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Chapter 1: What are the geopolitical implications of a conflict between China and Taiwan?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the OddLots podcast. I'm Tracey Alloway.
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Joe, up until recently, very recently, I would say there are or were two hypothetical blockades that kind of loomed large in the minds of geopolitical strategists everywhere. And the first was, of course, Iran blockading. The Strait of Hormuz. That's clearly not a hypothetical anymore. It's actually happened. It's reality. And we've been doing a lot of episodes about it.
And so the big hypothetical blockade that we're left with to ponder is China potentially doing something with Taiwan.
Definitely. And, you know, the only thing I would actually flip them in the sense that I would say the vast majority of discourse has been about the latter China potentially blockading Taiwan in some way. That was the thing that everyone has been talking about for years and years with growing intensity.
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Chapter 2: How does Taiwan's semiconductor industry play a role in global security?
And then, of course, as you mentioned, now the Hormuz situation, which sort of, I don't know, hit people by their blind spot because they didn't think it could ever really happen or whatever really happened has happened. But when this resolves, if this resolves, et cetera, I believe the question of Taiwan will very quickly return to the fore.
Oh, absolutely. So as you mentioned, it obviously hasn't happened yet, but people have been writing and thinking about it for years and years and years. And as you know, I consider myself an expert on this topic, having once written a paper in college saying that China was going to invade Taiwan before the 2008 bombings. Beijing Olympics, and that obviously didn't happen.
Well, being wrong has never gotten in the way of any pundit's career. That's right. So I would not worry about that. That has never been an issue. As long as it was well articulated and showed some knowledge, et cetera, then you're fine.
It was written from a server closet while I was in Beijing. So it had that going for it. But anyway, my point is that this is something that's always sort of looming in the background. And you always see headlines kind of coming up that hint at China-Taiwan tension.
Chapter 3: What strategies does Eyck Freymann suggest for preventing war with China?
So we actually had one this morning. We're recording on April 21st. The headline is Taiwan's president canceled his visit to Eswatini. Do you know where that is?
No.
It's a tiny, tiny place in Africa.
Did they like, you know, it's interesting because there's a few countries still wholly out there that recognize Taipei as the unified capital of China. Most have like, most have switched. There's a few random ones out there that are still like, they don't recognize the mainland, et cetera. So I'm all, you know, a little factoids here and there. I didn't know that.
So Taiwan's presidential office is citing Taiwan. air route issues, I'm doing air quotes for those who can't see this video, and China pressure. So you do get those kind of headlines every once in a while. And then the one other thing I would say is like, okay, the Strait of Hormuz, the blockade there, clearly an oil story and oil is something that powers the entire global economy.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Taiwan's domestic politics in the context of U.S.-China relations?
But as we've kind of learned over the past six or seven weeks, oil might not actually be the thing that like
powers markets right if you think about that that's true the thing that matters for markets it might be something much closer to ai and semiconductors and valuations entirely is cut right that's totally i mean evidently the world can go a few weeks and not grind to a halt if the straightforward moves is closed for a few weeks
I believe the reaction in markets would be, and just all around the world, and really everything would just be orders of magnitude differently if someone's like, no chips, no chips are coming out. That would be such a bigger deal.
And of course, the question of Taiwan's role in the world, that would already have been a very big security question even prior to the now constant drumbeat obsession with AI chips, et cetera. But it only magnifies why this is such a live issue.
Right. So apparently we can kind of survive a few weeks without oil. Can we survive a few weeks without advanced compute or months?
We can survive a few weeks without a fraction of the ā a certain fraction. Whereas if we ā the chip flow were to be disrupted on that level, it would just be ā Yes, much bigger deal.
All right. Well, we do, in fact, have the perfect guest to talk about all of this. Someone who has just written a book on exactly this topic called Defending Taiwan, a Strategy to Prevent War with China.
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Chapter 5: How has Xi Jinping's strategy influenced Taiwan's status?
We're going to be speaking with Ike Freiman. He is also a Hoover Fellow at Stanford. So, Ike, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts.
Thanks for having me on.
Here's my first question. You've spent a lot of time in China, including researching this book. Are you going to be able to go back?
I think I could go back. The question is whether I could leave. I'm joking. I'm joking. They gave me a hard time at immigration on the way out last time.
Oh, interesting.
And I can't do useful research there anymore. It's not like there's archives I can access, interviews I can do.
