How to avoid the Taiwan catastrophe

Lee Ha-kyung
The author is a senior columnist of the JoongAng Ilbo.

Last month, the Foreign Affairs ran a column titled “The Taiwan Catastrophe.” Matthew Pottinger, a former U.S. deputy national security advisor and an architect of the Trump administration’s China policy, was one of the three co-authors. The column pointed out that if China annexes Taiwan and pushes the United States out of Asia, “U.S. allies would face great incentives to develop their own nuclear weapons.”

The authors analyzed that Korea and Japan already have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons, adding “Beijing would have the power to complicate U.S. access to East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean — the littoral of the most populous, economically active part of the world.”

The authors also quoted hedge fund manager Ken Griffin’s estimation that losing access to Taiwanese semiconductors would shave 5 to 10 percent off the U.S. GDP. “It’s an immediate Great Depression,” he was quoted as saying in 2022. “The United States could begin to resemble, as the diplomat Henry Kissinger once put it to one of us (Pottinger), ‘an island off the coast of the world’.”

Will China invade Taiwan? Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed the military to be ready for war by 2027, according to CIA Director William Burns last October. Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu also remarked that given the growing possibility of China invading Taiwan, 2027 could be the year. The year 2027 marks the start of Xi’s fourth term in power and the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army.

If a war erupts in Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula will be immediately drawn into the turmoil. “The world is turbulent enough. Renewed conflict and turmoil should not happen on the [Korean] Peninsula,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on March 7 in a press conference during the National People’s Congress in Beijing.

We hope he is being truthful. But China will likely use North Korean provocations to distract the United States from its efforts to defend Taiwan. In his CNN interview in September 2022, President Yoon Suk Yeol pointed to a high possibility of North Korea staging military provocations if China attacks Taiwan. “Responding to the North Korean provocations based on a strong U.S.-South Korea alliance will be the top priority,” Yoon stressed. But in a recent House hearing, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified that the United States has lost military deterrence in Europe and the Middle East, adding, “We are on the cusp of losing that very deterrent model in Asia as well.”

If Donald Trump returns to the White House, the situation will turn more precarious. Despite U.S. President Joe Biden’s pledge to defend Taiwan, Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with NBC in September that he “won’t say” if he would provide military support to Taiwan against an invasion from China. He had once mentioned the possibility of withdrawing the U.S. Forces Korea. Is the defense of Taiwan and South Korea destined to become a bargaining chip of a former businessman?

Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un defined inter-Korean relations as “between two hostile states” and threatened to “destroy the South without any hesitation.” North Korea watchers Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker warned that the situation on the peninsula is more dangerous now than at any time since the Korean War.

We must reinforce the trilateral alliance among South Korea, the United States and Japan and have a rock-solid security posture. It was a great accomplishment of President Yoon to normalize relations with Japan, which serves as a rear base for U.S. troops in the case of an emergency on the Korean Peninsula. At the same time, we should talk to North Korea as it will help raise the possibility of peace.

Dialogue is essential to understand the enemy’s intentions. A U.S. National Security Council spokesperson said last week that Washington will explore various dialogues, including reducing the risk of an accidental clash on the peninsula. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is pushing for a North-Japan summit, and Pyongyang views it positively. But only South Korea — the directly concerned party — takes a different approach. “Inter-Korean exchanges” have disappeared in the Ministry of Unification while “peace” and “negotiations” have vanished in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Could this be alright?

North Korea’s belligerence is also a way to divert internal discontent about economic hardships to the outside. Instead of confronting the country with a hardline approach, we must wisely prepare various options. Given its stable democracy and world-class economy, South Korea has too much to protect. It needs to send strong signals to North Korea to help bolster the position of its moderates.

The Korean Peninsula is the most dangerous geopolitical tinderbox in the world. The Soviet Union joined forces with the United Sates to end World War II. But just five years later, the Soviets, persuaded by Kim Il Sung, brought in China to fight against South Korea and the U.S. in the Korean War. “In many ways, the Korean War was the dress rehearsal for World War III,” said William Stueck, a professor of history at the University of Georgia.

North Korea, China and Russia are getting closer again. At this point, we must strengthen our security posture, but must not abandon our efforts for dialogue. Despite the tensions in the Taiwan Strait, China and Taiwan have maintained the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement signed in 2010. Last year, Taiwan’s exports to China totaled $152.2 billion.

While the two Koreas are still pointing guns at each other, the powers around them are barking at one another without a let-up. Can peace ever be achieved on such a turbulent peninsula? Our yearning will be the starting point. If a nuclear-free peace comes to the peninsula, couldn’t it represent the permanent peace of the world, advocated by the great philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1795, when he said, “The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away”?