Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/12/21 Daniel Davis: We Shouldn’t Send American Soldiers to Die for Taiwan

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

Scott interviews Daniel Davis about an article he recently published at 19fortyfive.com about Taiwan. Davis does believe there is a solid chance that China will invade Taiwan. At the same time, he does not think there is anything the U.S. can actually do about it. Davis explains that, while the American military is much more powerful on a global scale, the Chinese have enough firepower pointed off their coast to overwhelm the U.S. Navy if it gets close to Taiwan. Scott and Davis agree that it would be a costly and ultimately doomed fight. And both stress that the National Security “experts” pointing to nuclear deterrence as the answer are playing a very dangerous and very stupid game.   Discussed on the show: “Why Should American Soldiers Die For Taiwan?” (1945) “America Needs To Stop Demanding North Korea Give Up Its Nuclear Weapons” (1945) Daniel Davis did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his time in the army. He is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and is the author of the reports “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” and “Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan.” Find him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antivore.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up to the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i have got the hero from the afghan war and by that of course i mean the great truth-telling whistleblower lieutenant colonel daniel l davis senior fellow at defense priorities and as I say lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. He did, he was in the big tank battle

of Iraq War I. He also was in Iraq War II and Afghanistan and he wrote the book the 11th hour in 2020 America. Welcome back to the show. How you doing? I'm doing good, Scott. Always a pleasure to be here. Great, great to have you here. Really important stuff to talk about. Like for example, this piece published on October the 21st at 1945. That's the digits, 1-9, and then 45 spelled out. I don't know what the hell is going on with that. They've got to figure that out.

How difficult does that make it to say their URL, the people, you know? Anyway, why should American soldiers die for Taiwan? You know what, for all I know, 1945 forwards to it. What do I know? Why should American soldiers die for Taiwan? Why, indeed, should they? lieutenant colonel davis what do you think uh well i mean the the obvious answer is they shouldn't uh there is no need for the united states to go to war with china over the situation of taiwan

and frankly our government is is helping making that difficult by continuing to act as though we might and giving cause to uh you know some of the leaders on taiwan to think that we might giving fear to some of the leaders of China that we might. And then you also have members of Congress wanting to outright spell it out, as well as other pundits that want to say, yes, we should give explicit security guarantees to Taiwan, which is insane, because I'm just flat out telling you from a military perspective, take all the emotions out of it, take all the what should or shouldn't happen out of it, and just you look at a cold, hard comparison of combat force, power, and motivation behind the various parties and the three parties in this and you come away with the

there's virtually no chance that the united states could could win a war against china over Taiwan and a great probability that we would lose that we would suffer possibly tens of thousands of casualties have an aircraft carrier or other ships drop to the bottom of the south and east china seas airplanes get shot out of the sky and still lose so that's why i'm saying we should absolutely not fight a war over Taiwan that we can't win. All right. Now, there's so many questions begged here, and I mean that in the proper sense of it, such as what is the true threat that China will invade Taiwan in the first place?

And maybe another question would be, does it matter if there's a discussion among former military personnel as yourself and regularly rolled civilians like myself about what the policy should be here? because I saw this presentation, I guess it was an interview, oh, there's a presentation by John Mearsheimer for this think tank in Australia. And he made it clear in the plainest of language.

Meersheimer, by the way, everyone is the dean of the realist school of foreign policy from the University of Chicago and wrote the great book on the Israel lobby with Stephen Walt, et cetera, like that. And he says, listen, the deep state has already decided that we will defend Taiwan.

It doesn't matter what the discussion is in Washington, D.C., or among the general public in the United States of America. And he apparently seemed to agree with, you know, that this was important, that we should, you know, be obligated to defend Taiwan. I'm fairly certain of that. But he was saying the decision's already been taken. It's made by the admirals.

That's the British phrase, isn't it taken? It's been made. It's the admirals and the whoever. the CIA and the Lords of Wall Street, the skull and bones, or whoever it is, they've decided, not us. Well, let's take your questions in order. The first one is, is there any realistic probability that China would attack Taiwan? And the answer is yes.

Without question, China has been absolutely very vocal from day one, from 1949 forward, that they are willing to use force to retake Taiwan. In fact, doing some research for a piece that I'm working on right now, it turns out that actually China had a plan to invade Taiwan in late 1949, early 1950, that was interrupted by the Korean War. And instead of sending their troops across the strait to take Taiwan, they had to divert them to, perversely, fight the United States. when they sit 300,000 troops into the northern part of North Korea to fight us. Otherwise, they would have done it then, but they had been trying at various levels after that. They recovered from all the losses they suffered during that war. And in recent years, from about 1980 on, apparently, not apparently, there was a good period where they were actually trying to cooperate and have a peaceful unification of, you know, something like the Hong Kong model in the period. with some interest on both sides of the strait, but that started changing in the 80s.

