SINGAPORE — European Union member states should mobilize their navies to patrol the Taiwan Strait to deter Beijing, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell declared on Saturday, April 22, in response to French President Emmanuel Macron’s remarks suggesting European strategic autonomy from the United States on Taiwan.
Borrell stated,
Europe must in fact be very present on this issue [of Taiwan], which concerns us economically, commercially, and technologically. That is why I call on European navies to patrol the Taiwan Strait to signify Europe’s commitment to freedom of navigation in this absolutely crucial area. At the same time, we must be vigilant against provocations and overbidding. The vast majority of the Taiwanese population believes that the peaceful status quo is the most appropriate solution. Let us, therefore, be firm in ensuring that this principle is respected.
Borrell was not the first EU bureaucrat to contest Macron’s remarks and plans to engage China in peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. Other politicians, including German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, tried to to speak “in the name of Europe.” Before her recent visit to China, Baerbock had stated that she wanted to articulate “the common European conviction that a unilateral change of the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, and in particular a military escalation, would be unacceptable.” Also, Manfred Weber, the president of the largest parliamentary group in the European Parliament, the European People’s Party, decried Macron’s proposals of a more Europe-focused foreign policy, slamming them as a “disaster” that “weakened the European Union.”
But Borrell took matters a step further with his call for EU member states to deploy their warships to the Taiwan Strait. If EU countries respond to Borrell’s suggestion, Beijing could view such actions as provocative and could ramp up its pugilism in the Taiwan Strait.
At the moment, Germany, France, and the Netherlands are the only three EU member states considered capable of naval patrol missions as far as the Western Pacific. Apart from the EU, there is also the U.K., which had already mobilized its HMS Queen Elizabeth to the South China Sea in 2021.
Based on data from the U.S. Naval Institute, America presently has at least five carrier strike groups deployed in the region around the Taiwan Strait. These carriers regularly stage drills and shows of force around the area. The guided-missile destroyer USS Milius was the most recent U.S. Navy transit through the strait, ending on April 16.
Although Beijing maintains that any transits through the Taiwan Strait by foreign warships need Chinese permission, the U.S. Navy does not seek China’s approval in order to “demonstrate commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” sailing “anywhere international law allows.”
Nevertheless, it is quite uncommon for European warships to sail through the Taiwan Strait as openly as the U.S. ships. Although Taiwan admitted that France had deployed the surveillance frigate Prairial through the strait earlier this month, the German frigate Bayern did not do so when it sailed through the region in 2021 for the first time in 20 years.
At a press conference in Brussels on Monday, Borrell also indicated that the EU would build relationships with other countries based on their stances toward Russia and China, stating that the bloc must step up bilateral interactions with “third countries,” plan “beyond everyday crisis management,” and counter the “Russian narrative” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a wargame modeling exercise ordered by a U.S. congressional committee revealed that Washington would be unable to resupply Taiwan with arms should China invade the island.
The U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, aided by the think tank Center for a New American Security in Washington, staged the aforesaid exercise.
The simulation revealed that American troops would incur great losses if the Pentagon fails to ramp up its stockpiles of long-range missiles and negotiate use of more Asian-Pacific military bases, Reuters reported, quoting an unnamed source familiar with the modeling results. Thus, a potential Sino-U.S. conflict would cause global financial markets to be in “absolute tatters.”
“We are well within the window of maximum danger for a Chinese Communist Party invasion of Taiwan, and yesterday’s war game stressed the need to take action to deter CCP aggression and arm Taiwan to the teeth before any crisis begins,” U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the committee, said in a statement.
“The business community is not taking the threat of a Taiwan crisis seriously enough,” Gallagher added, cautioning that neglecting the issue “verges on dereliction of fiduciary duty.”
Amid the resupply problem, Gallagher said, Washington must speed up its deliveries of the $19 billion in U.S. arms that Taiwan has ordered. The representative also requested more joint training exercises, reinforcement of U.S. military installations in the region, and enhanced missile production.
