, a speech given or saying Taiwan does, they might institute them, but I don't see them as compelling unification, not even blockade, because blockade is very risky.

The only way that China can take Taiwan without having World War III with the United States is what I was alluding to before. If they can execute this basic two-and-a-half, three-week campaign, it goes smoothly. Taiwan capitulates before the U.S. military can really deploy en masse into the region. A blockade Taiwan can hold out at least for forty-five days. So then you're at the point where Taiwan is holding out. Meanwhile, if the United States is committed to defending Taiwan, we have amassed those forces that are necessary to act in the way that David was saying before to stop an invading force.

So it just seems like a very risky proposition. I see a blockade much more likely that they would say, "Okay, we're doing this for two weeks," and so they get to hurt Taiwan. There's an end date. So it's like, is the United States really going to intervene? And even though we don't intervene, it still hurts our credibility. And so it's a complex issue. Not to say a blockade isn't problematic, but I don't see it as their campaign to forcibly unify with the island.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So I hear from both of you a skepticism about how effective a gray zone's activities approach would be, and you disagree over how easy or how successful an American attempt to prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan might be.

But I'd like to go to a preliminary question or maybe a prior question, which is why is it in the interest of the United States to defend Taiwan. Is it about America's role in the world? Is it a military argument? Is it about political values? Is it based on economic considerations? Maybe you can go first, David.

SACKS:
Sure, I'm happy to. Let me just get back to something very briefly that you mentioned, Jim, on the gray zone because you were asking about how successful it is, I think, from Beijing's perspective, which I didn't really touch on. So I think Oriana and I agree that I don't think the gray zone pressure on Taiwan is going to lead to "unification" at any point, but actually, it lowers the chances in my mind that you'll achieve unification short of that because it creates a real resentment among Taiwanese, a sense that the PRC is an adversary, that it's hostile to Taiwan. And so if you take the PRC at its word, and they, as Oriana said, remain committed in terms of their rhetoric to, "peaceful reunification," then actually it's shooting itself in the foot in a sense because the heightened pressure is making peaceful reunification less and less likely. So I'll just put that on the table.

As for the U.S. interest in defending Taiwan, I mean, I'll break this down into a couple of elements. I think first of all, if you look at a map and you think about geography from a U.S. perspective, Taiwan is at the center of what we call the first island chain, which goes down from Japan through Taiwan and into the Philippines. You're talking about all U.S. allies or close partners in the case of Taiwan. And that enables the United States to project its power and its influence militarily and also economically into East Asia. It also prevents China, for the most part, from projecting power outwards and threatening the United States more directly. So the fall of Taiwan, I think that if you have the PLA on the island, that would pose a real direct threat to U.S. allies from above all Japan, but also the Philippines and also cause more of a threat to the United States.

Flowing from that, I think that if Taiwan falls in the United States does not intervene on Taiwan's behalf, you're going to have real questions raised in Japan, South Korea, and Australia about whether they can also rely on the United States to come to their defense. Yes, Taiwan is not a formal treaty ally. They are. But in traveling through the region and having conversations with senior officials in these capitals, they don't perceive it as such. They believe that the United States is on the hook for Taiwan's defense, and they would believe that a failure of the United States to come to Taiwan's defense would have direct implications for their own security.

LINDSAY:
And why would that matter for the United States, David?

SACKS:
Because I think that what comes out of that is that Japan and South Korea decide to take their security into their own hands, potentially developing nuclear weapons. I think the weaker countries in the region that don't have that luxury bandwagon on China. And then you have a region that is vitally important to the United States where it has far less influence, and China's influence is far greater. And so I think that it would have real implications for the balance of power in a critical region of the world.

Let me also get onto the economics. I think that we all know how important Taiwan is to the global economy, primarily because of semiconductors. Over 90 percent of the world's most advanced semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan, around 60 percent of U.S. semiconductors that are used by the United States come from Taiwan. So there've been various estimates done of what the economic ramifications of a Chinese use of force against Taiwan are. The estimate that I've seen, the most recent one, is that it shaves up to $10 trillion off of global GDP.

And what this means in real terms is that almost every supply chain that requires a chip, and this is everything from cars to microwaves, smartphones, computers, would grind to a halt. And this isn't a product that you can readily substitute for. You can't find advanced chips really anywhere else. And so you are going to have a lot of economic pain, and it's not going to be short-lived. It's going to make the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine look small by comparison. And that, to me, just emphasizes the need to maintain deterrence in the Taiwan Strait.

