Fear of conflict - the key to managing Taiwan tensions

Disagreement and lack of trust dog cross-strait issues, but there is one thing China, Taiwan and the US are agreed on - conflict avoidance. This shared priority should serve as a starting point for managing tensions.

- Ryan Hass

Is the situation in the Taiwan Strait on a one-way escalator to eventual conflict?

Given the persistent ratcheting up of tensions in the Taiwan Strait in recent years, it is becoming easier for analysts to argue that the situation will continue to escalate until it reaches a breaking point. Such lazy cynicism is dangerous, though. The hard reality is that there is no military solution to tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait that involves the United States and China would mark the first war in human history between two nuclear-armed powers with long-range strike, cyber and space capabilities.

Given the national identities of the actors involved, it is hard to conceive of any side surrendering to the other. Thus, short of threatening the absolute destruction of the other side(s), there is no plausible path to war termination.

There also is no guarantee that any conflict, once launched, would remain limited in geographic or military scope. More likely, a conflict in the Taiwan Strait would lead to the global economy being shattered, real risk of nuclear escalation and generational setbacks for all countries involved in the fighting.

Even in spite of these inescapable risks, a key challenge is that it is growing harder for policymakers to foresee future scenarios that avoid conflict.

This problem has both a proximate dimension and a deeper structural component. At a proximate level, former US State Department assistant secretary Daniel Russel has rightly observed: "The dialogues and the mechanisms that have in the past restrained escalation and fostered some sort of resolution of an incident aren't working right now... The problem is that right now, an accident quickly becomes a crisis and a crisis could lead to conflict."