Fred Kaplan writes:

In March, Adm. Philip Davidson, the outgoing commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, told a Senate panel that China posed a “manifest” threat of invading Taiwan “in the next six years.”

No senior official had ever issued such a specific or urgent warning about the fate of the tiny democratic island 100 miles off of China’s eastern coast. But since Davidson’s testimony, boatloads of military officers, active and retired, have sounded similar alarm bells. Some congressmen, such as Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, have even called for recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation and making NATO-like commitments to defend it from invasion—a step that would reverse 42 years of U.S. policy, further destabilize relations with China, and possibly precipitate war.

At the same time, a debate has erupted among more scholarly analysts over whether China’s Communist leaders really want to invade Taiwan—and, if they do, whether the Chinese military is capable of doing so now or in the near future. With few exceptions, the pessimists tend to be military officers, who measure the balance of power by which side has more or less of what sorts of weapons systems, while the less-panicked tend to be experts on China’s history and politics who view the statistics in a broader context.

It is worth noting that Davidson did not clear his March testimony with the secretary of defense (something that officers are supposed to do, especially if they’re about to make provocative statements). Nor did his warning of a Chinese invasion “in the next six years” reflect any estimate by the U.S. intelligence community. In fact, the Pentagon’s latest report on China’s military power—while citing accelerating, and worrisome, trends in the production of Chinese ships, missiles, and nuclear weapons—downplays concerns about China’s ability or desire to mount and sustain an invasion of Taiwan. [Continue reading…]