Now, the final thing that I would raise to you is the question about international order and democracy. So the pillar of international order is the countries do not change borders by force. Well, here you would have PRC forcibly changing borders coming after Putin's Russia forcibly seeking to change borders in Ukraine. I think that that would be a significant blow to one of the pillars of international order. And we should be pretty clear-eyed that Taiwan's democracy, which by many accounts, by many rankings is the most robust in Asia, would be extinguished. It would not exist anymore, and that would have a chilling effect for democracies in Asia, but, I also think, around the world.

LINDSAY:
I'll just know quickly that from the vantage point of Beijing, such an eventuality would not involve changing borders because they argue that Taiwan is part of China. And I would imagine that many countries that are aligned with or support China would accept that argument. Oriana, I want to give you a chance to weigh in on this question of what U.S. interests are at stake when it comes to Taiwan.

MASTRO:
Well, I just want to add two things to what David said because that was a very comprehensive layout. The first is, and I wrote this in that New York Times piece that you alluded to in my biography that was somewhat controversial. I don't think that it is important under all circumstances to keep Taiwan from unifying with the PRC. I think the circumstances under which that would happen, and this is...I mean, honestly speaking, this is just an intellectual argument because as we said before, the people of Taiwan are not clamoring to be a part of the PRC, but we have to be clear that the U.S. policy is not to keep Taiwan separate from China, as David alluded to earlier, to make sure that it doesn't happen by force.

So if there was a situation under which, and even under some duress, like maybe the leadership of Taiwan does look at the balance of power and say, "This isn't going to work. We want to cut some sort of deal with Beijing," that to me is a different future. That tells me less about how dangerous the PRC is, right. If that happens, not great for some of the reasons that David laid out. Right now, the PRC has control over aspects of the semiconductor industry. They can push out into second island chain, but it's not clear to me at that point that they are an existential threat to the United States.

The different scenario, which, of course, I think is a more likely scenario if we're talking about unification, is that China uses force against Taiwan. And this is a scenario in which you have a government with all this power that has decided that the effective way of achieving their goals is through force. And that is hugely problematic for the United States and its interests for all the reasons that David laid out. But also for this, and I'm reluctant to talk about this abstractly because I just read this piece of research that said the American people are more likely to support Taiwan if you give concrete answers like those that David gave.

But from an abstract perspective, China wants to control every aspect of not only countries and what they do but the people that live in those countries. I mean, we see this. Someone in the NBA says something China doesn't like. No more NBA. Scholars write something that China doesn't like. Their stuff can't get published any more by top university presses that need to do business in China. For Americans, they have to ask themselves, how much of our sovereignty do we want to leave to the Chinese? The Chinese determining how our businesses get to do business, whether or not it's safe for us to travel, whether or not our military can be present in certain places.

Now, for some countries in Asia and in the world, honestly, they're always giving up some sovereignty in the face of a great power who's dictating the rules to them. What the United States is trying to do is saying, "We're better than China is because, for the most part, we want you to make decisions that are best for you and your people, right, and we're not as imposing as the Chinese are." But countries in Southeast Asia, they might say, "Listen, I'm willing to have that loss of sovereignty not to confront Beijing." But that's not our American story. The American story is not that for the sake of avoiding a conflict, we're willing to give away some of our most basic freedoms. And so I think people don't realize that it's not even just a domino type of argument. But if Taiwan is no longer an issue, and China, therefore, establishes military control over Asia, which is the most important region of the world economically, politically, and everything. And the United States military can't operate there. We can't defend our allies and partners. We can't protect our business interests there. We can't protect our people who are traveling there. That is a huge change of the state of play.

And we're talking about a country in which, during COVID, a lot of people, when they were told they had to wear masks, were ready to mutiny. Imagine when the Chinese are dictating the terms to us. So, for me, it's worth fighting for our own sake. And then, of course, part of that is maintaining that freedom and sovereignty and everything about the international liberal order that's so critical to the whole world as well as our allies and partners in Asia and beyond.

LINDSAY:
Oriana, let me draw you out on that if I may. I can imagine someone listening to our conversation being persuaded that the United States has an interest in defending Taiwan, preventing it from being forcibly incorporated into mainland China. They may also ask a second question is Taiwan doing enough to defend itself, to deter China? How do you assess that question?

MASTRO:
This is a hard question. I mean, I would say they haven't done enough, but it's also not their fault, right. So I'm not here to say, "Okay, unless the people of Taiwan are going to fight the PLA." You're talking about a population that has no military training, no access to weapons. The United States trained Ukraine for seven years before the war. We just started training the military of Taiwan. So there's only so much you can expect for them on a rational sense. So they're just completely overwhelmed in terms of the balance of power.

