“Will Communist China invade Taiwan?” It may well be the most significant geopolitical question of the first half of the 21st century. Many were startled when, in March 2021, Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Philip Davidson publicly warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that Beijing was preparing for military action against Taiwan by 2027 — though the admiral stopped short of predicting that Xi Jinping would give the “Go Order” in the end or that a crisis was inevitable.
However, while the question of “will they?” is of course an important one, because it’s an unknown that is inexorably linked to one man — Xi Jinping — and his state of mind, it’s one that precludes certainty. Indeed, this decision wouldn’t be the first time in the history of warfare that military doctrine, comparative assessments of strength and disposition, political ideology, and nationalism take a back seat to one man’s ambition and ego in the choice of whether to go to war.
Thus, a more practical and in some ways more interesting question is “Can Communist China invade Taiwan?” — and that leads me to a map that I’ve been thinking a lot about of late.
In 2019, Andrew Rhodes, an American scholar and civil servant, superimposed a scale map of the Normandy landings onto the shoreline of Taiwan and mainland China. As you can see, the distance between the embarkation ports on the English Channel and the Normandy coast are eerily similar to the distance across the Taiwan Strait. Moreover, should the People’s Liberation Army attempt the most direct route and try to land in the immediate vicinity of Taipei’s urban area, the invasion beaches would be roughly similar in geographical scope to the Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches of June 1944.
As Mark Twain probably didn’t say, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
An amphibious invasion of the island of Formosa — Taiwan’s big island — would be an amazingly complex and risky operation. Unless Taiwan’s de facto allies — Japan, Australia, Britain, and, most importantly, the United States — preemptively announced that they would not intervene, Communist Chinese planners need to contend with a formidable coalition possessing hundreds of aircraft, warships, and submarines that could contest the waters and skies around Taiwan.
In such a scenario, if Communist Chinese forces fail to gain freedom of movement in the Taiwan Strait and security in its airspace, the chances for a debacle and humiliating defeat for the invaders are very real. Imagine, for example, how much harder the already touch-and-go early hours of Operation Neptune — the code name for the amphibious-landings phase of Operation Overlord — would have been if German submarines still prowled the Channel and if the Luftwaffe had not already been largely swept aside by overwhelming Allied airpower. And, of course, modern weaponry and anti-ship missiles, as demonstrated in the Falklands War, threaten shipping in a manner that our grandfathers could have only imagined.
None of the above is to say that Beijing could not pull this off under certain conditions — I believe that to be an open question. The Chinese have spent years studying the problems associated with such an operation and have built up their naval strength and shaped their military disposition in an attempt to mitigate the risks and answer the challenges that they would face. And, in a crisis, Xi Jinping could also choose a relatively less risky course of action and attempt to coerce Taiwan through a blockade or the capture of smaller Taiwanese-controlled outlying islands such as Kinmen or Matsu that lie much closer to the mainland.
In the dangerous, crowded waters of the China Seas, perhaps the most important question yet is not “Will Communist China invade Taiwan?” or “Can Communist China invade Taiwan?” but rather “Does Beijing think that Communist China can invade Taiwan?”