And then Taiwan started becoming more independent-minded. They're saying they were de facto already a country. China started saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not going to go that way. They started getting more and more bellicose. You get into the big 1995-96 Taiwan Straits issue where missiles were flying all over the place in the sea, very close to Taiwan shores. The U.S. was sending two aircraft carrier battle groups through the straits, et cetera.

and we almost came to blows at that time, but things cooled down. In the intermediate time, really China realized that they didn't have any answer to our aircraft carriers at that time. So they set on what has turned out to be about a 25-year period to build up their military in every capacity that will allow them to successfully attack and take Taiwan, even with all of our combat power. And that's what the gist of several pieces I've been riding here of late that just look at the cold hard calculations that if China attacks Taiwan to retake them, and they have made it a very important plank of their national identity. I mean, it's that big to them. There's nothing we can do to stop it. And here's the reason why. When you look at the global comparison of forces between the United States and China, without question, we're overwhelmingly the superior force.

We have more modern and large Navy ships, more submarines. We don't have more fighter aircraft, even globally, I don't think. But nuclear power, we're still like 10 to 1 and more in some cases than China. So they're not going to do anything. They're not going to attack us. They actually can't because they can't project power much beyond what's called the first island chain, which is the Taiwan area. They can't project power hardly beyond that at all, much less to the United States.

States. But our power is not combined, or our power, the force comparison doesn't take place on a global scale. It takes place in the waters around Taiwan. And all of China's maritime forces and the majority of their missile and air forces are all concentrated right there in that area, whereas ours are scattered to the four winds and the seven seas of the ocean. So we're all over the place. Our force in that area, first of all, are very small in comparison to what's in China. But second of all, and this is maybe the most important aspect, China has been building up and preparing for conflict for a long time. So they've got all the ammunition stocks stored up. They've got all the fuel stocks, you know, wartime stocks that are ready to go that will allow them to launch and maintain a campaign for some time.

And it's all right there on their shore. I mean, it's literally with, you know, 100 miles across the water. We're 6,000 miles from the U.S. shore. and we haven't stockpiled other than just, you know, enough to fight for maybe two weeks in any unexpected contingencies. But to fight a war, you would have to sustain for possibly months. We just don't have it. We don't have the fuel. We don't have the manpower.

And we don't have the ammunition. We don't have the rockets and the missiles and the other things that we would need to be able to sustain combat. So if we started fighting, we would lose a lot of ships because they would use saturated bombing. They would use saturation launches with missiles. We just don't have enough to defend against what they would have. And then we're going to lose lots of ships. They're going to still take Taiwan. So here's the point that I've really kind of come down to.

If China does do what they claim that they're looking to do and they take Taiwan, our choice will be either let's remain fully in control of our forces and not suffer any losses and then use our full military and diplomatic power to impose a real price on China for using force to solve this problem that shouldn't be done, because I don't agree with it in the least. Or we can try to fight a war that we won't win, and at the end of the day, we'll have our power severely degraded. And now all of a sudden, our power, our ability to defend our country is significantly weakened across the globe. Well, there's another option, too, right? There's no option to win. Isn't there an option to just sell the Taiwanese out and tell them, look, man, this is the 800-ton dragon, and you're not.

And we're not going to fight for your independence because you're not a state in our union or even a nation North America. Like, we might fight for Canadian independence from the rising, I don't know, Atlantean juggernaut or whoever's coming for it. But Taiwan? You know, but we don't have to celebrate. He's just told them the truth that, like, sorry, we're not going to do anything about it at all. You guys should negotiate your reentry into the Chinese Union as soon as possible. What's wrong with that? Well, that is a version that I say.

That's exactly. I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean to sell them out. We can impose a price on China in several non-military ways if they do that because resorting to force is, you know, that's not good for anybody. But you can't do something because you just want to if you're not able to succeed. and the cost. Even if you succeeded, I mean, I don't think we could. But if and if you wanted to say maybe we would, what would we have, quote, one other than the loss of ships, planes, thousands of troops? And now then we're sitting 100 miles off the Chinese shore. And they will never, under any circumstances, allow that, which leads to the biggest risk, nuclear escalation.

