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8 February 2023

What the War in Ukraine Tells Us About Deterring China

Max Hastings

Max Hastings is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard, he is author, most recently, of "The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962."

The war in Ukraine is a year old this month, and only those who believe in Santa Claus will bet on its ending by this date in 2024. It represents one of the most terrible tragedies to befall Europe, and indeed the world, since 1945.

What follows, however, is not a reflection on the conflict itself, but on two closely related issues: Could Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion have been prevented? And what steps can the West take to deter other aggressors from similar courses, most notably China toward Taiwan?

Deterrence demands will, means and — an element often forgotten — a political climate in which to make preemptive measures acceptable. Many assert that the US and its European allies made a fatal error by failing long ago to extend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization umbrella to Ukraine. Only such a guarantee, they say, could have dissuaded Putin from launching his onslaught. They further argue that it reflects a pitiful weakness of will to have allowed fear of the Kremlin’s wrath to dissuade us from extending our support to a society eager to embrace democracy and freedom.

Russia is now so deeply committed to terroristic courses that it is hard to anticipate an early reconciliation with the West. At the outset, some pundits argued that this was Putin’s personal war, which ordinary Russians want no part of. A year on, however, we find most of Putin’s people still acquiescing in his monstrous deeds, accepting the Kremlin’s fantasy narrative that NATO is conspiring to humble their country.More from

Perhaps this was inevitable. Maybe there was never a path to making proud, chronically angry, grievance-burdened Russians recognize the realities of their national failure, and of Western success. Yet it was surely right, in the wake of the Cold War, to attempt to welcome the Russian Federation into the family of nations. Some of us think the West should have tried harder; that the US should have held back from its 1990s triumphalism, rubbing Russian noses in their defeat.

There is also a case that it was mistaken to admit Poland and the Baltic States to NATO, fueling a Russian paranoia that dates back centuries. Had Ukraine also been admitted to the alliance, this line of thinking goes, it would have accelerated a showdown between the Kremlin and the West.

You may say: But that is what we have now got anyway. So what was there to lose by offering a shield to Ukraine before Russia attacked? Here I shall cite the precedent of the Anglo-French 1938 deal with Hitler, which dismembered Czechoslovakia. Munich has today become a byword for cowardice in the face of aggression. It is cited again and again, not least by American politicians, as a term of abuse for alleged appeasers, whether in the context of Ukraine, Taiwan or Iran.

As a historian, however, I see Munich differently. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was a weak and deluded man. But no democratic government can prudently take great decisions ahead of the will of its voters. In 1938, many of the British people still had no stomach for a second bloody showdown with Germany just 20 years after the first, and their view was shared across the British Empire. If Chamberlain had then committed Britain to fight, he would have led a divided nation and almost certainly forfeited support from Canada, Australia and the rest of the so-called dominions.

A year later, by contrast, in September 1939, the political picture was transformed. Following Hitler’s rape of Poland, coming atop his contemptuous repudiation of the Munich deal for partition of Czechoslovakia, every supporter of freedom and democracy in Britain understood that he must be fought. The ensuing struggle commanded overwhelming popular consent.

Much the same was true of the US in 1940-41. Had Winston Churchill succeeded in his efforts to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to join the war, America would have been divided. Many members of Congress, perhaps a majority, would have declined to endorse such a decision. Only the unprovoked Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor and subsequent German declaration of war unified the American people, empowering Roosevelt to lead a nation of one mind, one purpose, through the global conflict.

To dissuade an aggressor, it is necessary that the defender and its allies should possess the military power capable of frustrating an assault. But it is also indispensable that they should be believed to have the determination to do so.

In the 1930s, the European dictators knew that the democracies possessed the paper might to mount a credible defense against Germany — some French tanks and aircraft were better than those the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe could deploy in quantity. But Hitler was convinced that the decadent French and British lacked the moral fiber to resist him effectively, and events proved him almost right. Thus, belated attempts at deterrence failed. The bloodiest war in human history proved necessary.

An example of successful deterrence on the margins of that struggle also deserves notice: Spain’s dictator General Francisco Franco was willing, even eager, to make his country a belligerent alongside Hitler, partly because of ideological compatibility and partly because he saw Germany and Italy as winners. He wished to share the spoils of victory.

He held back, however, because Spain was dependent on imported food and commodities. He was unwilling to face a naval blockade, which Britain threatened and had means to implement. Franco declined to fight in the West — he sent only a token division to support Hitler in the Soviet Union — so long as the Royal Navy remained capable of dominating Spain’s shores and ports.

In the Cold War, few modern historians doubt that deterrence prevented Armageddon: Both sides recognized that there could be no meaningful winner of a clash between nuclear-armed superpowers. There were hawks in Washington and Moscow who clamored to accept that risk but, thankfully, they were overborne by the voices of sanity.

Nonetheless, within that global framework there was a conspicuous failure of deterrence — on the Korean Peninsula in 1950, when North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and his Soviet sponsor Josef Stalin convinced themselves that the US lacked means and will to resist an invasion of South Korea. This was partly because the US Army, and explicitly its formations in the Far East, had been disastrously run down in the wake of World War II.

The Kremlin also misread confused signals from Washington about US willingness to fight to save the South. Over the ensuing three years, Western forces proved able to check and then to reverse communist aggression, but it was a near thing. Even after America and its allies rearmed, it was difficult to sustain popular will in the US for the protracted struggle, and its casualties.