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Chapter 6: What is the concept of strategic ambiguity in U.S. policy towards Taiwan?
So the value of it for research is going down for me, but also the risk to my person, the risk to my devices is going up. I do try to engage as much as I can, but I think it's better to engage in third countries.
What do you tell us the genesis of this book or the origin of it or how you got interested in this particular topic?
Well, my background is as a China scholar looking at China's global investment campaign. My first book was about the Belt and Road. And I looked at a bunch of Chinese language sources that show how it works under the hood as a campaign to mobilize the party state behind Xi Jinping. And then I went on the trail of it to Sri Lanka, to Tanzania, Greece.
Greenland, actually, I did my PhD about China in Greenland, trying to understand how China leverages... You did your PhD about China in Greenland? Yeah. Oh, that is timely. Keep going. That'll be another book. But what I learned in the process of doing this book is that China has this formidable toolkit for blending economic power with its geopolitical objectives.
And Taiwan was clearly emerging during COVID as the AI story was heating up as this monumental issue in the structure of the world economy, not just for the old reasons that we care about Taiwan, which is largely about geography. So it seemed to me reading about this, China had more ships, more planes, more missiles, more drones.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential economic consequences of a conflict over Taiwan?
What was I missing? Why is the United States not completely outmatched? So I started this project with a friend of mine named Harry Halem, who's a superstar naval historian. And I asked him, what's the book I should read to understand what a U.S.-China war over Taiwan would be like, what it would take to win, and then what of those things the U.S. can do or can't do?
And he said, well, the book doesn't exist. I can give you hundreds of articles, hundreds of people to follow on Twitter, but no one thing to read. And so it became this collaboration between two historians who One focused on the economics, one focused on the military to put the pieces together. And as I did so, I began to discover there's huge gaps in our knowledge of this problem.
This is the most complex, multidisciplinary, multifunctional foreign policy problem that American statecraft has ever faced because it's a military problem. It's also an industrial problem. It's a technology policy problem. It's a diplomatic problem, a real one, a complex one. for how we deal with China, with Taiwan, and with the rest of the world.
Chapter 8: How can the U.S. build alliances to counteract China's influence?
And then finally, it's an economic problem. It's a question of global economic order. Because if Taiwan falls by force or coercion, and China seizes the fabs, the semiconductor fabs, or the fabs are disabled or destroyed, that is a hard reset of the entire global economic system that we have had since 1989 and arguably back to 1945. So what comes next?
And while we have a lot of good thinking about certain aspects of this scenario, like the wargaming of what an amphibious campaign would look like and how we stop it. There's other aspects like the economic planning that we just haven't done. So that was the idea for the book.
Pull together the best of existing knowledge, fill in the gaps where we can based on interviews, based on historical work, Chinese language materials, and try to be the person to put the pieces together.
I want to back way up for a second and ask a very obvious question, which is, why does China actually care so much about Taiwan? And then is it even accurate to say, like, why does China care about Taiwan? Should I be asking, why does Xi Jinping care about Taiwan?
Those are the two right questions to ask. And it's where we start with the book. The first thing to understand is that it's not about the chips for China. The chips are a co-benefit, but China cared about Taiwan long before they made chips, and they would care about them if they didn't make chips. Taiwan is the unfinished business of China's civil war.
In 1949, as the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek's government was losing control of Northern China, they began to evacuate their forces alongside all the treasures of the Imperial Palace to Taipei. And they set up a government there, essentially took over the island by force, and became, over the course of the Korean War, essentially a U.S. ally. In 1955, Eisenhower went to Taipei.
They became a critical node in the U.S. alliance architecture. Mao obviously wanted to take this island. He wanted to wipe out the remnants of his enemy. And for him, the fact that there was this other China right across the strait, which at the time enjoyed the Chinese seat in the UN Security Council, was recognized by most of the world as the one true China.
This was a fundamental question of the legitimacy of. of the Chinese Communist Party. And so it became this totemic propaganda point that we will liberate Taiwan from the imperialists. And in the process, we will make China whole. We will fix this historical wrong that we were separated under this century of humiliation.
And therefore, for us to be fully rejuvenated as a civilization, Taiwan has to be brought to heel and the world must accept. It's not just about control over Taiwan. It's about political legitimacy. The United Nations must accept. The United States must accept that Taiwan is part of China and there's only one China in the world and the Communist Party is the only legitimate government.
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