Right. And that is not an empty threat. I'm telling you. Yeah. Hold on just one second. be right back so you're constantly buying things from amazon dot com well that makes sense they bring it right to your house so what you do though is click through from the link in the right hand margin at scott horton dot org and i'll get a little bit of a kickback from amazon's end of the sale won't cost you a thing nice little way to help support the show again that's right there in the margin at scott horton dot org hey you want to know what industry is recession proof yes you're right of course pot scott horton here to tell you about green mill super critical extractors. The SFE Pro and Super Producing Parallel Pro can be calibrated to produce all different

types and qualities of cannabis crude oils for all different purposes. These extractors are the most important part of your cannabis oil business. For precision, versatility, and efficiency, green millsupercritical.com. Hey y'all, Scott here. If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of

everything they didn't teach you in school but should have. Follow through from the link in the margin at Scott Horton.org for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Well, okay, so let me get back to Nukes in just one second, but what have we got to lose? I'll tell you this. I saw, I think, in the

comments on your piece, and I've seen this over and over again, that what we have to lose is, semiconductors. Nobody can make semiconductors except this one company in Taiwan. Which is funny because in Austin we have advanced micro devices and at least they used to make all their own semiconductors right here in the town where I'm talking to you from. I don't know why they couldn't

just and I know it's all American blueprints for every bit of that stuff in the first place. So I don't know what's so difficult about them, you know, kicking some new factories up in Texas. Right now there's An opportunity cost, obviously, it makes it cheaper to do it in Taiwan. But they, you know what? In fact, I think I read, this may have been the comment on your piece. The guy said it would take a trillion dollars in a decade to rebuild our semiconductor capacity.

Could that possibly be right? I mean, is anybody serious telling you that? Yeah. We would die without Taiwan. Well, it would take a long time. That's a fact. And this is part of the consequence of our just doing things. things on the cheap instead of having at least an element of strategic observation going on while

we do this because we have become absolutely indispensably dependent on the semiconductor issues for virtually everything in the modern world that we make. And we have chosen to allow it to all reside 100 miles off the Chinese coast within a range of their missiles. We should have been building things in Austin and several other places. We should immediately right now start to diversify fire ourselves so that that we don't have a single point of failure in that right now. And it would take a long time. I don't know that it would take a decade, but it would certainly take a number of years. And the problem is this is what gives China a lot of leverage should they make this move

because if they're smart and they usually are, they will put a big, huge, no fire zone, like about a mile around that factory so that not a bullet touches it because they want to control Taiwan and the ability to make those semiconductors so that they have. extraordinary leverage over the rest of the world that will mitigate anyone's ability to punish them economically after because they can still sell the semiconductors they'll have control of it that's the real that's the ultimate threat that I see is that that would give them leverage over everybody yeah well like you say they could start diversifying out of that right now I still don't know yeah I mean cheap is cheap but I don't know why it should be that the whole world

has outsourced the fabrication of this one kind of microchip to this one island? Is that really right? It was easy. Yeah, it's astounding to think that that is what happened, but that's a fact. And it was because it was easy. The Taiwanese were very, very good at what they are doing. But why do we believe that it would be so difficult to get started again? I mean, in Austin right now, and for 20 years, well, 50 years, IBM has been here, advanced micro devices has been here for what 30 35 years something like that michael dell's company is based here still of course um these are massive firms never mind all these new you know google moving to town i mean these are real computer firms that are you know long established hell i think rathion even fabricates uh you know some kind of microchips and whatever in town so i don't know

why it would take them more than a couple of months to kick their ass into gear yeah what's the problem they need special chinese sand or well no they don't but they do need very very specialized equipment and expertise uh it's not just like making other components because you know other things that we do we already have you know we could ramp a lot of things but that particular skill set is uh requires you know machining of the micro level uh that just doesn't exist anywhere else and it takes time to ramp that stuff up all right now i'm sorry to go back to the first question here and I know we're going to, I did set you up to talk about whether, you know, the admirals decide not the public anyway or even the Congress or the president. But we'll get back to that. But on the, you know, you talked about how prepared China is to do this. But I wonder if you, you know, how you think that translates to time scale here, whether they just have the capability to do this at any time or, for example, trying to seize control of those factories is their highest priority. in the shortest order.

Maybe they want to call our bluff soon or not later or not. Yeah, what do you think? They have the ability right now. I will dispute with some people who say that they're not quite there. They are there in my view right now. Because one of the big problems is when you look at a lot of the analysis that is done in the West as to why they can and what they need, etc. They're literally looking through this like it's still 1944, June, 1944, Normandy. or 1950 at the Injong landings, and they're just basically saying, we'll do the same thing in the future, and we won't.

