By Ambassador John Bolton

Taiwan may be Asia’s most imminent flashpoint, but the threats facing South Korea are no less perilous. North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs continue advancing amid constant rumors of another nuclear test, which would be North Korea’s seventh. Particularly significant for South Korea’s emerging strategy in response is the growing realization that threats across the Indo-Pacific aren’t discrete and unrelated but ultimately emanate from one actor: China. 

In Seoul, speculation about Pyongyang’s next nuclear detonation centers on the days just before America’s elections. The Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Congress, expected to enshrine Xi Jinping as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, begins on Oct. 16. Kim Jong Un won’t risk spoiling the Chinese congress during its session, but the ensuing weeks will offer a dramatic opportunity to flaunt his nuclear capabilities. Mr. Kim’s recent announcement of his first-strike nuclear policy, together with blunt warnings he won’t negotiate away the nuclear program, publicly codifies North Korea’s longstanding nuclear doctrine. 

Seoul has always understandably concentrated on Pyongyang’s threat. Now, however, it sees Beijing’s belligerence toward Taiwan, interference in South Pacific Island states, and critical support for North Korea as interrelated parts of an overall Chinese Indo-Pacific strategy. This assessment points to what should be obvious: Beijing is ultimately responsible for Pyongyang’s nuclear threat. For too long, the U.S. has allowed the Chinese government to pretend (through the Six-Party Talks, for example) that it is genuinely committed to finding a solution on nuclear proliferation. This fantasy is increasingly difficult to sustain, since North Korea never threatens China. Instead it threatens South Korea, Japan and America. 

More-comprehensive policies countering China’s Indo-Pacific threats, previously seen as unconnected, are slowly developing. President Biden enhanced the profile of the Quad (Japan, India, Australia and the U.S.) and approved the Aukus partnership to provide Australia nuclear-powered submarines. He also met with South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, a potential step to “trilateralize” Washington’s ties with Seoul and Tokyo. Nonetheless, the administration’s overall China policy remains fragmentary and opaque if it exists at all. 

Significant U.S.-South Korea military exercises (canceled by Donald Trump as an unreturned favor to Kim Jong Un) are resuming, with the USS Ronald Reagan carrier-strike group arriving in Pusan for joint maneuvers. The Reagan’s deployment (the first carrier visit since 2018) sends Pyongyang a strategic signal, but it is unaccompanied by any evidence the White House is prepared to jettison the failed 30-year diplomatic minuet with North Korea. Repeated administration offers to engage the North have elicited no interest. 

Mr. Yoon is working to improve relations with Japan, meeting informally with Mr. Kishida last week in New York, and their foreign ministers discussed problems blocking closer linkages. Improving ties with Japan is only a first step toward broader South Korean involvement in East Asia, but it is a critical one. Japanese opinion views a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan as tantamount to an attack on Japan, a view Seoul doesn’t share. Beijing’s menacing stance toward Taiwan, however, is inexorably bringing South Korean leaders a fuller understanding of China’s many interrelated efforts to control its periphery. Greater cooperation between Taiwan and South Korea is critical to thwarting China’s ambitions. 

The Quad should become a “Quint” by making South Korea a full member. Seoul’s perspective and capabilities would measurably enhance the grouping’s potential to address Beijing’s use of North Korea as a surrogate, its threats in the South China Sea and to Taiwan, and its aggressive behavior in the South Pacific. Moreover, Seoul-Tokyo engagement in a Quint context could more easily encourage bilateral patterns of cooperation than if the two were limited to stewing in contentious bilateral issues. 

A Quint would demonstrate broader resolve in the face of China’s attempts to keep the U.S. and its allies off balance through divide-and-conquer tactics. South Korean participation in wider regional structures would help eliminate strategic ambiguity about Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese attack. Biden staffers have apparently rebuffed suggestions to make South Korea part of the Quad. If so, this mistake needs prompt reversal. 

