China’s direct fire drills around Taiwan this week suggest that the country will take steps toward the island, prompted by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei earlier this week.
The drills in six areas effectively encircle Taiwan and overlap what Taipei claims are its territorial waters, the Wall Street Journal reported, as it lies within 12 miles of its coast. Some military analysts compared the four-day exercise to a temporary siege.
Beijing sees Taiwan as Chinese territory to be taken by force if necessary, and has built a long-standing military complex to achieve this and deter the US, the island’s longtime security partner. However, many analysts and military experts in China believe that Beijing lacks the necessary capabilities to launch an open invasion, making such an operation very complicated and dangerous in the next few years.
Instead, they believe, Beijing will try to pressure Taiwan before going to war and forcing it to surrender.
“It’s a cautionary exercise,” says Brian Clark, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
China’s military began the exercise on Thursday with maneuvers involving warships and aircraft, as well as ballistic missiles.
Military analysts expect China to hold large-scale naval and air exercises in the coming days to demonstrate its control of the waters around Taiwan.
The close proximity of the exercises to ports and shipping lanes has led to shipping and flight delays, a small taste of the pain China can inflict on Taiwan and global markets.
“This will encircle the island of Taiwan,” Major General Meng Xiangqing, a professor at the National Defense University of the People’s Liberation Army, told CCTV Thursday morning before the exercise. This creates excellent conditions for strategic transformation. The situation is in the interest of the alliance.
Analysts and military experts in China said they will be watching to see if Chinese forces remain after the drills end, or if drills near Taiwan become routine.
The White House accused Beijing of “overreacting” to Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and announced that the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier would remain in the Taiwan area to “monitor” the situation, while postponing a routine test. dropped An intercontinental ballistic missile to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing.
Analysts say such exercises could become a tool to periodically disrupt Taiwan’s economy and its relations with the world in an effort to reduce popular support for the local government.
“China probably doesn’t want to go to war to achieve its goals,” said Bradley Martin, a retired Navy officer and researcher at the RAND Corporation.
This type of conflict, which some experts sometimes call a “grey zone” war, is part of China’s rules of the game with Taiwan and the countries in the region with which it has territorial disputes.
Despite strong warnings from Beijing that it considers Taiwan part of its territory, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, who has been highly critical of China, visited the island on Tuesday and Wednesday and began his trip to Japan on Thursday. His Asian tour
Beijing considers the initiative by Pelosi, the highest elected US official to visit Taipei in the past 25 years, a provocative move and a retreat from US promises to China.
Source: Lebanon Debate