The message of Korea was that it is easier and cheaper to avert an attack through precautionary measures, as the US has continued to do in the peninsula for the past seven decades, than to reverse aggression once it has taken place, on the battlefield.

But here a chicken/egg problem rears its head, which is conspicuous in today’s Ukraine, and in addressing tomorrow’s possible Taiwan invasion: how to mount effective deterrence until the political conditions exist for doing so; and how to counter charges of escalation or risk the precipitation of armed conflict. Both friends and foes are bound to advance such allegations, if a major ally arms a threatened nation ahead of aggression taking place.


Consider the crisis that would almost certainly have burst upon Europe had the US embarked on massive weapons shipments to Ukraine in the winter of 2021, in response to Russian troop movements around its borders. The Kremlin would have denounced it as an intolerable provocation, perhaps claiming that it justified a preemptive assault. Most US allies in Europe would have taken fright.

Today, among the most important reasons it has proved possible, against expectations, to sustain a coalition of the US and its allies in support of Ukraine and against Russia, is that the Western powers are seen to have acted only in response to aggression, and not in mere anticipation of it. Putin was granted every possible benefit of doubt until he dispelled it in a storm of missiles and shells.

I suggest that the West was right to be seen to hold back, just as the democracies were morally much stronger in engaging Hitler in 1939 than they would have been a year earlier. Roosevelt was wise to await the dictators’ attack on the US.

Does my argument mean that I oppose reinforcing Taiwan ahead of an alarmingly plausible Chinese assault? The island’s government today deploys only a small fraction of the men and weapons available to Beijing.

The easiest part of the answer to this hard question is that the US must strengthen its own armed forces ahead of such an event. As the balance stands today, most strategic gurus believe that the US Navy would struggle to frustrate an invasion, given that Taiwan is just 100 miles from China’s home bases.

Putin and President Xi Jinping of China appear to accept the logic of mutually assured destruction. Even if the nuclear threshold is not breached, however, the Ukraine conflict demonstrates how devastating a conflict can become. Every prudent nation must be ready to defend its vital interests by conventional means. The great British historian and strategist Michael Howard wrote in 1979, while the Cold War was still pretty chilly, that the price we must expect to pay for our continuing independence is to sustain credible armies, navies and air forces: “Only if adequate conventional forces are maintained will statesmen be spared the agonizing dilemma” of choosing between surrender and going nuclear.

In modern times, too many Western nations have flinched from accepting the logic of this imperative, and even now remain slow to accept its budgetary consequences.

There is much that Taiwan and the US can do to strengthen the former’s defensive capability, without offering explicit provocation to Beijing. The island’s current fuel stocks, perhaps as little as seven days’ worth, could be increased; munition stockpiles for US forces can be pre-positioned in the region; Taiwan can invest in new-wave drones and subsurface unmanned naval craft. It can purchase data from commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites such as Ukraine is using to good effect, to improve its early warning and surveillance.

Leaders go to war because they believe they can win, as did Putin in Ukraine. It is entirely feasible to reinforce both Taiwanese and US capabilities in the region, to a point at which Beijing must doubt its ability to prevail in the necessary amphibious assault, a perilous and difficult undertaking.

The Ukraine experience has rewritten in lights a towering lesson of history: To deter aggression, there is no substitute for credible armed forces. We in the UK and the rest of the West are supremely fortunate that America still possesses these, despite the caveats about the Navy’s vulnerabilities in the Pacific.

Yet more important even than weapons is will. Many people, sometimes including myself, have doubted and continue to doubt whether, if China does invade Taiwan, the US and its allies will undertake military action in response. This is a reprise of the 1950 Korean uncertainty, with one important difference: 73 years ago, there was nothing in South Korea of material value to the West; its armies fought instead to defend a principle. In modern Taiwan, by contrast, advanced semiconductors represent an industry of towering importance both to China and ourselves.

Despite unscripted lunges by US President Joe Biden declaring a commitment to Taiwan, the US position on the island remains equivocal. The intention is to avoid provoking Beijing, yet the consequence is to weaken deterrence. It seems possible, arguably essential, for the US to become more explicit. Washington can assert a determination to support Taiwan’s autonomy by all necessary means, so long as that remains the will of the island’s people.

But the Biden administration can also be clear that should this change — if the Taiwan’s people assert a desire for reunification with the mainland — then the US would raise no obstacle to the imposition of Beijing’s hegemony. Support for the will of a society’s people seems a fundamental democratic principle that the West is entitled to promise to uphold in any context, including of course Ukraine.

Such a comprehensive declaration of deterrence should be no barrier to sustaining a carrot-and-stick approach to Beijing, seeking to negotiate and compromise wherever possible. It is the Chinese who have chosen to adopt a confrontational posture, and seem increasingly unwilling either to accept civilized standards at home or to behave with restraint abroad.

The rhetoric and saber-rattling of the Chinese demand that the West should be ready to meet them in arms should they decide to fight us, or indeed to invade Taiwan. If we allow Beijing to doubt our willingness to do this, then deterrence must fail. We shall then deserve the war we get, in a way neither we nor the Ukrainian people did anything to deserve the one in which we are already committed to preserve their country.

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