The tempo of Indo-Pacific challenges is increasing, with threat levels rising. But as the U.S. confronts critical tactical decisions, such as how to arm Taiwan effectively to deter Chinese belligerence, it must be careful not to ignore larger strategic issues. South Korea and its new president are ready for regional defense cooperation beyond the existing hub-and-spoke bilateral alliance with the U.S. All the concerned countries in the Indo-Pacific would benefit. Let’s not miss this opportunity. 

Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06. 

This article first appeared in the Washington Post on September 12th, 2022. Click here to read the original article.

John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump and is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” 

Few areas of the world seem more distant from the United States than the island states of the South Pacific. World War II reminiscences have faded, and the words “South Pacific” now resonate more as a Broadway musical title than a geographic locator. For U.S. national security, this needs to change, sooner rather than later. 

Get the maps out; Chinese leaders, diplomats and the military have theirs nearly memorized. Hemmed in by what it calls the “first island chain” (stretching from the Kuril Islands, through Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia), China has longed to break free into the broader Pacific Ocean. Beijing is interested in this wider horizon because its aspirations extend not merely to hegemony along its immediate Indo-Pacific periphery, but to far wider objectives, already reflected in its pursuit of economic interest in Africa and the Western Hemisphere. 

Taiwan is thus important to China not just because of nationalistic fervor, but also because dominance over Taiwan would irretrievably pierce the first island chain. Another breakout strategy over the tyranny of geography is to leapfrog the close-in islands and stake out positions across the Pacific — which is precisely what Beijing appears now to be attempting. 

The Pacific’s insular nations are small in land mass and lightly populated, although huge when their ocean territories are included. Xi Jinping has marked them as vulnerable, seemingly intent on going island-hopping, using intimidation, bribery or whatever it takes to achieve China’s ends. 

The immediate crisis is in the Solomon Islands, where U.S. forces won a critical victory in 1942-1943 on Guadalcanal, a World War II turning point. In August, senior administration officials Wendy Sherman and Caroline Kennedy, whose fathers fought in the Solomon Islands, led a U.S. delegation to mark the 80th anniversary of the battle at Guadalcanal. Signifying growing Chinese hegemony, however, and perhaps issuing an insult at China’s behest, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare failed to attend the ceremonies near Honiara, the capital. Weeks later, a U.S. Coast Guard vessel was denied permission to make a port call, another apparently intentional discourtesy. Most recently, elections scheduled for next May were postponed until 2024, a move that opposition leaders consider an ominous sign of China’s influence. 

A Chinese base in the Solomons would directly menace Australia (about 1,200 miles away), harking back to the Japanese threat during World War II. I was recently in Sydney, and found that Australians need no persuading about China’s rising regional threat. What they seek is a more visible, vigorous U.S. presence in the region, and rightly so. The Solomons are in jeopardy now, and while “domino theory” inevitability might not yet obtain, other island states are clearly vulnerable. 

America has for too long paid insufficient attention to the South Pacific. In 1945, the United States assumed Japan’s former League of Nations mandate over the new United Nations’ Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. After plebiscites in 1983, one island chain became the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, thereby remaining part of the United States, adjacent to Guam, long a U.S. territory. Three other island groupings — Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia — chose independence. (American Samoa is a separate territory.) 

These three new nations all signed “compacts of free association” with the United States, which provide that Washington supervises their foreign affairs (short of declaring war), including prohibiting the presence of foreign military forces without U.S. permission. The compacts have been extended once and are now up for renegotiation because they expire over the next two years. 

This is not a moment to falter or for shortsightedness. Fortuitously timed as the renegotiation is, the White House should take full advantage of the opportunity to cement long-term strategic relations with this trio of nations to keep China out. The costs of enhanced U.S. involvement are trivial in the context of global aid budgets; and the sea and land expanses involved are only somewhat smaller than the continental United States itself. 

When I briefed President Donald Trump just before his meeting with the three leaders of these freely associated states in 2019, he asked, “Why am I meeting these people?” His successors should not need to ask. 

