What if China Decides “Now” Is the Time to Attack Taiwan & America

By James Holmes, Warrior Contributor, Navy 

Will a ‘Peak’ China decide now is the time for war with America: Hal Brands and Michael Beckley have breaking news from 1832! Namely that it sometimes makes sense for the weak to pick a fight with the strong. No less an authority than Carl von Clausewitz affirms it. Suppose, postulates Clausewitz, a weaker contender “is in conflict with a much more powerful one and expects its position to grow weaker every year. If war is unavoidable, should it not make the most of its opportunities before its position gets still worse? In short, it should attack . . . .”

Verily, Clausewitz is a man for all seasons. If you know important trendlines are turning against you—if you expect your strategic standing vis-à-vis your antagonist to be worse next year than this—then he advises you to strike now. Otherwise, you’ll get less than you might. Your window of opportunity might even slam shut by next year.

Such a now-or-never calculus makes for a combustible atmosphere. The challenge before America is to deter China from striking a match.

Brands and Beckley are professors at Johns Hopkins and Tufts, respectively. Though they don’t mention the sage of nineteenth-century Prussia in their lucidly written new book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, they apply Clausewitzian logic to Communist China, arguing that the world is witnessing “peak China.” If China stands at the zenith of its power, and if Chinese Communist Party magnates know it, then they might reason that now is their best opportunity to use military might to settle longstanding grudges.

The next few years will be a time of temptation for Beijing—and thus a time of peril for the Indo-Pacific.

To buttress their case the coauthors catalog various factors that have turned negative after abetting China’s rise to great power. China, they observe, has been the beneficiary of a uniquely favorable political and strategic environment over the decades since party leaders resolved to reform the economy and open it to the world. But China’s surroundings are no longer so auspicious—in large measure because Beijing has squandered Asian and international goodwill through its bellicosity and mendacity.

There are externally imposed limits to China’s rise.