「台海戰爭堪比二次大戰」澳洲前總理陸克文：戰後將改變世界新秩序 風傳媒 20240608

「台海戰爭堪比二次大戰」澳洲前總理陸克文：戰後將改變世界新秩序    風傳媒 20240608

前澳洲總理、現任澳洲駐美國大使陸克文（Kevin Rudd）日前在一場演說中警告，台海戰爭對全球造成的後果，將與第二次世界大戰的衝擊一樣巨大，會使世界成為「截然不同的地方」。

陸克文過去10年內兩度擔任澳洲總理，之後擔任中國問題學者，曾任紐約智庫「亞洲協會」（Asia Society）主席。他大學期間主修中國歷史與中國文學，大學學位論文以中國民主運動為主題，也在兩岸三地都有工作或求學經驗。1980年代他曾來台灣留學，就讀於台灣師範大學。

習近平若要實現「國家完全統一」，要在10年內滿80歲前行動

《路透社》7日報導，陸克文6日在夏威夷智庫亞太安全研究中心演說中指出，中國國家主席習近平6月15日將滿71歲，如果習希望與台灣實現「最終國家統一」，他有可能在未來10年內，也就是在滿80歲之前採取行動。

總統賴清德發表520就職演說後，中共軍方發動連2天的「聯合利劍-2024A」軍演。陸克文說：「如果我們忽視中國越來越清楚的軍事信號，包括其最近軍演的模式，將會很愚蠢。」他說，中國是否採取軍事行動，將取決於其對美國威懾力量的認知。

陸克文並指稱，美國認識到若中國成功併吞台灣，將對美國的可信度造成負面影響，並「對美國在全球同盟的可靠性帶來深遠，且可能無法逆轉的效應」。

陸克文示警，這場台海戰爭所產生的經濟成本、對國內政治衝擊、和不可知的地緣政治後果，很可能是自二戰以來，「我們從未見過的程度」。不管台海戰爭的結果如何，「可能美國勝利、中國勝利或是兩敗俱傷，戰後的世界，很可能變得與之前截然不同的樣貌」。

避免台海開戰的核心：習近平如何詮釋美台及盟友的嚇阻策略

另外，《華盛頓郵報》6日刊登陸克文投書，這篇投書也是摘自其前述演說。陸克文表示，中國威嚇台灣的灰色地帶手段愈趨激烈，且持續增強軍力。他認為，要避免台海爆發戰爭，最核心的問題是了解習近平如何詮釋美國、台灣及美國盟友的嚇阻策略。

他提到，中國在政治、軍事、經濟、外交與網路等領域，用灰色地帶策略威嚇台灣，目的在影響台灣民眾心理、態度、行為及政治輿論。對反對統一的台灣領導高層，北京也加強政治攻擊，藉由使對政治無感的一般選民看到台灣的脆弱性，使他們喪失合法性。

陸克文說，北京對台的灰色地帶策略包括：海軍、空軍、海警跨越海峽中線，入侵台灣24海里鄰接區及離岸島嶼周圍，讓台灣民眾以為其政府沒有能力捍衛台灣主權；經濟方面則祭出懲罰性措施，以阻礙台灣的貿易、投資和其他國家收入，藉此讓對政治無感的選民看到台灣的脆弱性。

陸克文認為，北京在南海及東海的作為，跟其對台灣的灰色地帶策略有點類似。中共空軍也飛到釣魚台列嶼附近；北京在南海仁愛暗沙（仁愛礁）對菲律賓也有非致命性脅迫舉動。

https://www.storm.mg/article/5151009

 

 

Australia ambassador to US Kevin Rudd    Reuters 20240607

June 6 (Reuters) - Australia's ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, cautioned in a speech that the global consequences of a war over Taiwan would be as great as the impact of the Second World War, making the world "a radically different place".