South Pacific responsibilities need not rest on the United States alone. Australia, New Zealand and Britain all have contemporary relationships and regional histories, dating back to naval coaling or whaling stations. France retains three extensive overseas territories (New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Fortuna), represented in France’s Parliament, and whose territory is deemed part of the European Union. 

Countering Chinese aggressiveness in the South Pacific should be a matter of urgent bipartisan agreement and action, rare as they might be today. The faraway island of Bali Hai, celebrated in a certain musical, is closer than we thought. 

In an unprecedented joint public appearance on July 6, FBI Director Christopher Wray and his British counterpart, MI-5 Director General Ken McCallum, warned a London audience of business leaders and academics that China posed a “massive, shared challenge.”  Beijing, said Wray, was “set on stealing your technology—whatever it is that makes your industry tick—and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”  McCallum was equally forceful, describing China’s “coordinated campaign on a grand scale,” representing “a strategic contest across decades.”

This is not the first time Wray has spoken out in unambiguous terms.  On January 31 at the Reagan Presidential Library in California, he stressed that China’s threat to America’s economic security had “reached a new level—more brazen, more damaging than ever before.”  This stress on foreign-government threats to America’s private sector may seem unusual for the FBI, but Wray has correctly focused on the incredibly broad scope of Beijing’s menacing behavior, well beyond intelligence gathering and clandestine actions against the U.S. and allied governments. 

Wray’s public statements are complementary to Vice President Mike Pence’s 2018 warning about Beijing’s widespread efforts to influence U.S. public opinion.  Unfortunately, we are, even now, only just awakening to the extraordinary scope of China’s whole-of government (which, in Beijing’s case, essentially means whole-of-society) operations against our economy and society, and that of our allies.  This awakening must spread, and quickly.

In government, President Joe Biden’s performance is decidedly mixed.  He deserves credit for the first in-person meeting of the “Quad” (Australia, India, Japan, and America), a constellation with enormous potential (but, so far, few practical achievements) for constraining China.  The Pentagon agreed to the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (“AUKUS”) project to build nuclear-powered, hunter-killer submarines for Australia, a conceptual and operational breakthrough whose success or failure has major strategic implications across the Indo-Pacific.  By contrast, Biden may have already rescinded Trump administration decision-making rules on offensive cyber efforts, thereby returning to Obama-era procedures that effectively strangled such measures, crippling our ability to strike pre-emptively against Chinese election-meddling efforts.  Biden, seemingly intimidated by Chinese complaints about a projected Taiwan visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has urged her not to go.

AUKUS and the Quad represent initial steps in constructing a denser alliance framework, more akin to the North Atlantic pattern.  Analysts have long worried that America’s bilateral Asian alliances are merely “hub-and-spoke” arrangements, but this picture is changing.  Newly inaugurated South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, for example, is seeking to forge closer trilateral relations with Tokyo and Washington, symbolized by the three leaders’ recent meeting in Madrid.  The “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing partnership (among Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and US)  consists entirely of Pacific powers.  The pieces are there for robust Indo-Pacific cooperation against the full range of Chinese threats.

Ironically, America’s sleeper problem, one spotlighted by Wray and McCallum, lies in the private sector.  Despite two decades of increasing warning signs, American firms, led by financial and high-tech enterprises, invested and traded with China as if international political risk no longer warranted deep consideration in business decisions.  Extensive capital investment in China exposed intellectual property to Beijing’s high-tech piracy.  Forced-technology transfers as a condition to do business there, and the dangers to supply chains from political tensions, were ignored or minimized.  Even today, as the political risks of doing business with China are skyrocketing, especially in sensitive national-security-related areas, many U.S. business leaders still do not appreciate the threats they face.

Assurances that China does not engage in commercial espionage or theft of intellectual property should carry no weight with Western businesses.  In 2015, Xi Jinping and a gullible Barack Obama agreed that neither of their governments “will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property,” a commitment to which Beijing’s Ministry of State Security has paid no heed whatever.

