"The Devil’s In The Differences: Ukraine And A Taiwan Contingency" - By CWP Alum William J. Norris
When and if a Taiwan contingency were to ever unfold, there is likely to be a natural tendency to refer to the Ukraine experience as a reference from which to draw strategic lessons. While there are some structural similarities between the Ukraine war and some future Taiwan scenario—and certain preferences and courses of action may look familiar—attention ought to be more focused on areas in which they diverge. Drawing on US economic statecraft responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I suggest that a Taiwan contingency may prove more challenging, and that parts of the US government should proactively take measures today to enhance our position in any future conflict involving Taiwan. Across the more than 30 departments and agencies in the US government that are responsible for some element of economic statecraft, there is a pressing institutional need to engage in economic statecraft capacity building. Economic statecraft takes on a wide variety of forms well beyond sanctions. We need to improve both our understanding of economic statecraft as well as our institutional capacity to wield this important tool of national power. The time to do that is now, not in the middle of an acute crisis.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0163660X.2023.2189343 - Pages 137-151 | Published online: 04 Apr 2023 - https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2023.2189343
Dr. William Norris is currently an associate professor of Chinese foreign and security policy at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University where he teaches graduate-level courses in Chinese domestic politics, East Asian security, and Chinese foreign policy. Dr. Norris has been an associate with the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C. where his work examined the potential for a conventional US-China conflict to escalate to the nuclear realm. He was also a postdoctoral research associate at the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs and a fellow in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, a joint program created by the two universities to foster the study of China’s foreign relations. He completed his doctoral work in the Security Studies Program in the Department of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he specialized in the confluence of economics and security, focusing on the role of economics in contemporary Chinese grand strategy.
Photo Credit: By Office of the President of the Republic of China, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124691162