If Chinese President Xi Jinping, who turns 71 this month, wanted to achieve "final national unification" with Taiwan he would likely act in the next decade before he reaches his 80s, Rudd said in a speech in Honolulu on Thursday.

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"We would be foolish to ignore the increasing clarity of China's military signalling, including the pattern of its most recent military exercises," said Rudd, who was twice Australia's prime minister in the previous decade.

Whether China acts will depend on its perception of the strength of U.S. deterrence, he said.

China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan strongly objects to China's sovereignty claims and says only the island's people can decide their future.

The United States has expressed concern about Chinese military activity near Taiwan, including after the island's presidential election and the inauguration of President Lai Ching-te last month. China has warned the U.S. should not interfere in China's affairs with Taiwan.

Taiwan and the United States have no official diplomatic relationship, as Washington formally recognises Beijing but is bound by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself and is the island's most important international backer.

The United States recognized that if China was successful in annexing Taiwan it would impact U.S. credibility and have "profound, and potentially irreversible effect on the perceived reliability of U.S. alliances worldwide", Rudd said.

The United States, China and Taiwan have a common interest in avoiding open military confrontation on the future of Taiwan, said Rudd, a China scholar who was president of the Asia Society in New York until last year.

"The economic costs, domestic political impacts, and unknowable geo-strategic consequences that such a war would generate would likely be of an order of magnitude that we have not seen since the Second World War," he said.

"Whatever the outcome (an American victory, a Chinese victory, or a bloody stalemate), the world is likely to become a radically different place after such a war than it was before."

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/war-over-taiwan-would-change-world-says-australia-ambassador-us-kevin-rudd-2024-06-07/

 

‘Short of war,’ China’s gray zone strategy on Taiwan is gathering in intensity    Kevin Rudd＠Washington Post 20240606

The West must strongly deter — without foreclosing a future reconciliation between Taipei and Beijing.

Kevin Rudd is Australia’s ambassador to the United States and was previously prime minister and foreign minister. This is an edited extract of a speech delivered Thursday at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. The speech is a personal reflection in his capacity as a China scholar and not as an official representative of the Australian government.

The central question for our time, if we are to avoid war across the Taiwan Strait, is to understand how Chinese President Xi Jinping actually interprets the deterrence strategies of the United States, Taiwan itself, and U.S. allies and strategic partners.

What strategy is China now embarking upon, short of preparation for an actual invasion, to achieve its political objectives in relation to Taiwan? And what is the role of deterrence in responding to such a strategy?

The key to understanding Beijing’s red line on Taiwan’s political status is China’s fear that Taiwan will become an independent state, and be recognized by the international community as such, thereby destroying the possibility of unification with the mainland.

This, in turn, is based on Beijing’s insistence that any political dialogue between Taiwan and the mainland must be based on the “1992 Consensus” — an ambiguous arrangement broadly based on the principle of “one China,” albeit with differing interpretations of what that means to each side.

Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in government since 2016, has opposed the “one China” element within the 1992 Consensus. As a result, Beijing has rejected all official dialogue with Taiwanese administrations since the party came to power. The DPP has argued that Taiwan was already independent and so had no need formally to declare it. President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president from 2016 to 2024, took this concept further — continuing to reject the 1992 Consensus, while refining the Democratic Progressive Party’s position on Taiwan’s political status as one committed to “maintaining the status quo.” This position has been reiterated by the new DPP President William Lai who took office last month.

But Beijing is increasingly making it plain to foreign interlocutors that this stance is not sufficient. Far from being relieved that the DPP has stepped back from the brink of any formal declaration of independence, Beijing is signaling loud and clear that its political objective remains to force Taiwan into negotiations on its preferred “one country, two systems” model that it has used for Hong Kong.