Worse, too many business executives and politicians across the spectrum seem to believe that the proper response to Chinese threats is massive Federal expenditures to bolster U.S. competitiveness.  This approach fundamentally misperceives the problem.  America doesn’t suffer from a deficit of creativity and innovation.  It suffers instead from decades of China stealing our creativity and innovation, as FBI Director Wray has forcefully explained, and in some cases benefitting from the gratuitous transfer of intellectual property by credulous Americans heedless of the consequences.  

Beijing has weaponized what superficially appear to be commercial telecommunications firms like Huawei and ZTE, making them arms of the Chinese state.  The Trump and Biden administrations have imposed increasingly strict sanctions on such firms, but enormous damage has already been done, including putting at risk communications involving America’s land-based, ballistic-missile forces.  Beijing’s espionage deviousness is exemplified by its offer to build a Chinese garden at Washington’s National Arboretum, which would actually be a concealed listening post or accessing user data from the popular Tik-Tok app.  We are still not adequately awake to the potential that virtually any Chinese “business” enterprise could be an agent of commercial infiltration and exploitation.

However, appropriate defensive measures should not be confused with massive subsidies to the U.S. information-technology industry.  There is clearly a need for more Federal spending to counter Chinese espionage and piracy of intellectual property and other critical data, but that spending should be for military, and intelligence measures to enhance our defensive and offensive capabilities.  Moreover, money to replace existing equipment sold by Huawei, ZTE, and others, largely in rural and sparsely populated areas, but which can affect the nationwide telecommunications grid, is well spent.  Expenditures for “regional technology hubs” by contrast, will not enhance creativity, but will shrink the Federal dollars available for critically needed efforts at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community.

Chris Wray has more than enough to occupy his time at the FBI, so his public focus on the threat of Chinese espionage demonstrates just how serious he judges the threat to be.  American businesses and government should pay more attention to what he is saying.

This article first appeared in 19FortyFive on June 5th, 2022. Click here to read the original article.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the most recent, but far from only, incident highlighting Taiwan’s vulnerability to Chinese attack. Western assistance to Ukraine, particularly sharing intelligence, has contributed significantly to its defense, but the underlying failure of deterrence was tragic. Prior to Moscow’s attack, Washington and its allies lacked credibility, unity, and adequate appreciation for larger geostrategic issues. The consequences are evident daily.

China and Taiwan are watching closely, and debate has accelerated over the military capabilities Taipei needs to maximize deterrence and defense against Beijing. Unfortunately, as with Ukraine, this debate lacks a broader politico-military foundation, which threatens Taiwan whatever its military arsenal. Biden administration myopia is missing critical opportunities to strengthen not just Taiwan, but the entire Indo-Pacific’s resistance to Chinese belligerence.

For the United States, implementing more effective deterrence for Taiwan is not simply a tactical case study. “Defending” Taiwan (or whether it has the right weaponry) is far too narrow a politico-military framework. Taiwan is not some isolated problem, but a strategically critical component of an Indo-Pacific, indeed global, counter-China strategy. Nonetheless, too many still view Taipei as an irritant to Beijing, an unnecessary burden we are protecting.

This misperception persists despite fundamental changes in Taiwan. It is no longer just the “losing side” in China’s Communist-Nationalist civil war, but a functionally independent country that intends to remain so. Its successful, growing economy is critical to America and the world, and its robust democracy has no appetite for anschluss with China. These are not just fun facts, but are integral to Taipei’s strategic position and its relationship with Washington.

Given its dramatic social, political and economic changes since 1949, Taiwan has little doubt the “one China” concept, like “strategic ambiguity,” is past retirement age. Thirty years of surveys have asked residents how they identify themselves. Those identifying as “Taiwanese” rose from 18% to 62%; “Chinese” fell from 26% to 3%; “both Taiwanese and Chinese” fell from 46% to 32%; and non-responses fell from 11% to 3%. Taiwan’s people have rejected the Shanghai Communique language of “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait” as archaic. Perhaps more than any other reason, this is why “Taiwan” is Asia’s synonym for “Ukraine.”

