If China wants a wargame, let’s give it one

Advertisement

Nobody wants a war over Taiwan. It’s a great power conflict so immense that it obviously invites the worst possible outcomes including losing.

But the free world can’t just let China have Taiwan, either. If it does, then it will be next stop IndoPacific as Beijing seeks to extend freedom-crushing Pax Sinovile as far as it can go.

So, as Beijing throws the toys out of the cot around Taiwan this week, let’s give it the wargame it so clearly wants.

No, I do not mean another carrier group from the US sailing the Straits.

Advertisement

What I do mean is to mock deploy the Russia/Ukraine response applied to China. NATO should resolve a package of mock sanctions, weaponised US dollar, and commodity blockades that will all but excise China from the global economy.

There is a lot to recommend this course of action:

  • It will prove that it can be done, as well as make clear to the CCP that if it wants to take Taiwan then it will be giving up its economy with obvious implications for its social contract to rule.
  • Equally, it will illustrate to global markets that it will be triggered in the event of an invasion and, so, become a self-fulfilling prophecy as risk premiums for China blow out forcing all manner of supply chains to reorient away from that country now instead of later.
  • In turn, this will bolster the resilience of the free world to Chinese economic coercion.
  • It will also help illustrate to all and sundry how infantile is Beijing and intensify the shift in global normatives from greed to fear around the CCP.
  • Finally, it will ensure that China grovellers, such as the Albanese Government, have nowhere to hide.
Advertisement

Funnily enough, for the wisdom of this course, we can turn to none other than our own disgraced Scott Morrison. Paul Kelly wrote up his first decent piece in years on the weekend, though he was paraphrasing others:

On April 20, 2020, then prime minister Scott Morrison told the national security committee of cabinet that Australia’s democratic system was being “infiltrated” by Beijing and that the government must become more strident in its language about China to signal its resistance.

“We need multiple points of pushback on this increasing aggression,” Morrison told his most senior ministers during the NSC meeting. The cabinet committee was meeting virtually but was provided with an oral update on the latest Chinese-sponsored cyber activity that was alarming the prime minister.

…Fresh details and insights into Morrison’s management of China’s coercion against Australia are contained in a new book, Plagued, by The Australian’s political editor Simon Benson and the paper’s chief political correspondent Geoff Chambers.

…The book reveals that at an ­earlier April 6 NSC meeting, the national security implications of Covid were laid out for the first time. The assessment from the nation’s intelligence community was that the pandemic would accelerate tensions in the region and that China could be expected to exploit the situation for its interests.

…This April 6 NSC meeting was a fortnight before Payne’s interview on Insiders, and the Benson/Chambers account captures the nature of warnings and discussions among senior ministers. Australia’s scepticism about China’s influence in the World Health Organisation was deep-seated, with Payne saying in her interview the WHO could not conduct the inquiry into the virus since it mixed being “poacher and gamekeeper”.

…The PM said he was fully aware that some agricultural industries would be exposed and their businesses risked becoming collateral damage from Australia’s strong stand against China. “We will cop some pain but we can’t let it undermine our national security,” Morrison told cabinet.

…Morrison had concluded the only way to counter China was through greater intelligence and strategic co-operation among aligned democracies. He moved to implement this view after Payne’s interview, and the April 20 NSC meeting ended with Morrison saying: “I’ll call the UK Prime Minister.”

…It was the next year during Morrison’s 2021 visit to Britain – where he attended the G7 meeting and had a three-way meeting with Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden – that his global diplomacy reached its zenith. The three leaders laid the basis for the AUKUS agreement to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarine technology.

In Morrison’s briefing to the G7, leaders he spoke to the 14 grievance points the Chinese embassy in Australia had released to the media. The Benson/Chambers account says Morrison made sure all the leaders had a copy of China’s grievances in front of them.

They report Morrison saying: “This is what they are doing. This is what we are dealing with.” He told the leaders Australia would not submit to such pressure and that if Australia did concede, China would then come after other countries.

I had this wrong at the time. ScoMo knew what he was doing all along in provoking Beijing. Bravo!

Advertisement

This is his lesson for the world. Tag the CCP’s glass jaw and it will reveal all of its hideous ignominies. More than anything else, that will drive a wedge between it and the world.

It is too risky to save Taiwan militarily and the US should absolutely NOT try. Democrats looking to boost its status to allie and end “strategic ambiguity” are lunatics.

Offering the CCP enough rope to hang itself is Taiwan’s best hope of freedom.

Advertisement
About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.