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Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana poses for a photo with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen during his trip to Taipei on Aug. 22. (Reuters/Yonhap News)

“So what alternative do you have in mind, Mr. Gil?”

I’ve had a few arguments with Peace Network Director Cheong Wook-sik ever since the late July publication of our book “The US-China Rivalry and the Taiwan Strait Crisis” (Galma Baram), which examines the crisis in the Taiwan Strait.

What alternatives indeed. I’ve wrestled with that question for a few months now, but I’ve had trouble thinking of any kind of strategic masterstroke that South Korea could come up with on its own to ease the conflict in the Taiwan Strait, which could be seen as the front lines of the grim strategic rivalry unfolding between Washington and Beijing.

Realistically, if the US were to ask South Korea for its cooperation in relation to Taiwan, we would find ourselves in a difficult position where we would need to puzzle over the fine line of options available to us that would not do irreparable damage to our relationship with Beijing.

But is there any perfect balance we could strike that neither the US nor China would have issues with? The US may have been disappointed time and again with South Korea’s tendency to commit itself only halfway, but we can’t expect China to stand idly by, given its history of resorting to economic retaliation even in cases like the deployment of a purely defensive Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.

In my encounters with officials from the Japanese Embassy, I once said that, were a crisis to break out on the Taiwan Strait, South Korea “will need to help the US out, but it will only be able to do about 60%–70% of what Japan does.” They responded cynically: “Don’t you mean 20%–30%?”

But whether it’s 20%–30% or 60%–70%, it’s all just abstractions and semantics. If a war were to actually break out and South Korea and Japan were to assist the US, both of us would need to be prepared for a military confrontation with China. Just thinking about it is chilling.

What would happen in the event of an actual war in the Taiwan Strait?

On Aug. 9, the Wall Street Journal reported on the results of a recent war game conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an eminent Washington think tank, based on the scenario of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

The simulation’s findings were horrifying. It concluded that with the US distracted by the European front and Taiwan disabled by a cyberattack ahead of the invasion, China would exploit Japan’s hesitation to join the fray by firing various intermediate- and short-range missiles of various distances toward US-controlled Guam and Japanese-controlled Okinawa (thus automatically bringing Japan into the conflict).

In the process, the US would lose two of its aircraft carriers, around 20 warships, and around 500 state-of-the-art fighter aircraft. China would take advantage of this to successfully land 22,000 troops in southern Taiwan.

After this preemptive strike, the US and Japan would launch a fierce counterattack. China’s landing fleet, which would be in the position of having to continually bring troops and material over from the mainland, would end up wiped out by blistering missile and submersible attacks from the US and Japan.

The simulation concluded that the grim combat would continue for about three weeks, causing enormous losses for both sides, but that the US and Taiwan would ultimately keep Taipei. In effect, it would be meaningless carnage that leaves no winners — and all because of the foolish decisions of a couple of people.

What would need to be done to prevent this sort of tragedy? The US and Japan have chosen a simple path: stepping up their alliance’s deterrence and response capabilities to ensure that they would be able to overwhelm China. But is this kind of deterrence through force even possible?

In my various readings on this matter, one idea that caught my attention was presented in the September 2021 issue of the Japanese political magazine Sekai by military critic Tetsuo Maeda.

He suggested that instead of launching an arms race with this “deterrence and response” approach to defense and containment of China, we should instead be coming up with a model of “cooperative security guarantees” that would allow the countries of East Asia — including South Korea, China and Japan — to collaborate. This bold “zero-zero strategy” would have the aim of creating a missile-free East Asia.

The first “zero” is the elimination of missile defense systems like THAAD, if only in East Asia. The second “zero” is the elimination of intermediate-range missiles capable of direct strikes against the other side.

It may sound far-fetched, but it actually isn’t. During the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union both stuck to their pledges not to possess either of those things. While people have forgotten all about them now, those were the terms of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which lasted from 1972 to 2001, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which lasted from 1987 to 2019.

Given the complexity of the security environment in East Asia, it might be impossible to revive those two agreements straight away. But at the very least, we should be giving thought to creative alternatives that might stop the reckless confrontation between the US and China.

There’s no future for us when we keep allowing ourselves to get pressured into constantly picking sides.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]