"How Britain Can Help Keep The Peace In Taiwan" - By CWP Alum Eyck Freymann

During a recent trip to Taipei, I sat down with several retired Taiwanese national security officials to talk about the possibility of war with China. Their responses were sobering: most agreed an outright war is likely this decade or in the early 2030s – whenever Beijing thinks it can outmuscle the US and Japan. They wanted the world to know the situation’s severity. ‘I lived to see Taiwan’s rise,’ one elder statesman told me. ‘Now I fear I will live to see its fall.’ 

Officials in the Pentagon are laser-focused on the western Pacific. They see Vladimir Putin as little more than a distraction. Senior US Navy officials, such as the chief of naval operations Admiral Michael Gilday, have warned war could come this year. The Marine Corps, too, is retraining: the last US war was a counterinsurgency in the desert, the next one is likely to be an island battle in the Pacific.

The noises coming from Beijing suggest these fears aren’t misplaced. On Monday, Xi Jinping, who will visit Putin in Moscow next week, pledged to build China’s military into a ‘great wall of steel’. China’s navy, already the largest in the world, is rapidly growing in scope and sophistication; it’s expected to have 400 ships by 2025 (America has fewer than 300, Taiwan just 26).

From magazine issue:18 March 2023 - https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-britain-can-help-keep-the-peace-in-taiwan/

Eyck Freymann is a CWP fellow for 2022-23. Previously he was a doctoral candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, where he researches the geopolitics of climate change. He is Director of Indo-Pacific and global pandemic coverage at Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

In the 2022–23 academic year he will be a joint Fellow at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program.

Freymann’s first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard UP 2020), is assigned as required reading in Harvard’s “United States and China” introductory course for undergraduates. He also writes on a range of other current affairs topics, including U.S. politics and foreign policy and COVID-19. Freymann’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The Atlantic, among others, and he is a reporter and columnist for The Wire China.

Freymann holds two masters degrees in China Studies: the first from Harvard University and the second from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Harvard-UK Henry Scholar. He earned his bachelors degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.

Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/lextotan-7839095/