Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says there's a one-in-three chance China makes a military grab for Taiwan in the next three years — and his entire prescription amounts to demanding that the United States keep footing the bill for deterrence so that Australians don't have to answer for their own commitments.
Speaking to the Australian Institute for International Affairs in Canberra, Rudd warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to take Taiwan from next year. He pointed to three shifts: the military balance, China's calculus of the United States, and the electoral success of Taiwan's pro-independence DPP. "All factors considered, over the next three years, through until the end of 2028… unilateral Chinese military action across the Taiwan Straits to take Taiwan is not a probability, it is, however, an increased possibility," Rudd said, pegging that possibility at roughly one in three.
His solution? "What's worked since 1949 is deterrence, deterrence and deterrence." And by deterrence, he means American deterrence — "the capabilities and the perceived and declared political will of the United States to act in defence of Taiwan, is the critical factor."
Notice who's doing the deterring and who's doing the talking. Rudd wants Washington to project resolve so Beijing backs down. But when pressed at the National Press Club on whether Australia would actually join a fight over Taiwan, he punted. "It's not responsible for anyone who served as prime minister, foreign minister, or ambassador to the United States to engage in hypotheticals," he said — before noting that when he pulled Australian forces from Iraq, President Bush wasn't happy, but it didn't "imperil the alliance."
So let's get this straight: Rudd wants American credibility on the line, American forces as the tripwire, and American taxpayers funding the arsenal — but won't commit his own country to the fight. That's not an alliance. That's a client state directing its patron.
China's military spending accounts for roughly 44 percent of the entire Asian region, according to IISS calculations cited by Rudd. That's a serious buildup. But a serious buildup by a regional power doesn't automatically become an American war. The foreign policy establishment wants you to believe that any Chinese move on Taiwan is an attack on the United States. It isn't. Taiwan is an island 7,000 miles from American shores. It produces semiconductors we need — and we should secure that supply chain through domestic production, not through a forever war commitment.
Rudd invoked 1914, warning of tripwire events that killed 60 million people. He's right about the danger of miscalculation. He's wrong about the cure. The tripwire that dragged the world into the Great War was precisely the kind of entangling alliance the founders warned against — great powers bound to act by treaty obligations rather than by rational assessment of their own interests.
Every dollar spent projecting force in the Taiwan Strait is a dollar not spent on the American heartland. Every sailor stationed in the Western Pacific is a sailor not securing the Southern border. The bipartisan foreign policy class will call this isolationism. The founders called it common sense.
Rudd says the odds of war are one in three. Fine. Here's the question he won't answer and the establishment won't ask: what exactly is the American interest that justifies a single American life or a single American dollar in that fight — and what's the exit strategy once we're in it?