President Biden has said three times that America would defend Taiwan if it were attacked, and three times his staff has tried to pretend he didn’t. Such confusion has not been limited to Taiwan. So, if Biden intended to reinforce “strategic ambiguity,” he and his administration have done a masterful job. In April, 2021, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified that:

“[if] we were to see a U.S. shift from strategic ambiguity…,to clarify our willingness to intervene in a Taiwan contingency, the Chinese would find this deeply destabilizing….It would solidify Chinese perceptions that the U.S. is bent on constraining China’s rise, including through military force, and would probably cause Beijing to aggressively undermine U.S. interests worldwide. That is our assessment.”

If Biden disagrees with Haines’s assessment, which counsels against a “shift from strategic ambiguity,” he needs to say so. Rather than press-question answers followed by cleanup patrols, Biden must speak comprehensively, bury “strategic ambiguity” unambiguously, and establish plainly that Washington sees Taipei as an ally. Being explicit would benefit both countries, and everyone in the Indo-Pacific who assess China’s menace similarly.

Enlarging Taipei’s military cooperation throughout the Indo-Pacific is today potentially the most effective way to break Beijing’s heavy-handed efforts to quarantine Taiwan politically. Deciding what military assets America should provide Taiwan is crucial, but the bigger picture is to interweave Taiwan into the emerging alliances and coalitions forming to deal with the Chinese threat. That would be real “integrated defense.” Taiwan’s critical geographic position in the “first island chain” between China and the broader Pacific alone explains why. Beyond the East China Sea, Taiwan has inherited territorial claims in the South China Sea; its air and naval assets could play vital roles, alongside other navies, ensuring freedom of navigation and refuting Beijing’s unfounded sovereignty claims across that critical space.

Many such duties for Taiwan come readily to mind. The recent Tokyo meeting of Quad heads of state (India, Japan, Australia, and the United States) launched the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), an excellent initiative in which Taiwan could play a vital part. Intended to “build a faster, wider, and more accurate maritime picture of near-real-time activities in partners’ waters”, the IPMDA contemplates “immediate consultations” with others, which should obviously include Taiwan.

The AUKUS (Australia, UK, US) initiative to produce nuclear-powers submarines for Australia provides another template for mutual cooperation on sophisticated, interoperable defense capabilities in which Taiwan could be seamlessly integrated into larger Indo-Pacific coalitions. There is no imminent need, or potential, to have one comprehensive alliance structure like NATO, which itself grew and evolved over decades. But Taiwan should be a part in whatever steps are being taken in the Indo-Pacific.

It was, therefore, a significant disappointment, and a significant error, not to include Taipei in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), unveiled the same day as IPMDA. Taiwan (under the outdated name “Chinese Taipei”) is, after all a WTO member; it is manifestly insufficient to say the U.S. will continue enhancing bilateral economic relations with Taiwan as if that is a substitute for participation in initiatives like IPEF. If other IPEF members feared Beijing’s reaction to including

Taiwan, it shows they still gravely underestimate China’s threat, and will fear other necessary and appropriate steps in the near future. Such timidity augurs poorly for IPEF’s prospects.

Taiwan’s broader, entirely appropriate regional roles cannot be fulfilled merely with “defensive” weapons against potential Chinese amphibious assaults, whether in traditional or asymmetric capabilities, which Biden’s advisors are pressing. Their focus is too narrow. It undercuts effective U.S. regional strategy, including their own initiatives like IPMDA and IPEF. Properly providing for an expanded, coalition-based military role for Taiwan requires assigning responsibilities to coalition-of-the-willing members and equipping them accordingly. We will then have a realistic context to assess specific weapons systems that will assist not just Taiwan, but the larger regional program to counter Beijing’s belligerence.