“The goal of course is to deter China from launching the invasion,” Gallagher said in a Fox News interview. “One of the obvious lessons from the failure of deterrence in Ukraine is that when it breaks down, it’s very costly in terms of lives and blood and treasure. So we are conducting this wargame in order to prevent a war.”
Gallagher then claimed that “peace can only be achieved through strength, particularly since Xi Jinping appears to be preparing his country for war. I’m sure he’d prefer to have conquest without war. We need to be ready, and we’re not moving fast enough.”
Earlier this year, another Washington think tank that regards its mission as defining the “future of national security,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), staged 24 different wargame scenarios for a Sino-U.S. conflict over Taiwan. The conclusion for the simulations was that, while the United States and Japan would eventually triumph, they would lose warships, hundreds of planes, and thousands of troops. The CSIS stated that Taiwan would be left in shambles, “without electricity and basic services,” whereas China would forfeit hundreds of ships and aircraft, as well as tens of thousands of troops.
Tony Cox, an American journalist who has written for various news outlets including Bloomberg, contended that in light of Washington’s past and present moves, America’s “decision-makers might actually be encouraged and emboldened by the CSIS’s projections” rather than be deterred by the possible losses the United States and its allies could sustain in a Sino-U.S. war.
Cox justified his stance by stating,
Washington’s rulers have no qualms about getting thousands — or even millions — of people killed or maimed. That’s especially true of the smaller allies that they vow to support. From the South Vietnamese to the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds to the Afghans who sided with the West against the Taliban, many a little brother can testify to how big brother emboldened him to fight, pledging to have his back, only to throw him under the bus when it came time to skedaddle.
For the hawkish elites in Washington, Cox asserted, such destruction would be “a small price to pay for boosting the American war machine.”
Quoting former South Vietnamese president Nguyễn Văn Thiệu after the latter was betrayed by America, Cox said, “It is so easy to be an enemy of the United States, but so difficult to be a friend.”
Cox then compared American actions in Asia to its efforts in Ukraine, where Washington helped set the stage for the ongoing Russo-Ukraine conflict by lobbying for the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders and backing the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014. Even Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov acknowledged in a January 5 interview that Kyiv’s forces are “shedding their blood” for NATO.
Hostilities in the Taiwan Strait have risen in the past year, with Chinese authoritarian leader Xi Jinping pledging to reunify Taiwan with the mainland by force if necessary, while President Joe Biden suggests that Washington would intervene militarily if China invaded. Beijing severed security relations with the United States after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei last August, in a move that was deemed by Beijing as provocative.
Arguably, Taiwanese, Chinese, and even American deaths in the event of a Sino-U.S. war could be leveraged by the Deep State neocons in Washington to push their war agenda forward, as American history has shown.
During the initial stages of the Second World War, then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt reportedly sought to incite Japan into attacking the United States at Pearl Harbor to provoke even anti-war Americans to clamor for war. A historian who backed this view was the late Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deceit, who singled out an October 1940 memo from the Office of Naval Intelligence on how the United States could provoke Tokyo to attack American troops. According to Stinnett, Washington’s plans purportedly included provocative actions such as aiding the Chinese national government led by Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese, deploying U.S. destroyers and submarines to the Orient, sanctioning all trade with Japan, as well as stationing the main forces of the U.S. Navy in Hawaii.
If Stinnett’s arguments hold water, then Roosevelt’s plans were successful. A May 1940 Gallup Poll revealed that 93 percent of Americans opposed entering the war, but 91 percent were in favor of declaring war on Japan and Germany after the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941.
Years later, the foreign-policy think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) unveiled a report in September 2000 that stated that to construct “tomorrow’s dominant force,” the requisite transformation of America’s military would take a long time, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”
In 2001, when political bigwig Donald Rumsfeld became the U.S. Secretary of Defense, America experienced another “Pearl Harbor,” namely, the September 11 attacks on Washington and the Pentagon that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Following an eruption of bipartisanship in Congress, then-President George W. Bush powered America’s war machine, increased state surveillance, and undermined civil liberties on the pretext of national security. As indicated in the 2000 PNAC report, American government actions also catalyzed a brutal regime-change war in Iraq, devastating the Middle Eastern country and killing thousands.
