The Case for Defending Taiwan

As the architect of former president Donald Trump’s China strategy, Matthew Pottinger engineered the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War. The former Marine military intelligence officer has published a new compendium on military and diplomatic strategy towards China, “The Boiling Moat,” with an urgent warning to Western leaders that Taiwan must be defended from China’s aggression.

Far from advocating a hot war with the Sleeping Giant, Pottinger favors a rigorous policy of deterrence. He argues, “If just one lesson could be drawn from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it must be that deterrence would have been a lot cheaper than war.” Former secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo attests that “The Boiling Moat” “lays out precisely how we can deter the catastrophic war that China’s dictator is planning.”

Die Weltwoche reaches Pottinger in his office in Washington, D.C. The former deputy national security adviser explains what is at stake in Taiwan. He also discusses his decision to resign from the Trump White House following the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

«Urgent Steps»: Matt Pottinger.

Weltwoche: In your new book, “The Boiling Moat,” you lay out “Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan.” Why does the West need to protect Taiwan against China?

Pottinger: Taiwan has massive strategic importance that is geopolitical, geographic, economic, technological, and also importance with respect to what the future holds for democracy far beyond the shores of Taiwan. If we look at the way that Taiwan was considered even during the Cold War in 1950, General MacArthur, who was at that time living in Japan and was still a few months before the Korean War broke out, believed that it was essential that Taiwan be a friendly government or at least a neutral government, or else it would become a springboard for aggression by dictatorships. He was thinking about the Soviet Union, and he was also thinking about the People’s Republic of China, which had just been established in 1949. Those things are still true today.

Weltwoche: The geostrategic situation has changed since then. How are General MacArthur’s assessments still true today?

Pottinger: The Soviet Union’s gone, but the People’s Republic of China remains a Leninist dictatorship. It has designs on the region that go far beyond Taiwan. In fact, we know from reading Chinese military and political doctrine that they believe that controlling Taiwan is essential, not just as a means of achieving a great feat for the dictator in Beijing, but really for what would follow, which would be threatening all of the region’s democracies.

When you are a Leninist dictatorship, you never feel safe having a democracy as your neighbor. Xi Jinping’s speeches show that he’s obsessed with the idea that nearby democracies might at some point undermine Beijing. He’s obsessed with the idea of color revolutions and even neighbors that have no intention of harming China. Whether it’s Japan, or South Korea, or the Philippines, or European countries further across the Eurasian landmass, it doesn’t matter. There’s no amount of reassurance that will convince a Leninist dictatorship that it can be truly secure. Therefore, they are compulsively belligerent.

As soon as a Leninist dictatorship has the capacity to be aggressive, it will be aggressive. In fact, the more that you try to reassure a Leninist dictatorship, often the more aggressive they become because they interpret it as weakness or attempts to reassure them.

Weltwoche: What is economically at stake in Taiwan?

Pottinger: Taiwan manufactures well over 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors and a huge percentage of even non-cutting-edge semiconductors. That is the whole 21st-century economy. That is your smartphones. It’s your cryptocurrency. It is your artificial intelligence. It is all of the services that are emerging or which have already emerged, basically, and live off of the architecture of high-end semiconductors. If Beijing were to either damage or take control of that production, it would basically give Beijing leverage over the entire free world and, indeed, the whole industrialized world. They would control the most important input of the high-tech economy.

Weltwoche: After more than two years of killing in Ukraine, we see a growing war fatigue in the West. We hear echoes of history, when people in the 1930s asked, “Mourir pour Danzig? Why should we die for Danzig?” Today they ask: “Why should we die for Kiev? Die for Taipei?” What do you say to people who believe that a conflict about Taiwan is in America’s interest and that Europeans should abstain from it?

Pottinger: Yes, it’s a mirror image of American attitudes in the 1930s when we saw the rise of Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. A significant number of Americans on both sides, on the left and the right, said we’re protected by two oceans. This is Europe’s problem. It’s not our problem. We’ve already gone through World War I, the Great War. American veterans’ hospitals were filled in the 1930s with men aging from terrible traumatic brain injuries from the shelling that occurred on the European battlefields of World War I.

