Name: The Taiwan Trap
Uploaded: 2024-07-27T17:01:52.000Z
Duration: 14 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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It can fly 267 kilometers per hour and has advanced radar and torpedoes specifically designed to find and destroy submarines.

In 2015, the government of Taiwan asked to purchase 12 of them from the United States.

Taiwan wanted these helicopters in order to defend themselves against a potential invasion from China, which has a massive submarine fleet.

The U.S. has for decades sold Taiwan a huge variety of its weapons, so this was a routine request.

But in 2022, the deal suddenly collapsed.

Reporting revealed that the U.S. was actually not responding to its request and even pushing

And it's because the U.S. has become very concerned that Taiwan's strategy for defending itself from an invasion has some major flaws.

I think would have been the first time that the United States formally denied a Taiwanese request for something.

The consensus is Taiwan needs to do much more to show that it is addressing this with urgency.

So what is Taiwan's plan to fight off a Chinese invasion?

The conflict between China and Taiwan started almost a century ago.

In 1927, Chinese communists loyal to Mao Zedong began fighting against the nationalist government ruled by Chiang Kai-shek and his allies.

More than 6 million people died in the ensuing civil war.

In 1949, the communist army won, and the nationalists fled to Taiwan, just 130 kilometers offshore.

On the mainland, the communists established the People's Republic of China, which, for the sake of clarity, we'll call China, while the nationalists set up their own authoritarian regime called the Republic of China, which we'll call Taiwan.

But the war never ended, with each side continuing to claim that they were the legitimate government of both Taiwan and the mainland, and threatening, eventually, to reunify with the other.

The United States originally sided with the nationalists in 1954, then signed a mutual defense pact with them, promising to defend Taiwan if China invaded.

It then positioned American troops and weapons on the island.

But about 20 years later, the U.S. wanted to improve its relationship with China.

So in 1979, it formally recognized it as the country's legitimate government.

It then pulled its troops out of Taiwan, and ended its official promise to defend it.

In its place, the U.S. passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which was a promise to maintain trade and cultural relations with Taiwan, but crucially not a promise to defend the island in the event of a Chinese attack.

It leaves ambiguous whether the United States would actually intervene directly on Taiwan's behalf.

David Sachs is a fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Because of U.S. ambiguity, Taiwan assumes that the United States will not come to its defense.

Instead, the law promises that the U.S. will sell Taiwan all the weapons it needs to defend itself.

So in the 80s and 90s, Taiwan started submitting requests to buy weapons, and the U.S. government approved them.

It bought fighter jets, tanks, attack helicopters, missiles, and even ships.

These were some of the most advanced and expensive weapons that the U.S. had to offer.

These M60 tanks cost more than a million dollars each, F-16 fighter jets cost about 40 million dollars each, and these ships cost upwards of 300 million dollars.

But the U.S. and Taiwan both agreed that these weapons gave Taiwan an advantage against China's likely invasion strategy.

At the time, China would likely begin its invasion by sending its troops across the strait in ships.

But while it had millions more soldiers than Taiwan, it had relatively few advanced weapons to protect them.

So as they crossed the strait, Taiwan's jets, ships, and missiles could easily attack them.

Any Chinese troops that made it across would quickly run into Taiwan's defenses, including its tanks.

As Taiwan stalled China, its second advantage, the United States, could decide to intervene and move in its military, giving Taiwan a high chance of successfully repelling a Chinese invasion.

The key variable here when we're thinking about U.S. intervention on Taiwan's behalf is time.

So through the 1990s, Taiwan kept spending its money on U.S.-made aircraft, tanks, and ships in preparation for that scenario.

But across the strait, China was changing its strategy, and fast.

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And now let's get back to China and the biggest military buildup in modern history.

In 1995, China fired six missiles into the sea surrounding Taiwan to protest the rise of a new Taiwanese leader.

Li Teng-hue would become Taiwan's first popularly elected president, and he wanted to move Taiwan away from any reunification with the mainland, something China disapproved of.

By firing these missiles, China was demonstrating its commitment to reunification and its willingness to use its military to achieve it.

Over the previous decades, China had dramatically grown its economy.

Then beginning in the 1990s, it poured a lot of that money into its military, outspending

China developed its own modern tanks, fighter jets, submarines, helicopters, battleships and ballistic missiles in order to match Taiwan's American-made weaponry.

Now we see China fielding advanced fourth and even fifth generation fighters.

They're just as advanced as the F-16s Taiwan has.

We've also seen China really ramp up its submarine capacity, ballistic missiles.

And so it has been focused above all else on preparing for Taiwan.

By 2013, the Taiwanese Ministry of Defense estimated that China's military had three times as many helicopters, more than four times as many battleships, eight times as many fighter jets, 10 times as many tanks, more than 15 times as many submarines and an overwhelming number of ballistic missiles that could reach Taiwan.

These weapons gave China a better chance of successfully invading by negating both of

Instead of sending its troops over first, China could use its missiles to bombard Taiwan's airfields and ports, easy targets that would effectively eliminate Taiwan's Air Force and Navy.

Next, its ships and submarines could protect its troops as they crossed the strait.

Then its aircraft and tanks could help them capture the island, possibly fast enough to discourage the U.S. from intervening.

That would leave Taiwan with a very low chance of success.

But if the U.S. did intervene, China could use its own advanced aircraft, ships, subs and missiles to block its path, creating a scenario that either side could win.

A lot of the capabilities that China has developed make it much more difficult for Taiwan to leverage those advanced weapons.

Taiwan needed a new strategy that didn't rely so heavily on these advanced weapons.

In 2008, an American military expert named William Murray proposed a strategy that did just that, and even gave it a name.