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A recent forecast from former prime minister Kevin Rudd asserting that there’s potentially a “one-in-three chance of China moving to take Taiwan” in 2028 has exposed critical weaknesses in the Australian government’s current defence spending timeline for the 2030s.
Former PM Rudd made the comments during an interview with David Speers on Insiders: On Background on 13 September this year.
Rudd is considered to be one of the foremost experts on People’s Republic of China policy and thought policy of PRC leader Xi Jinping after studying Chinese language and East Asian history at the Australian National University, according as foreign minister and holding a doctor of philosophy from the University of Oxford with doctoral research examining Xi Jinping’s ideological worldview.
He has also written two books on China and US–China relations: The avoidable war and On Xi Jinping. In addition, he established the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis and currently leads Asia Society globally.
A one-in-three shot for 2028
“Well, I’ve been looking at the US–China relationship over Taiwan for the better part of 50 years, since I was a junior woodchuck at the Australian National University, and through a period of working in our embassy in Beijing, as prime minister, foreign minister and as a China analyst since then. So I don’t reach these conclusions lightly (that there’s a one-in-three chance of China moving to take Taiwan in just a couple of years), and I’ve never been in the Taiwan alarmist category, nor am I now. It’s just that I think I’ve got a responsibility to point to elevated risk,” the former PM said.
“If you look carefully at the pace and intensity of Chinese military preparedness, it has been moving at angular levels. That is, sharply up.
“In the last half decade plus, China’s annual military exercises relevant to Taiwan look more and more like dress rehearsals.
“In terms of tripwires, if you look carefully at the upcoming Taiwanese presidential elections for January of 2028, there is indeed a possibility of the re-election of the pro-independence party for their fourth consecutive term under current President Lai Ching-te. And this party is anathema to the PRC.
“What concerns me is President Xi looking at that and seeing it as a tripwire for pulling the military lever, if he makes a profound miscalculation about the level of American ultimate resolve in providing the defence for the Taiwanese, given that’s been the assumed reality since ’49.”
The Trump question
The former PM also outlined his concerns around interactions or perceived interactions between China and US President Donald Trump.
“Well, there’s another thing about 2028, the year that you’re talking about here, and that is that it’s the final year of Trump’s second term. Is that a factor here as well? …The capacity for Chinese miscalculation goes to the heart of their analysis of President Trump himself,” he said.
“If you look at President Trump’s declaratory positions on Taiwan, particularly in his interview with Fox News coming out of his summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing in May, President Trump said a number of things.
“‘Basically, Taiwan is nine-and-a-half thousand miles away from America, it’s 50 miles away from China. Secondly, the Taiwanese stole our semiconductors. And thirdly, I’m not going to proceed at this stage with implementing the latest Congress-approved arms shipment to the Taiwanese of some $12 to $14 billion unless the Taiwanese behave themselves.’
“My concern is the Chinese Communist Party analysing that and reaching, I think, a dangerous conclusion that therefore American resolve has evaporated.
“And the reason I say a dangerous conclusion is, notwithstanding what the President has said, what you have had is a complete reaffirmation through the operations of Indo-Pacific Command under Admiral Paparo of forward-leaning American naval military support for Taiwan, and most recently within the region, full-scale, large-scale military exercises in the Philippines.
“So at an operational level, the United States Navy is making absolutely clear where it stands.
“Deterrence ultimately rests on two propositions: Chinese perceptions, in this case, of American political resolve, and Chinese analysis of American military capabilities. On the capabilities front, that gives Chinese PLA planners, military planners, a lot of room for pause because the US capabilities kit is formidable.
“On the political front, my concern is that they misread President Trump’s ultimate position on this.
“If you looked at it hypothetically, and I rarely engage in hypotheticals on this question, but it’s relevant to the overall analysis of deterrence, what our Chinese friends need to think through very carefully is that if they made a judgement that they could get away with this, the net effect would be to cause President Trump to look weak domestically within the United States, as the first president to have blinked on the question of deterrence since ’49.
“And under those circumstances, what I know about President Trump is that President Trump would then act in order to reassert his strength.
“On the question of deterrence, at the end of the day it is about this: does President Xi, as Chairman of the Central Military Commission, wake up one morning and reach a conclusion that the risk is now attenuated and doesn’t therefore really exist, and that he can get away with that sort of a military operation?
“I think any sober and real calculation of all the risk elements would still cause him, on balance, to conclude this is too risky an enterprise.
“Which is why I say, in 2028, this is still not a probability. I am pointing, however, to it being an elevated possibility, one in three.”
Cost of deterrence
The possibility of conflict between Taiwan and the PRC in 2028 obviously raises concerns about Australia’s own military preparedness and defence funding which is expected to hold at 2.3 percent of gross domestic product spend on defence and “kick the can down the road” to 3 per cent GDP by 2033.
“If people were to think through the reverse side of this equation, which is what the Indo-Pacific would look like if Taiwan fell militarily, I think they would quickly double down on the ultimate rationale for ongoing deterrence. It is by far and above the cheapest, most affordable, least disruptive investment that any government can ever make in preserving the status quo,” Rudd said.
“The alternative in a post-deterrence-failure world, let’s say if Taiwan fell, the geopolitical consequences for the Indo-Pacific would be beyond imagining.
“If you were to think it through, let’s just assume that Taiwan fell tomorrow, whether the United States acted or failed to act militarily, but let’s just assume that deterrence failed.
“Number one, our friends in North Asia, led by Japan, in my judgement, would then begin immediately reconsidering their own future military options, including nuclear options. There’s already a nascent nuclear weapons debate unfolding in Japan. This would be turbocharged.
“Secondly, if that was to occur, there’s no way any self-respecting president of the Republic of Korea could remain non-nuclear in an environment where Japan had become nuclear.
“And thirdly, if you look at those scenarios, what would be the North Korean and PRC reactions to early notification that South Korea and Japan were going nuclear? Would they seek to pre-empt to prevent that from occurring? That’s an open question.
“And finally, I’ve just skipped over quite neatly the fact that we’ll be in the midst of an immediate recession and probably a global depression, brought about by the collapse of the semiconductor supply route from Taiwan, which currently provides the vast bulk of the world’s advanced computer chips, which underpin most industries in the world today.
“And secondly, before you even began to factor in what trade and economic sanctions would flow between the world’s largest and second-largest economies. Apart from that, it’s all a walk in the park, mate.”
Final thoughts
“If the Taiwanese reach a political accommodation with the PRC at some point in the future, that’s a matter for both sides. If Taiwan was to fall militarily through a failure of deterrence and/or a failure for America to fight, or America fighting and losing, those consequences are writ large,” Rudd said.
“But it would be a rewriting of the global geopolitical order overnight, just as the world changed after the guns of August sounded in 1914.”
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