Defeat Putin Now, or Watch Him Help a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan
It was worthwhile of U.S. President Barack Obama to attempt to split Russia from China, as Winston Churchill had separated fascist Spain from Nazi Germany in the lead-up to the Second World War. Most of Obama’s critics are seeking a scapegoat, while at the same time recommending no better a solution than a simultaneous confrontation of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Although Russian President Vladimir Putin is now mobilizing a wartime economy, Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping is not confident Putin will prevail. Giving Putin respite through a ceasefire deal with Ukraine, will leave him vindicated and vengeful. While he may focus on regime consolidation rather than immediately attacking the Baltic States, Finland, Sweden, or Georgia, he will almost certainly exact retribution by supporting China in their bid for Taiwan. Beijing, if isolated, with Moscow embroiled in a forever war in Ukraine, or worse, with a Kremlin that is overthrown by a liberal color revolution, will not risk an invasion of Taiwan.
It is exceeding rare in the last eight hundred years for an attacker to attempt an amphibious attack without full sea control, as observed by British naval theorist Philip Howard Colomb. However, all of the successful exceptions are cases that resemble a beach assault on Taiwan, such as the 1704 British capture of Gibraltar. Beijing may believe that a shock but costly offensive involving its entire air force and navy as escorts, 20,000 of its Marines, and over 200,000 regular troops ferried over on civilian ferries and freighters, may cause Taiwan to collapse, especially given how poorly Taipei has prepared. The payoff may be worth the tremendous risk, as it was for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1982 British Falklands campaign. Despite the destruction and damage of 16 Royal Navy warships and freighters, and the deaths resulting from the aerial bombardment of marines caught in their amphibious vessels, the British gamble restored imperial deterrence.
If Russia is an undistracted ally of China, it may be inclined to host China’s seven or eight Jin class ballistic missile submarines in its Sea of Okhotsk bastion. This is serious because a decisive basis of U.S. deterrence is its conventional option of threatening to destroy China’s nuclear missiles on land and at sea. Russia could also provide artillery ordnance, weaponized drones, electronic warfare transmitters, aircraft parts, and possibly tactical nuclear weapons, as it claimed to have provided Belarus. Russia may deploy maritime patrol aircraft, submarines and surface flotillas, under a non-combatant flag, into the deep Pacific and Atlantic, Panama and the Indian Ocean, to help China track U.S. and Japanese submarines, convoys, aircraft staging areas, and ports. It may launch airborne early warning aircraft from the vantage point of Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk to monitor aircraft launching from Alaska to Japan.
Most importantly, the recent construction of the world’s largest pipeline between Russia and China has critically undermined the impact of a U.S. maritime blockade of China’s energy imports. China’s most recent large capital projects and retooling of its entire energy infrastructure has been focused on achieving strategic autarky, plans with which Russia plays a vital part. Ten years ago, a U.S. naval blockade at the Strait of Malacca would have crippled China’s economy and seriously inconvenienced consumers, eroding support for the Communism regime in Beijing. Today, Beijing’s large coal reserves may be sufficient to energize its electric car and commercial vehicle fleet, manufacturing, and provide seasonal heating and cooling.
In 2023, China was the world’s largest importer of crude, at 11.3 million barrels per day, (versus a domestic extraction of 4.26 bpd) with Russia (at 2.05 mbpd, or 19 percent), Saudi Arabia, and Iraq being the largest suppliers, and Iran. Over 1,000 unregistered Russian tankers ship oil and LNG from the West Siberian oil fields, predominantly through Arctic ports, to its customers, but also through an oil pipeline terminal at Kozmino port near Vladivostok. To circumvent a naval blockade and to exploit Russia’s distressed energy exports, China has added 4,000 km in energy pipelines, and filled its strategic reserve. Russia and China have recently completed the Power-of-Siberia pipeline, moving 30 billion cubic meters of gas per day, plus another 10 bcm which are shipped by tanker through the Bering Strait. China is expected to double its natural gas demand by mid-century, and is moving quickly to build an oil pipeline parallel to Russia’s gas pipeline.
A naval blockade of China will drastically cut imports, which will reduce military manufacturing output. However, one detailed discussion argues that a blockade of China will take years to have a political effect, is easily evaded by trade along rail lines in the Eurasian continent, and will have only a limited effect on China’s food supply. The conduct of the blockade itself will be politically complex, because many influential neutral powers, such as China’s largest food supplier Brazil, will refuse to participate. The greatest impact of a blockade will be to interrupt China’s exports, one estimate of whose effects will be to contract China’s economy by 16.7 percent (a catastrophic collapse compared with the sanctioned but internationally less exposed Russian economy). Furthermore, the U.S. would be tempted to strike at Chinese rail and pipeline infrastructure along the Russian border, risking Chinese retaliation into the interior of North America, while risking that this type of infrastructure destruction may not even be cost-effective.
Frontline NATO allies, like the Baltic states, have argued that giving respite to Putin will permit him to rebuild his military, particularly in terms of training and developing technological solutions to lessons learned. However, Russian military bloggers make a symmetrical argument, that a respite will benefit NATO more than Putin, whose domestic support is eroding because of sanctions, to the extent that he will be unable to resume a future war with Ukraine. In either case, Russia will have the spare military manufacturing capacity, electronic warfare technology, energy, food (Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter) and mineral resources to sustain China in a years-long campaign against the U.S. over Taiwan.
Even at current levels of Western military and economic support for Kyiv, Ukraine will not prevail against the persistent onslaught and substantially superior resources of Russia. Once its stored tank inventory is exhausted, Moscow will be incentivized finally to shift to a focus on a qualitative improvement of its army. Kyiv’s strategy is to play for time and wait for an exogenous systemic shock to the Kremlin’s political calculations, such as the revolt of the Wagner mercenaries, or an uprising of discontented conscripts. Ukrainian troops have demonstrated their resilience, despite recent journalistic claims that desertion rates are indicators of an imminent collapse. Temporary desertion, escaping for psychological relief, was common among U.S. troops on the Western front during the Second World War. Neither instance is a sign of an unsustainable decay of fighting capability, such as the 45 percent desertion rate of Chinese KMT soldiers in 1948, or the historically high levels of desertion among Russian or French troops in 1917, due to poor leadership by officers. This author had at one time charged an otherwise exemplary sentry for abandoning his post for just 48 hours, to see his girlfriend 400km away.
If Ukraine suffers a catastrophic loss of territory, with Russians deploying up to the Dnipro River and the outskirts of Kyiv, balance of power incentives may finally push NATO to intervene. Western Ukraine has far more defensible terrain, is closer to European supply sources, and even centrifugal countries like Hungary, Slovakia and Romania may feel compelled to set-up no-go zones across their borders.
While the oscillating culture wars of U.S. (and European) electoral politics has produced a temporary commiseration with the conservative Russian reaction to gendered modernization, the immediacy of a geopolitical threat may lead to a rapid shift of sentiments. The shocking 1940 fall of France led to an abrupt shift in attitude among U.S. political elites against the threat of Nazi Germany. A Chinese attack on an outlying Taiwanese island, the equivalent of a Pearl Harbor attack, would have a similar effect of countering the isolationist sentiments of the larger American electorate. It would be wise for Washington’s new administration to anticipate that the collective resources of the world’s democracies are not sufficiently overpowering to win a war against a unified coalition of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11.