So I think that Taiwan now has shifted. They're focused on buying the right systems. They've extended their conscription to a year, but there is no scenario into which Taiwan can defend itself without direct U.S. military intervention. I want people to be very clear about this. There is no Ukraine option that we just from afar provide them weapons, and they fight the PRC without us for many reasons. One of which being we can't actually get them anything once the war starts. There is no Poland right next to Taiwan that you can start shoveling things in. Whatever they've got the day that war starts that's all they're going to have. And given the size and nature of the Chinese military, which is much more sophisticated than even Russia's, we can only have so much of an expectation of Taiwan.

And this is less of a scientific perspective and a very biased one because, obviously, I'm here in my civilian capacity, but, as you know, Jim, I'm also in the military. So I obviously have a bias and believe in the effectiveness of force to solve problems in the international system. But one of the other reasons that fifteen years ago I joined the military is I do believe that the United States military can be a force of good and can protect those that can't protect themselves. So just because the people of Taiwan are not going to be ready and are not sort of, "doing enough" to protect themselves from China, in my view, that doesn't negate the argument that the United States should still be there for them.

LINDSAY:
David, I want to give you a chance to weigh in on that question of whether Taiwan is doing enough, but I also want to get to the question of what advice you have for the next president of the United States. Obviously we have two candidates. They've talked a little bit about these issues on the campaign trail, not a tremendous amount. It's not a question that's come up at debates. They haven't issued five-point, ten-point, twelve-point plans for these issues. So perhaps exploring that isn't as useful as sort of thinking about what you would hope the next president might do or what warnings you might have for either candidate.

SACKS:
So just very briefly on the defense question, just to provide some maybe facts and figures around this. So Taiwan spends 2.5 percent of GDP roughly on its defense, and it has doubled its defense budget over the last eight years or so. So it is getting serious about it. I think it has gotten serious about defense. This was due to, as I mentioned before, Hong Kong, but also seeing Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I think the question really is, are they going fast enough? And so, I don't think that many people believe that Taiwan is a deadbeat or is just shirking responsibility.

The question, though, is if you do think that a conflict might happen this decade, you said 2027 or even 2030 or 2032, is Taiwan moving fast enough as a society to get ready for that day? And I think that's what the open question is. And we shouldn't be focused just on defense spending. And I've written about Taiwan's defense budget and how much it spends, how much it should spend, and things like that. But one of the lessons, again, from the war in Ukraine is that Taiwan has to be far more resilient as a society.

And that's something that the current president, President Lai, is focused on, and that's answering questions around things like your power supply. How can you assure that you're able to have enough oil and gas on the island to keep everything running during a blockade or an invasion? And how do you make sure that you have enough redundancy in those systems? Water supply, internet connectivity as well, these are all things that Taiwan is now really focused on to prepare for a potential conflict.

On what the next president should do on Taiwan policy, let me say one thing in the abstract and then a couple of things concretely. I think that we talk a lot about U.S. foreign policy failures, whether that's Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, things like that. But I think that we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that policy towards Taiwan and the U.S. relationship with Taiwan is a real bright spot of post-war U.S. foreign policy.

I mean, here is an island against all odds, and the majority of the credit should go to the Taiwanese people, but against all odds, with few natural resources facing an existential threat from the PRC has built by many measures, the most robust democracy in East Asia, the highest GDP per capita in East Asia, a technological powerhouse on an array of fronts. And so this is really a remarkable set of achievements that Taiwan has achieved through its own hard work and perseverance, but also with U.S. assistance and U.S. protection in some sense. And so we shouldn't lose sight of that. And the mission for the next president should be how do you protect that and how do you keep that going, hopefully indefinitely?

I think that Oriana and I would agree that military deterrence is a big part of that. I think that Xi Jinping is a rational actor who wakes up and thinks about, "Can I do this at an acceptable cost?" And we can manipulate that. We can make it so that the costs are so high for Xi Jinping that he, in my view, I believe that he will determine that he can't seize Taiwan by force and hopefully leaves that question to his successor. And that should be the objective of U.S. policy. This isn't something that we can solve in any definitive way, but hopefully, it's something that we can manage and continue to allow Taiwan to flourish as a society. Another concrete thing that I would say is that Beijing wants this to be a bilateral issue between itself and Taiwan. That's where it has the most leverage. That's where it wants to negotiate from.

