The Taiwan Issue and if India can be the next USA

dhruvtalksstech
Jan 21, 2023
5 min read

Imagine a separate country having a specific law that is a legal declaration to invade your country if your country asserts its independence!! This is a Chinese law meant to stop any parts of China from seceding from China itself and it mentions Taiwan. It says that if the possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, China shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Translation - if they run out of diplomatic solutions, China is required by law to invade Taiwan and force it to reunite with China.

In the summer of 1995, China sent a bunch of its troops to the province of Fujian, they then started running highly publicized combat exercises very similar to what it would look like to cross this 130-kilometer-wide strait to invade the island of Taiwan a place that China doesn’t think is a real country but rather a part of China itself - a rebellious island province in an unfinished civil war. And this was all because the Taiwanese Prez asked for an American Visa and the US Congress voted to give it to him. Oh! And Taiwan was holding its first democratic election these were the first free elections of a Chinese leader in five thousand years. China hated that all of this was happening on the island that they think is theirs, hence all the military flexing but look who showed up next.

It was the US military and they sent their biggest show of military force in Asia since the Vietnam war right here in China’s neighborhood. And guess what, it worked! China-backed down and the U.S reasserted itself as the global powerhouse. So, now let us fast forward to last fall, a lot has changed in these twenty or, so years, and China is at it again flexing on Taiwan. Their favorite way of doing this lately is flying military aircraft into the Taiwan Air Defense Identification Zone or ADIZ.

China has started flying military aircraft over this airspace without asking permission and without identifying themselves dozens of times a day and hundreds of times a month. So, guess who shows up to the region to calm things down? Right after this huge bulk of flyovers of Taiwan’s ADIZ, the US sends in guided missile destroyers through the Taiwanese strait, but this time it did not work. It is not the nineties anymore. Things have changed - Bill Clinton cannot just send a bunch of naval ships to the Taiwan strait and expect China to back down. We are living in a different era. The biggest difference is that China’s military has become way more powerful than in the last 20 years.

Yet, rather than a full-blown invasion, the more likely situation is that China will pressurize Taiwan through blockades or through other painful pressures that will get them to come to the negotiating table. If the Chinese Military has a goal for a less violent Intervention, that’s not how war works. Conflict is very messy and one miscalculation can lead to an escalation in the conflict and now you have a wildfire that is out of control on both sides. It’s incredibly easy for the momentum of conflict to bring us to a situation where the entire region is devolving into a war that threatens to engulf many more countries and hundreds of thousands of lives.

If something like this starts, it’s really hard to reverse it, to put the cat back in the bag. We don’t live through a global war, we live in an international system that feels like it has rules, we have the UN, we have treaties and conventions, we have global trade. It feels like there’s some sort of order but let me remind you that this is because we live in the most peaceful time in human history. Few people alive today have witnessed what it looks like when the two powerful countries clash in all-out war, it usually happens when some powerful leader feels strongly that he deserves land that the rest of the world says the land isn’t his so he uses his big powerful army to go take it and in the process he sparks a horrible tragedy.

I think China and Taiwan in this specific case is the best thing to look at to evaluate whether we can talk about creative ways to solve conflicts instead of resorting to the thing humans have done forever which is just fight each other and see who wins. For now, only time can tell if the Chinese and Taiwanese leader’s handshakes will spread the warmth of tranquility in the region or will the yellow stars twinkle in the night sky of Taipei.

The sunrise of the world isn't when we wake from our slumbers every day, but when a superpower like India wakes from its slumber of economic and cultural suppression. India is today witnessed as the growing tree with its roots in almost the entire world; from the vice president of the USA, Kamala Harris to the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai. The magnificence of this gigantic tree is indeed awaited by all its dwellers.

Diverse perspectives find their paths to be expressed in a plethora of ways. From the very moment when its shackles were broken till this very age when its youth dominates the world, how it has sailed its voyage makes India the very flag holder of tomorrow’s world. Today, our youth look up to the USA for opportunities, even the world’s no. 1 colleges - the Ivy League, MIT, and Stanford. But it won’t be long before not only the Americans, but the entire world’s youth, will yearn for Indian Colleges like IIT or IIM.

From yet another perspective, India can be perceived as the global power of today’s world which has elevated the ladder of success exponentially over the past decades. The question that arises in our minds: CAN India be the next USA?, needs to be addressed today, for the answer is in the affirmative for all the Indian patriots.

Fortified with its lionhearted soldiers, filled with innovative minds full of imagination, India, in its true sense, is ready to dominate the world in the coming decade. By the next decade, we, as the youth of the nation, have the vitality of the identity of India to be the ‘greatest superpower’ of the world. ‘When Indian super-minds will rise to supreme power, only then will the sun truly dawn on the human race.’