...I don't know since when Joye also became a "military expert" but I do agree with the assessment that the Chinese re-unification agenda has been brought forward with the Pelosi visit to Taiwan, a move that was ill-considered and placed Taiwan in greater jeopardy to shore up American domestic political support.
...however, China would likely try to coerce Taiwan into a one country two system model similar to HK without undertaking military incursion if it could help it. And if China chose the appropriate time to do so, I doubt the Biden administration would risk a full fledge war with China. Not unless US-China relations deteriorate significantly from here to level of being nemesis.
Neither would Australia be up for it, despite all the rhetoric, we're not going to war over a country that barely has much relevance, it would be the ANZUS treaty that is to be considered.
China and Taiwan war risk ‘very high’
The best available analysis implies Beijing will attempt unification with Taiwan sooner rather than later.
Christopher Joye
Updated Aug 12, 2022 – 9.55am,first published at 9.23am
About a month ago, one of our top geopolitical and military advisers – and far and away the most accurate forecaster on all matters China – called to say he had amended his views on the probability of the Middle Kingdom having a crack at that recalcitrant province, aka Taiwan. He was bringing forward his expected time horizon to the next 12 months.
I was surprised because our panel of about seven global advisers had generally coalesced around the opinion that China needed another five to seven years to militarily prepare for unilateral unification with Taiwan. Internally, we disputed the panel’s judgment. We countered that President Xi Jinping had a strong incentive to attempt unification in the short term for three reasons.
First, nobody expected it. All the Western analysts who had perennially underestimated the speed and sophistication of China’s military modernisation, and the expansive ambitions of Xi himself, thought they had time on their side. That is precisely why Xi should move earlier: to increase the chances of success as the Western dogs napped.
Second, the US administration presented a unique window of opportunity. Some of President Joe Biden’s most senior security advisers privately state that they would never counsel a war with China, even if Xi attempted to take Taiwan.
Biden is all but an intellectual invalid and characterised by extreme indecision. It is highly unlikely that he would quickly resolve to wage a full-spectrum defence of Taiwan, and incur mass US casualties, without at least many days or weeks of discussion, debate and prevarication. Yet China is planning to secure Taiwan within 24-48 hours. After appropriating control of all Taiwanese power nodes and central government agencies, Beijing will coerce the execution of a formal agreement crystallising unification.
Irrespective of its authenticity, once this treaty is signed, it will be impossible for the West to do anything about it. Our gullible media will be broadcasting the news 24/7 alongside Chinese propaganda of tens of thousands of Taiwanese ostensibly celebrating unification in the streets of Taipei.
And Xi knows that the US reaction function will likely be radically varied under a hawkish Republican president if Biden or his nominated Democrat successor does not win a second term.
The final motive for moving sooner rather than later is that Xi almost certainly appreciates that the US technological gap in the military domain is likely to expand dramatically. After decades of neglect that allowed Beijing to minimise the capability differential, the West has belatedly recognised the existential threat posed by Xi and a Chinese Communist Party that is maniacally focused on neutralising all perceived risks to its power and permanence.
Within five to 10 years, the West may be able to successfully defend Taiwan should it be disposed to do so. But that is emphatically not the case today, which is why Xi must act if he is to deliver on the iconic objective of his presidential term.
So in contrast to our advisers, we have always felt the probabilities were tilted towards a crisis while Biden remains president. It is deeply worrying that our very best analyst has now converged on this position.
It is incumbent on all decision-makers to prepare for the very worst possible contingency, which could easily involve Chinese ballistic missiles raining down on strategic signals intelligence and surveillance assets throughout Australia. You might want to buy a non-Western satellite phone!
If you think this sounds like hyperbole, the US has relocated one-quarter of its entire strategic B2 stealth bomber fleet to Australia in response to the heightened tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
For years we have gamed through these scenarios and exactly what we would do in the event kinetic conflict materialised. This has also involved deeper analysis of the real empirical risks.
Last October we released academic research that for the first time (to our knowledge) quantified the empirical probabilities of different types of military conflicts occurring between two nation states using advanced statistical methods and up to 160 years of data covering a multiplicity of conflict drivers. We published this research via our interactive “War Lab”, on the academic SSRN website, and provided a non-technical summary through the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Our models, which included machine-learning methods that had out-of-sample explanatory power, put the empirical probability of a China/Taiwan kinetic military conflict, including the declaration of war, at a very high 74 per cent. They further estimated the probability of a US/China kinetic conflict at a high 45 per cent, which likewise encompasses the declaration of war.
Importantly, these assessed probabilities were predicated on rich military, conflict, geographical, political, economic and social data over the 160 years up to 2020: they did not have the benefit of all the new data/information that has emerged since 2020, which imply much higher conflict risks again.
Bridgewater’s famous founder, Ray Dalio, has recently released a much more basic “conflict gauge”, which is an index built from “indicators such as changes in military spending, personnel, and deployment; sentiment of each country’s people about the other country; media attention given to the conflict, etc”. On August 9, Dalio highlighted the increase in his US-China conflict gauge, which has popped since 2020.
We applaud Dalio for seeking to furnish quantitative insights on conflict risks, which has been something of a lacuna in the global research literature.
In our technical academic paper on the subject last year, we wrote: “The core contribution of this work to the academic literature and society more generally is the integration of a wide range of historical data sets, including predictors of militarised interstate disputes (MIDs) and advanced variable selection methods, with sophisticated modelling techniques to address a well-defined set of forecasting problems based on differing MID severities and time horizons, culminating in the generation of calibrated and accurate forecast probabilities of different types of MID outbreaks between any state pair of interest across time.
“We believe this is also the first time these insights and forecast probabilities have been disseminated via a publicly accessible graphical user interface system.”
In contrast to our work, Dalio’s “conflict gauge” does not seek to provide an array of differing conflict-type probabilities over a range of forecast horizons for every country globally using sophisticated statistical methods. His goal is simply to develop an indicator to track the time-series change in conflict signals, which is also a very worthy one.
Since the outbreak of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, we have sometimes been asked what our system suggested about that contingency. Back in 2020, our models had a relatively elevated one-in-four to one-in-five probability of a Russia/Ukraine conflict, including a war, over the next 10 years, although they were severely hampered by the fact that Ukraine is a relatively new country established in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This means time-series data on Ukraine for the purposes of quantitative modelling is extremely limited in comparison to most other countries, such as the US, China and Taiwan.
Since our analysis was restricted to the period up to 2020, we are working on updating our data sets to 2022 to enable the publication of more contemporary projections. As a public good, we will share these insights with decision-makers as soon as they become available.
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