The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan

"Matt Pottinger is a former Deputy National Security Advisor, a former Marine, and a Chinese speaker. In the book, he assembles an impressive array of analysts from across the United States and allied countries to tell us why Taiwan matters, and what the United States, Taiwan and other allies and partners can do to shore up military deterrence. In particular, the book is exceptionally strong at explaining why Taiwan falling by force or coercion would be so bad. It gives the clearest articulation of what the division of labour would be between the US, Taiwan and partners in a military contingency. It provides a raft of really specific, actionable and feasible steps that each of the players can take. It’s exceptionally lucidly written as well. Beijing has many options for moving against Taiwan, and not all of them involve an amphibious invasion. Another option is blockade, which can be prosecuted with varying degrees of severity. Another is what I call a quarantine, or others have called ‘indirect control,’ which is an effort to take control of who and what comes and goes from the island. That might be branded not as a military operation, but rather as a customs or law enforcement operation. China also has a range of capabilities to bombard Taiwan with missiles, with drones, or to use plausibly deniable, ‘civilian’ vessels to harass Taiwanese vessels or ships coming in and out. Any of these options Beijing can use in a modular way, in combination, or in sequence. The Boiling Moat focuses on the amphibious invasion scenario, which, in a sense, is the hardest and most obvious scenario. If you can take that pathway to victory off the board, you can argue that creating any kind of crisis makes less sense for Xi Jinping . Taiwan is a very difficult target—geographically—to take through an amphibious invasion, because the Taiwan Strait is a nasty body of water, but China is doing everything that it would be doing if it wanted the capability to do that and do it soon. So the question of how we organize and train and equip ourselves to defeat such an operation is something that I think deserves careful attention. Ivan Kanapathy, now senior director for Asia on the National Security Council, has a chapter on this in the book. So he’s the man in the US government directly responsible for coordinating with Taiwan on this, which is a sign of the book’s authoritativeness and credibility."