A lot of Americans said this is not our problem. Guess what? It very quickly became our problem. In fact, had we treated it as our problem at the outset, it's quite possible that we would not have suffered the horrendous catastrophe of World War II, which was even bloodier than World War I. If we had been there to push Britain to not permit Hitler’s move on the Rhineland to stand, if we had not allowed the Anschluss or the annexation for creating Lebensraum in Czechoslovakia, if we had made it our problem earlier, we would have had a much better chance of deterring the conflict as opposed to having to fight the conflict.

In a sense, you see some re-emergence of some of those attitudes again in America, where Americans are saying,“Yes, Russia’s bulldozing Ukraine, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of civilians, as well as hundreds of thousands of its own Russian soldiers. This is Europe’s problem again. It’s not an American problem.” I wholeheartedly disagree with that assessment. By the same token, Europeans need to understand that Taiwan is a European problem just as much as Ukraine is an American problem.

Weltwoche: You start your book with George Washington’s first annual address to Congress in 1790: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” What is the importance of the Founding Father’s proverb in regards to Taiwan?

Pottinger: That deterrence is always cheaper in treasure and lives and heartache than fighting a war.

Weltwoche: Would the West not provoke Beijing to launch an invasion in Taiwan if it expanded military presence in the South China Sea?

Pottinger: Taiwan has been a de facto separate government from the People’s Republic of China. Since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, Taiwan has never been governed by the People’s Republic of China. Yet, in the United States, every president from Jimmy Carter onwards, following the normalization of US-China ties during the Carter administration, has said that we want to preserve the peaceful status quo in the Taiwan Strait; any change to the status quo must be agreed by the people of both Taiwan and China. That stable status quo has held, for the most part, for more than seven decades. It’s only now that the Chinese dictator is amassing enormous military capability that he is now taking steps to undermine the status quo, unilaterally.

Taiwan is not undermining the status quo. The United States is not undermining the status quo. Japan is not undermining the status quo. It is Xi Jinping who is deliberately undermining the status quo in order to try to annex Taiwan so that he has a new military outpost from which he can threaten to blockade Japan, the Philippines, and a lot of other countries. He hopes that by doing that, he can force those countries to become client states, vassal states of the People’s Republic of China. If we allow that to happen, we are going to be living in an extremely different world the next day and for each successive day, thereafter. We’ll be moving towards an anti-democratic norm in the world.

Weltwoche: You point out that China’s president Xi Jinping sees himself as the architect of a new order. In your book, you quote from 2018 military textbooks on Xi Jinping thought: “The world is now undergoing a transition so massive that nothing like it has ever been seen before. At its core, this transition is being driven by the following changes. The US is becoming weak. China is becoming strong. Russia is becoming aggressive, and Europe is becoming chaotic. This is a historic turning point.” Do you agree with Xi’s assessment that we are witnessing a historic turning point?

Pottinger: I would agree with Xi Jinping that he is facing a historic opportunity that does not have to become a turning point if free societies keep our wits and do what we need to do to deter further aggression. It’s very clear that Xi Jinping is now acting on that design that is laid out in that textbook by backing the largest war in Europe since 1945, by supporting Iran, and also providing diplomatic cover and propaganda support for Iranian terrorist proxies like Hamas, among others, and the Houthis.

What we’re now witnessing is a significant change that’s occurred over just the last two years: the erosion, bordering on collapse, of deterrence by Western democracies; and the aggression of this axis of chaos with Beijing at its core. Beijing isn’t, yet, the one pulling triggers killing people. What it’s doing is servicing dictators to wage war in their respective regions in Europe and in the Middle East. I fear that more fronts may soon be opened by Xi Jinping and his axis.

Weltwoche: In the Trump administration you were the White House’s foremost China expert. You kept a whiteboard mapped out with a highly detailed accounting of China’s growing global influence. What are the strategic goals of the Chinese Communist Party, worldwide?

Pottinger: The first goal of the CCP is to maintain its monopoly on power. Its number one enemy is the Chinese people. It claims to speak for the Chinese people, even though it's never been elected by a single Chinese person. It fears, first and foremost, its own people. It spends more money on its internal security than it spends even on its massive military. Its military spending, according to the American Enterprise Institute, is now very close to approaching parity with US military spending, which is the most in the world.