Beijing might well be in the process of concluding that Taiwan thinking of itself as de facto autonomous, with the international community on much the same page, will become further entrenched — and irreversible. As time begins to run out (from China’s perspective), we will begin to see a change in Chinese strategy toward the “Taiwan problem.” Indeed, we are already seeing it, with China increasingly availing itself of a multidimensional “gray zone” strategy over the past 18 months or so, a strategy aimed at applying new forms of pressure on Taiwanese and international public opinion to force Taipei to the negotiating table.

Prominent analysts have described the gray zone strategy as seeking “economic, military, diplomatic, or political gains without eliciting a costly and direct response from an opponent.” Others have described it as a “short of war” approach — a combination of political, military, diplomatic, economic and cyber measures where the objective is to achieve a psychological, attitudinal and then behavioral change on the part of Taiwanese public and political opinion.

These measures include intensifying political assaults by Beijing to delegitimize Taiwanese political leaders opposed to unification. They also involve military assets: naval, air, coast guard and other intrusions across the median line, Taiwan’s 24-mile contiguous zone and in and around Taiwan’s offshore islands, are meant to show the Taiwanese that their administration is incapable of defending Taipei’s claims to sovereignty. They also entail punitive economic measures (well short of a blockade) aimed at impeding Taiwanese trade, investment and other national income, to demonstrate to apolitical Taiwanese voters Taipei’s vulnerability.

During her tenure, Tsai already pointed to mounting cyber intrusions into Taiwan’s economic and communications infrastructure, again with the intention of demonstrating to the Taiwanese people the acute vulnerability of their systems to an integrated cyberattack.

For China watchers, there are some similarities in Beijing’s “short of war” strategies that have already been tried in the South and East China Seas, and those being tried on Taiwan. Japan has seen this with the intensity of People’s Liberation Army Air Force sorties around Senkaku-Diaoyu Dao. We have also seen China assert nonlethal coercive actions in relation to the Second Thomas Shoal and the Philippines.

With Taiwan, however, there appears to be a growing intensity across the full range of “gray zone” activities. And those are likely to increase as the DPP settles in for another term, and Beijing’s preferred political partner on Taiwan (Kuomintang, or KMT) looks at the prospect of a cumulative 12 years in opposition.

An embrace of gray zone agitation does not mean China has suspended its efforts to build the military capabilities necessary to take Taiwan by overwhelming military force. Those efforts continue.

And there is no inconsistency between China pursuing these two approaches in tandem. China’s political strategy for unification with Taiwan has always had a fundamental military component. Indeed, these two approaches are entirely compatible if their cumulative effect is to reduce Taipei’s deterrence and war fighting capabilities, as well as its political, social and economic resilience.

Deterring China from launching military action against Taiwan is the cornerstone of a U.S. and allied strategy for preserving the status quo and the wider geostrategic stability of the Indo-Pacific region. The question that arises for all of us, however, is how to also deter China’s emerging menu of measures that remain “short of war” and “short of invasion” but that share the same political objective, which is to force Taipei to capitulate.

Governments across the region and the world will increasingly be required to draw a clear linkage between identifiable gray zone actions on the one hand and a series of calibrated policy responses on the other. The alternative is no response at all — which presumably is Beijing’s current expectation.

In the future, the Taiwanese might choose to engage in a fresh round of negotiations with Beijing on easing cross-strait tensions, new forms of economic cooperation and new approaches to the political relationship between them.

Indeed, all our interests would be served by breaking the 1992 Consensus impasse so that effective dialogue can recommence after nearly a decade of silence. Silence accentuates tension; talking can reduce it. As Winston Churchill famously reminded us, it’s always better to “jaw, jaw than war, war.”

But there is a difference between a voluntary, agreed approach to negotiations, as opposed to a coerced one.

For Beijing, reassurance that Taipei and its international partners will sustain the status quo on Taiwan’s future political status is essential for strategic stability. But with Xi’s evident frustration at Taiwan’s continuing autonomy, reassurance alone will not be sufficient.

It needs to be part of a much wider equation of integrated deterrence that will command all our efforts for the decade ahead if we are to successfully preserve the peace.