Yes China War—they know they must act on Taiwan sooner rather than later

In April, China’s military completed three days of large-scale combat exercises around Taiwan that rehearsed blockading the island and said  it is “ready to fight … at any time to resolutely smash any form of ‘Taiwan independence’ and foreign interference attempts.” The actions followed U.S. pledges to arm up Taiwan and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s diplomatically risky meeting on U.S. soil with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In recent months several Chinese fighter jets have buzzed American military aircraft over the South China sea. Barring a confrontation over Taiwan, however, Xi and other senior Chinese officials have said they do not want war with the United States. Relations between the two powers should not be a “zero-sum game where one side outcompetes or thrives at the expense of the other,” as Xi told Biden at their last bilateral meeting in Bali in November, according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement.

So far, China’s actions seem to be speaking louder than such words. LaPlante conceded that fears Beijing is calculating it must act against Taiwan sooner than later are “a very valid concern. It is always a question that is on everybody’s mind.” In an interview, LaPlante said that sense of urgency is why Biden has invoked the emergency Defense Production Act, enacted during the Korean War, to rebuild and expand the nation’s domestic hypersonic missile industry. This is a key area of Chinese advancement, and U.S. officials fear that Beijing seeks to use hypersonics to push U.S. ships and bases out of close range in the Asia-Pacific region.

Many critics say it’s not enough. “We’re in a window of maximum danger,” says Christian Brose, a former senior aide to the late Sen. John McCain, who for years was a lone voice in the wilderness warning against the Chinese and Russian buildup. “We could throw a trillion dollars a year at the defense budget now, and we’re not going to get a meaningful increase in traditional military capabilities in the next five years. They cannot be produced.”

One of the reasons, again, is that China and other countries — not all of them friendly — make and supply a lot of that stuff now. Over decades of what many say was delusional thinking by both political parties about turning China into a friendly “stakeholder” in a peaceful international system, Washington heedlessly ceded shipbuilding, aircraft parts and circuit boards over to China and other cheap overseas labor forces. America’s new F-35 fighter jets, for example, contain a magnet component made with an alloy almost exclusively manufactured in China. China also totally dominates machine tools and rare earth metals, essentials for manufacturing missiles and munitions, as well as lithium used in batteries, cobalt and the aluminum and titanium used in semiconductors. While Beijing has made new advances in explosives, most American military explosives are made at a single aging Army plant in Tennessee, Forbes reported in March.

“While they were industrializing, we were deindustrializing,” says Brose. Today China commands some 45 percent to 50 percent of total shipbuilding globally, while the United States has . “Given those numbers, explain to me how the United States is going to win a traditional shipbuilding race with China?”

“The bottom line is this whole problem was decades in the making,” added Brose. “It’s not something that just kind of crept up on us and surprised us over the last couple of years.”