We've made big strides, I think, under the Biden administration to what we would call internationalize the Taiwan Strait. Highlight that countries in Europe and Asia have a stake in the Taiwan Strait. A conflict in the Taiwan Strait would be catastrophic for Germany, France, the UK, Australia, Japan, for a host of reasons. You've seen reference to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and multilateral organizations and bilateral statements with our allies. And I think that all of that should continue to highlight to the PRC that it can't isolate Taiwan, it can't seek to erase Taiwan, and that it can't look at this just as a bilateral issue or trilateral issue with the United States. Countries around the world have a stake in this, and now you see former President Tsai is soon to embark on a trip to Europe, something that would've been unthinkable just a number of years ago.

And so I think that that is the direction that our Taiwan policy should go in, and it's also to invest in those alliances with Japan and South Korea and Australia, which really would hopefully play a critical role not only in maintaining deterrence but in assisting the United States if deterrence fails.

LINDSAY:
So, Oriana, what advice or warning would you have for the next president of the United States?

MASTRO:
Well, the first thing I really want to be clear on, and this is a little bit broader than Taiwan, is that the greatest challenge to the United States is managing its relationship with China. And so, as you mentioned, it hasn't come up a lot in these electoral campaigns. Vice President Harris mentioned the other day that she thought the greatest threat to the United States was Hamas. 100 percent, absolutely not. Absolutely not. The war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, while these are devastating conflicts of which the United States has some interests, these are not even close to on par with the scenarios we're talking about with China and great power competition with China.

So, as you know, I wrote this piece for Foreign Affairs in the July issue about why the pivot has failed, and it concerns me that we continue to get distracted. And so anyone who makes the argument like, "We have to defend Ukraine to the fullest." And let me just say I'm perfectly fine with the level of our current involvement in these conflicts. So I'm not an isolationist. I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything. But if you're talking about any sort of redeployment of priorities and forces to European Command or Central Command, and any view that this somehow influences Xi Jinping's thinking on Taiwan, I mean, this is just...it's ludicrous. It's not true.

What David was saying is really important. Our allies and partners and our posture in the region is what's going to deter Xi Jinping. And so the next president has to have his or her eye on the ball that we have to continue whatever you want to call it, right? The Biden administration calls it campaigning right now, the Trump administration called it great power competition. We have to keep our eye on the ball of maintaining the U.S. position and protecting the international liberal world order, given China's rise. And part of that is what we do in Taiwan and improving our relations with allies and partners and our posture and military posture in those areas.

But I would also give this warning of what not to do and what not to do is all the political maneuvering around Taiwan. Every time I testify for Congress, I tell them, "Stop going to Taiwan." The president should maintain strategic ambiguity and not be making statements like, "Taiwan is an ally of the United States" or things that suggest that we've changed our policy on Taiwan. And I say this not in any way to placate Beijing, but right now, we've been talking about a war of choice that Xi Jinping thinks, "Huh, maybe I can do this. It sounds good to me. This is what I want." He probably needs a very, very high likelihood of victory to do something like this, given all the challenges that David laid out.

I couldn't posit the exact amount, but just for the sake of the example, it's like his PLA needs to tell him 90 percent chance this is going to succeed before he goes. If it looks like U.S. policy on Taiwan is changing, that our political stance on Taiwan is changing, what I'm concerned about is that that percentage decreases that he's going to be willing to use force at a lower likelihood of victory and that allies and partners in the region are going to see the United States as partially provoking this war, thereby not giving us the access base in an overflight that we need to succeed.

So that's what I would tell the next administration. Focus on China, and not only blunting China or trying to undermine China, which I think was the approach of the Trump administration but also trying to strengthen the United States and catering to our competitive advantages. The U.S.-China relationship and competition is actually not about us, it's about the rest of the world. So develop a real clear strategy towards the developing world. Don't concede that leadership position to Xi Jinping and continue to improve our force posture around Taiwan, carry a big stick, but speak more softly. Those would be a few of my pieces of advice.

LINDSAY:
I recognize that there's a lot more that we could go into, but I think we've reached the point where I need to close up this special election 2024 episode of The President's Inbox. My guests had been Oriana Skylar Mastro, Center Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and David Sacks, fellow for Asia studies here at the Council. Oriana and David, thank you very much for joining me.

MASTRO:
Thank you for having me.

SACKS:
Thanks for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:
This special election 2024 series is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. If you would like to learn more about what the candidates has said about foreign policy, please visit the Council's 2024 election central site. You can find it at cfr.org/election2024, and election2024 is one word.

Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Molly McAnany and Kenadee Mangus with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.