Beijing’s Changing Invasion Calculus

Editor’s Note: The United States is focused on countering an invasion of Taiwan, but Beijing can coerce Taiwan in many other ways. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis’s Evan Braden Montgomery and Toshi Yoshihara, drawing on their longer Washington Quarterly piece, point out that China can put pressure on Taiwan through a blockade, via a campaign of assassination and subversion, nuclear threats, and intimidating important potential U.S. allies like Japan. Such approaches would be far less costly than an all-out war and have a strong chance of success.

Daniel Byman

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If there is one big issue that most members of the U.S. foreign and defense policy communities can agree on, even as they might debate the details, it is the growing danger represented by China’s armed forces. Calls to heed the threats posed by a rapidly modernizing People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and its paramilitary counterparts were once outliers. Now, they reflect the conventional wisdom. China is the pacing challenge for the U.S. government, and a PLA invasion of Taiwan is the pacing scenario for the Pentagon—a scenario that some China-watchers believe is increasingly close at hand.

Conventional wisdom is often a lagging indicator, though. Today, the type of threat that U.S. strategists and planners tend to focus on most—an amphibious assault against Taiwan—may not be the only, or even the most likely, path to the fall of Taiwan. That is not because China is abandoning its revisionist ambitions or its plans to annex the island by an all-out cross-strait attack. Rather, it is because China’s expanding coercive toolkit is creating new options that might appear easier, faster, and cheaper than invasion to leaders in Beijing, especially if those leaders are looking to balance the potentially opposing goals of national rejuvenation and territorial reunification.

An invasion of Taiwan might seem like a shortcut to seizing control over the island. But invasion would entail launching an extraordinarily complex operation against a well-defended island target, while also taking on the world’s most capable armed forces if the United States intervenes. Chinese leaders would be risking an expensive and untested military that is the centerpiece of their quest for status and prestige. Under these conditions, success might not come cheap, if it comes at all, and failure could result in a generational setback for a rising great power, especially if the conflict devolves into a protracted war.

China has, or will soon have, a variety of other coercive tools at its disposal. Although the amphibious forces that would assault Taiwan and the missile forces that could target the United States and its allies tend to capture the most attention, Beijing has also been building out its irregular and paramilitary maritime options, its surface naval assets, its nuclear arsenal, and its network of communist agents and sleeper cells on Taiwan. These tools could complement or, in some cases and in certain combinations, even substitute for an invasion force.

For instance, the PLA could use large-scale military and paramilitary exercises as cover to begin imposing an air and maritime blockade of the island. Quarantine operations involving the coast guard and a customs inspection regime could also be used to squeeze Taiwan. The primary aim would not necessarily be to coerce the population through deprivation, although this is possible given Taiwan’s limited stocks of food and fuel, but to isolate the population from outside support and put the onus on outsiders to escalate further by challenging the blockade.

At the same time, China could also engage in assassination and subversion to prevent or degrade local resistance. Decapitation attacks could take a variety of forms, not all of which are as overt as missile strikes or special operations raids, although China could resort to those options. This could, for example, entail the use of fifth-column saboteurs to bribe, intimidate, blackmail, discredit, or kill Taiwanese leaders. Chinese Communist Party agents could also persuade or pressure Taiwanese commanders to stand down.

Alongside blockade and subversion, China could leverage its increasingly large and diverse nuclear arsenal to engage in nuclear coercion against the United States and its allies. These threats could be relatively subtle. For instance, Chinese leaders could make discrete but noticeable changes in the readiness level of their nuclear forces by moving units out of garrison and deploying them to possible launch locations. Threats could also be more blunt. Beijing could, in addition to raising alert levels, make public statements that military intervention would cross a nuclear redline and obviate its already-dubious nuclear no-first-use policy. In either instance, though, these steps would raise the stakes of a crisis by bringing nuclear weapons from the background to the foreground.

Rather than try to beat Taiwan down and knock the United States and its allies out, this type of multipronged coercive strategy would aim to throw China’s opponents off balance—to present so many dilemmas and introduce so many risks that it creates decision paralysis in key capitals. Alone, none of these coercive measures might have that effect—blockades, decapitation strikes, and vague nuclear threats each have a mixed track record. But when combined, and with the invasion threat still lurking in the background, their influence on policymakers could be enormous.

If China is considering settling its score with Taiwan through means other than invasion, it would suggest that Washington might be misreading Beijing’s ultimate theory of victory by relying on a very narrow understanding of applied military power, when a broader understanding of coercive military power is becoming more and more relevant.

Those who worry most about invasion assume that any Chinese campaign will focus on targeting Taiwan and its partners’ fielded forces, based on the presumption that Beijing perceives these formations, platforms, and personnel as its adversaries’ center of gravity. In its quest for military victory, therefore, Beijing will try to eliminate Taiwan’s defenses and reduce the ability of America’s military (and perhaps that of its allies) to intervene on the island’s behalf at the outset of a conflict. By decimating the opponents’ means to resist, so goes this reasoning, China’s aim is to remove any real choice on the part of adversary policymakers, even if they possessed the will to fight back, and thereby achieve a military fait accompli.

However, it is plausible that Beijing sees another path to success. China may follow an alternative theory of victory that targets the risk calculus of decision-makers in Taipei, in the capitals of U.S. allies, and in Washington, D.C., all of whom might be influenced in other ways that, at least on paper, look to be much cheaper for China than launching an all-out invasion.

If Beijing can convince leaders in Taipei to concede quickly, it is unlikely that outsiders will mount a serious defense on its behalf. If it can convince leaders in Tokyo to stand aside from the start, it is unlikely that the United States could fight effectively on its own. And if it can convince leaders in Washington that the risks of war are so great that they hesitate or act indecisively, then Beijing might even achieve a political fait accompli and win without a major fight.

The virtue of this approach is that, should coercion short of invasion fail, China could always fall back on its conventional military might to seize Taiwan by brute force. Coercion and invasion are not mutually exclusive, with the latter serving as the ultimate insurance policy.

The question that U.S. policymakers need to ask themselves, therefore, is: How could China try to achieve its goals? If invasion is not Beijing’s only, or even preferred, answer, that would create a significant challenge for U.S. defense planners and policymakers. As the side looking to overturn the status quo, Beijing can already choose when to strike. But it can also choose how to strike. That means Washington cannot afford to focus too closely on one particular threat, even as it cannot take its eye off the risk of invasion.

Of course, devising ways to manage the threat of a brute force invasion as well as a coercive combination strategy is no mean feat, particularly when many of the military and paramilitary tools Beijing is building could support either one. Nevertheless, that is the burden the United States must bear if it remains determined to uphold the status quo in the face of a rising revisionist power with many options at its disposal.