By understanding that the first and greatest adversary of the Chinese Communist Party is its own people, you start to understand the logic of its foreign policy. Its foreign policy is designed to strengthen its hand against its own people. It fears the example of other democracies, which gets to the third reason China wants to take Taiwan.

Taiwan is a nation mostly made up of people with Chinese heritage. Most speak dialects of Chinese that are also spoken in mainland China. Yet, they built one of the most successful and prosperous countries in the world as a freewheeling democracy. Taiwan often rates higher on democracy and disease than the United States and a lot of European countries.

Weltwoche: What is the danger Beijing sees in Taiwan’s freewheeling democracy?

Pottinger: Beijing has to extinguish this ethnically Chinese democracy in order to feel safe at home. By the same extension of logic, it needs to feel that the United Nations is not promoting liberal ideas but is promoting illiberal ideas. It is working on co-opting international organizations. It can only feel safe if democracies—even ones on the other side of the world, like the United States—are increasingly weakened and pose less of a formidable threat and leadership role in the world. What Beijing is doing there is employing forms of warfare, short of conventional and nuclear war, in order to disintegrate our society slowly but surely.

Weltwoche: What kind of warfare are you talking about?

Pottinger: I’m talking about chemical warfare. Remember, the American epidemic of fentanyl which kills close to 100,000 Americans a year. We're now looking at more than a million Americans who've died since the turn of the century.

Beijing not only tolerates, but provides robust, persistent government subsidies for the illegal trade of fentanyl or the precursor chemicals that they know are not going into hospital drugs but into illicit street drugs that kill children and destroy communities.

Chemical warfare. Information warfare. Here, they use several vectors, but the most potent vector of all, by their own admission, is Tiktok. Tiktok is subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party.

In fact, the parent company, the editor-in-chief and deputy editor-in-chief of the algorithms are the Communist Party and deputy Communist Party secretaries, respectively, appointed by the central government. Their main threat through Tiktok is not only the harvesting of sensitive data but, more than that, control of what content trends and goes viral and what content dies in silence because they are able to suppress it.

What that means is that we've essentially handed the public square over to the Chinese Communist Party. They don’t control what people say in the public square, but they control whether anyone else hears those people in the public square. On the other hand, they can also amplify what is said in the public square. We see those distortions when you compare content that trends on Tiktok versus the other non-Chinese controlled platforms. The disparity is massive in what content trends and what gets suppressed.

Weltwoche: You worked to develop President Trump's policies towards China. What has Trump achieved with this strategy and where was he short of implementing what you advised him to do?

Pottinger: The big contribution that President Trump made was to abandon a failed two or three decade old strategy of engagement and to shift towards a much more hard-nosed policy of great power competition that involved imposing significant costs on the Chinese Communist Party when the Chinese Communist Party was harming our interests, which it routinely does. He was willing to accept friction in a bilateral relationship in order to impose tariffs, for example, on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese exports, starting with those exports that had benefited from the theft of American intellectual property.

The other contribution was that President Trump really changed the bipartisan consensus on China so that even after he left office, President Biden, who had been critical of President Trump’s China policy, ended up adopting that policy almost wholesale until just the last year and a half where, I think, things have started to slip in the Biden administration’s policy in ways that are really unfortunate.

President Trump moved us to a new baseline. President Biden held that baseline for his first couple of years in office and is now sliding away from that baseline in ways that are actually quite dangerous and provocative, in my view.

Weltwoche: The title of your book, “The Boiling Moat,” derives from a quote by the Han Dynasty statesman Kuai Tong from the first century CE. He advised that even a powerful army should refrain from attacking well defended border cities protected by “metal ramparts and boiling moats.” To protect Taiwan, you suggest that Taipei, the US, and key allies should embrace a “boiling moat” strategy. What would that mean?

Pottinger: A boiling moat strategy is one that takes advantage of the geography that favors Taiwan—namely, the fact that there are 100 miles of ocean separating Taiwan from the People’s Republic of China. China will not be able to succeed, in our estimate, in forcibly annexing Taiwan without control of the seas. Therefore, there’s an opportunity for Taiwan, Japan, the United States, as well as Australia and some other allies, to hold China’s Navy at risk.