China is not going to just follow the same old playbook that requires the same kind of things we had for 1944. They're going to use much different tactics, different capabilities, et cetera, that make it a lot easier, a lot easier to do than it was then. And also you can't ignore this part of the equation. the Taiwanese defense is woefully inadequate. I mean, the fact that they barely spend 2% of GDP on their forces, the fact that their frontline units, their active duty units are at some cases as low as 60% man, that just tells you they aren't really worried about China. They don't really want to fight China, but on the other side of the aisle,

out of the strait, China is overwhelmingly emotionally connected to this, and they are really, really pressing on this issue here. So if it comes to fighting, they can do it. All right. Now, you talked about nukes there for a minute. It seems like this would be, and this is, of course, the point of view of the Hawks here, that if America just says essentially, okay, you might sink some of our battleships, but man, are we going to impose some costs on you up to and including the threat of nuclear war,

that that will be a sufficient deterrent to keep them from trying it and that that is the best case scenario is we'll just hold the status quo from now on instead of you know essentially announcing that no we won't do that

which is of course the height of dishonor and betrayal and horribleness and that kind of thing yeah well I mean first of all the status quo is okay because no one's getting killed so I'm all right with the status quo where no one in

AIDS, no one has to die. But that's a horrible way to look at it because it's also an ignorant way to look at it. Because China has 1.4 billion people. We've got 0.3 billion people. So they could absorb a lot of nuclear strikes. We can't. I mean, but I wouldn't trade a single American city, not even a single one for anything in China. I don't care how much they got harmed. If we suffer a nuclear strike, it's catastrophic and there's nothing that could ever be good come out of it at all. And we just can't go down that path. Our nuclear force is to deter someone from attacking us so that if we're struck, we can then impose a catastrophic loss on the other side that will deter them from ever launching the first missile in the first place. We should never even think about thinking that we can succeed at launching a nuclear strike against someone and somehow survive.

it. That's insane. Okay, but if I'm at a think tank in D.C., I'm saying, yeah, but no, nuclear deterrence works so well that, you know, we extend our nuclear umbrella. We're not going to let anybody attack Canada. So, you know what? We should also extend our nuclear umbrella to South Korea and Japan, and of course, to England and France and Spain and Portugal and Greece and Germany. And, of course, we need an Italy.

And of course, you know, yeah, whatever. the sky's limit, Estonia, whatever you got. And wherever we tell people, you better not mess with anybody or else we'll nuke you, those are all places where nothing bad ever happens. So why not extend our nuclear umbrella to every nation in the entire world except Russia and China and then they'll never do anything and no one else will ever do anything and everything will be world peace forever, Daniel. Yeah, let's start with, I don't know, Georgia, Ukraine.

Why not? Let me let's start right there, right? because there's models of stability, which is insane. I mean, I'm saying that tugging cheek, obviously, but people are wanting to do that, and that is frightening. It's terrifying that people think that that's a good idea because, look, you're playing with fire that at some point, some of these other owners of nuclear weapons, especially if there is a conventional conflict, and it starts going bad for their side, that they could potentially panic and say,

okay, well, we'll just launch one nuclear missile over here as a warning not to do anything else. I mean, you can see where someone might have that irrational mindset in a crisis. And the last thing we need to do is extend this nuclear umbrella to other unstable people who don't have nuclear weapons that do have longstanding conflicts with nuclear powers. That is insane and we should not do it. Yeah. And hey, look, I mean, for people in the audience, you know, Danny's not. not making that up. I mean, that's a thing. I mean, I remember the way they talked about this. This is, we think that the new Russian doctrine is escalate to de-escalate, that they will set off one small nuke to prove that they will set off a bigger nuke. So that means we have to also adopt

that same posture and prove to them that that'll never work, and that if they use a nuke, then we'll use one back, and then we might even use a bigger one than that in order to prove to them that they better de-escalate now. Exactly. the hell you know you just because you like have a job at the university of chicago or at harvard kennedy school of whatever or some shiny stars on your chest that they gave you in the navy that you get to sit around and come up with plans for exterminating all the mankind on the barest of pretexts like this it's crazy man yeah it truly is and it's terrifying because those

conversations are happening. And people are calculating, I mean, just numbers. And that's all they are to many of these people. They're just numbers. And they're like, okay, well, I think we can survive this. Not thinking every single one of those digits is a lot that matters a great deal. And it just boggles my mind that people are okay with playing with these quote numbers. Yeah. Well, anyway, man, I'm sorry we're out of time because, you know, I really want to talk about alternatives to all of this. because it seems like mutually assured destruction, it only works so well, and especially when, as we're talking about,

people abuse it so badly and extending its, you know, its border of what's to be defended under its doctrine so recklessly and so far. But now we're out of time, so we'll just have to talk about that next time, which is really unfortunate, too. And I'm really sorry, because I called you late,

and then we got a little delayed there. But I also wanted to at least mention and make sure that people go and look at this at 1945. America needs to stop demanding North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. And again, I'm so sorry we don't have time to talk about this, but this is such an important piece. And of course, it's exactly right. And there's more great stuff like that at 1945.com.

Daniel L. Davis, senior fellow at defense priorities, and the book is The 11th hour in 2020 America. Thank you so much, Dana. Thanks for having me. the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk ninety point seven fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scott horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org