Naval vessels are very expensive. China’s very good at building them. But even with their massive armada of ships, Taiwan, if it continues to procure at a faster rate and the US procure at a faster rate anti-ship weapons, for example, and that can include drones, anti-ship missiles, mines, torpedoes, and also UAVs, unmanned vessels that operate in the waters, under the waters, and in the air over the Taiwan Strait. Those things are relatively cheap in comparison to this extraordinary Navy that China has built, and they can actually sink that Navy.

Weltwoche: What are the most urgent steps the next president needs to take?

Pottinger: We have to ensure that we have enough of those munitions available. The munitions cost very little compared to the ships that China’s building, but we’re not procuring them fast enough. One of the key things that we write about is the sense of urgency by which we need to revamp our collective industrial bases. Our military industrial bases have been shown to be wanting in the current conflict in Europe because we've followed antiquated contracting rules. We have not leveraged our private sector sufficiently to incentivize it to find faster ways of procuring more and more deadly and cheaper weapons. That’s a big part of it.

Another key recommendation we make is for Japan to embrace its role as the swing state in this Taiwan war deterrence equation. Japan has very significant military capabilities, and it's building more. What my co-authors and I urge is that Japan be much more forthright in stating its intention to help involve itself in a conflict to defend Taiwan and then do more to prepare with its allies and to prepare its citizenry for that conflict.

If Japan tries to posture as though it’s a passive player, it will invite the war that would be so damaging to Japan’s interests. Therefore, to acquire deterrent value, Japan needs to be more outspoken about how it would actually fight alongside the United States and Taiwan. We look at Taiwan’s own very urgent need to revamp its military culture, to get rid of an antiquated culture adopted from the early days of the Republic of China, a century ago, and to adopt something more like the Israeli model—a small, but extremely well-trained reserve force backing a small but very capable active duty force.

We also look at some of the mix of weapon systems that we think Taiwan should relinquish and the types of weapon systems it should spend more money purchasing. That’s a taste of some of the recommendations that we make.

Weltwoche: You served the Trump administration from day one. Then, you left office on January 7th, 2021, one day after the attack on the Capitol. What was the reason for your departure?

Pottinger: Look, I did serve President Trump very loyally. I am very proud of his accomplishments as president in the area of foreign policy. A lot of people thought that his foreign policy was going to be a disaster. It ended up being quite effective. I would argue one of the more effective foreign policies we’ve seen. He was able to prevent new wars, and he was able to turn the page towards a new paradigm, recognizing the reality of our Cold War with China.

He was also able to shift the Middle East towards a better paradigm. That work is unfinished. We made an amazing step forward with the Abraham Accords where President Trump was able to negotiate a peace between Arab countries and Israel.

Weltwoche: Why did you leave despite all those achievements?

Pottinger: The reason that I left was that I disagreed with the president’s decision not to accept the court rulings that determined the outcome of the election. Even if you don’t agree with the outcome, and even if evidence surfaces later suggesting that the outcome may have been different, we are a Constitutional democracy with co-equal branches of government. Our judiciary determines the outcome of the election when it is disputed.

There was a comprehensive sweep in the courts, including by judges that President Trump had himself appointed, saying that the election was effectively won by President Biden.

Once the events of January 6th unfolded, I thought it was only appropriate for me to keep the courage of my convictions and offer my resignation that day on the 6th. I ended up leaving office the next morning because I was the most senior person on deck, and I didn’t think it would be responsible for me to leave on the spot without making sure that our national security concerns were being monitored by a senior official. I was the deputy national security advisor, and the national security advisor (Robert O’Brien) was not in the White House that day. He was visiting one of our military commands. That's really what it's about.

Weltwoche: If Donald Trump was to be elected again in November and asked you to join his team, would you serve him again?

Pottinger: I will support the elected president of the United States, whomever he is. In President Trump’s first term, I did that in office. I’m very proud of my service, and I’m proud of what we accomplished. There are also ways to serve that don’t involve being in office, and I will offer my best advice to President Trump if he’s elected in whatever form seems appropriate and useful to the president.

Matt Pottinger (Editor), The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, Hoover Institution Press, will be on bookstands July 1^st.