One-China: Listen to Beijing

 “The 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation clearly stipulated that Taiwan, stolen by Japan, must be restored to China”.

Ambassador Zheng Zeguang, October 26^th, 2025

Why Now?

October 29^th. China is preparing to invade Taiwan.  Probably not tomorrow, but maybe the day after…. Hear me out. In December 2021 I wrote a piece predicting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  I had not only read what Putin was saying, but also what their armed forces were doing. Part of my reasoning at the time was that Putin would never have a better opportunity.  China today?  Beijing is not only telling the West it intends to reunify the Republic of China with the People’s Republic of China there are several very good reasons the West must listen.  President Xi Jinping will also never have a better opportunity.  The West is in strategic, political and economic disarray; an internal power struggle is also underway at the very top of the Chinese Communist Party.

First, China is softening up the West for decisive Chinese action against Taiwan. Last week, Zheng Zeguang, the Chinese Ambassador to the Court of St James, published a piece in a British newspaper explaining why Taiwan has always been a part of China and always will.  The message is clear: if Britain and the wider West want to shape the twenty-first century world order it can only do so with China and not against it.  And only if the collective West re-confirms its collective adherence to the “One-China” principle. Zeguang was clear: “This is the key to ensuring the sound and steady development of China-UK relations”. 

Second, Zeguang suggests that Taipei is claiming the sovereign right to participate in the UN and other international organisations on the grounds that UNGA 2758 does not address Taiwan’s legal status or preclude such participation.  He also suggests that if successful such status would be a casus belli.  Beijing is particularly concerned about “the threat to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait…from separatist activities for “Taiwan independence” and the connivance and support by external forces”. The specific source of Beijing’s concern is what Zeguang describes as recent efforts by Taipei’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) “[again] in collusion with certain external forces…to distort UNGA (United Nations General Assembly) Resolution 2758”, which establishes the One-China Principle.

Third, China assumes that however important Taiwan is to world semiconductor production, the US will not go to war with China if Beijing invades.  Donald Trump does not wage war over other peoples’ issues and in principle accepts Taiwan as a ‘renegade’ province of China.  By writing the article in a British newspaper Beijing was also sending a message to the Americans. Britain does not matter beyond being a fading metaphor for Western/US power. Zeguang pointedly quoted the joint 1972 British-China communique which stated that, “The Government of the United Kingdom recognise the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China”, and that “Taiwan is a province of the People’s Republic of China”.

Fourth, XI is essentially a Han Chinese nationalist and he is resorting ever more to such nationalism to shore up his domestic position. There is a power struggle underway between various factions at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.  For the first time since he came to power in 2012 President-for-Life Xi is facing questions not only over the course of his domestic but also foreign policy.  As he ages questions of the succession are also becoming ever more acute.  At the very heart of Xi’s nationalism is not only the recovery of Taiwan, forced if necessary, but the eclipse of the United States as the world’s dominant military power. Even if Taiwan is recovered well before the centenary of the founding of the CPC in 2049 Xi’s China will continue to challenge the US.

Fifth, Beijing believes China’s military might just be able to pull off a military invasion if but only if it can subvert Taiwan from within first through an applied information and cyber coercion, corruption of Taipei’s elites, blockade and sabotage of critical infrastructures to ease the way for its armed forces across the Taiwan Straits. 

A Warning from History

Would an invasion succeed? Take the D-Day maritime amphibious invasion of France in June 1944. Portsmouth to the Normandy beaches is 180km or 110 miles, whilst the distance between mainland China and Taiwan across the Strait of Taiwan is the same. Prior to D-Day Anglo-American forces had undertaken five major maritime-amphibious invasions and most of those only narrowly avoided disaster.

That D-Day was a success was in no small part because the conditions that were absent for the Nazi’s planned Operation Sealion in 1940 were in place for Operation Overlord: excellent intelligence, the support of the local population and undisputed Allied control of both air and sea.  The ‘only’ contest Allied forces faced was getting ashore and establishing quickly an unassailable bridgehead. No doubt the Chinese have studied the extremely extensive and intensive Chiefs of Staff Supreme Allied Command (COSSAC) plans that led to D-Day in their own planning, which they have clearly now completed.  Recent military exercises testing Chinese Naval Infantry suggest that any such attack would still be an enormous risk for the Chinese. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) simply lacks the experience of contested blue water power projection and/or massive joint maritime-amphibious operations.

One-China?

Here’s the twist - Chinese planning suggests the threat of invasion is more Operation Sealion than Overlord, an attempt to force a settlement through the threat of invasion as one of several instruments of power. Western planners assume such an invasion would be contested. What if it was not? In other words, Beijing needs to successfully subvert Taipei politically and paralyse Taiwan critically BEFORE it attacks militarily.  In such circumstances, Taiwan’s reunification with mainland China would be processional and ceremonial, a warning to others.  Zeguang’s article is one such instrument of power.

The West?  Washington is all that matters to Beijing.  If the US did defend Taiwan there would be a major war over an issue that the US has accepted has already been decided. Taiwan is Chinese real estate.  It would be very hard to sell such a war to the American people and for Trump Taiwan is a faraway land about which he knows little. The Atlantic Alliance would also certainly split (again) thus helping China’s useful idiots in Moscow.  Despite the large number of Japanese citizens in Taiwan it is very unlikely Japan would act without the Americans. If Europeans are pretty much irrelevant in Europe, they certainly are in East Asia. They would issue a few concerned declarations and then adopt their usual grand strategic posture of burying their heads in the drifting sands of False Virtue.

What is clear is that a reckoning over Taiwan is coming and it is coming soon and those responsible for statecraft in Western capitals clearly think the best course of action would be to expedite a peaceful resolution to the conflict on China’s terms.  Sudetenland 2025?

One-China: listen to Beijing...very carefully.

Julian Lindley-French

Jonathan Powell: Virtue Imperialist?

 

October 24th. How does one craft British foreign and security policy when one knows how weak, divided and broke the country is? What trade-offs must be made and at what cost? What is the balance to be struck between pragmatism and ideology? How does one present the management of decline as responsible statecraft?  Those are the dilemmas Sir Keir Starmer’s National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell, confronts daily. Powell certainly has form.  As Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff for a decade he was intimately involved in the Northern Ireland Peace Accords back in the 1990s and the Iraq War in 2003.  More recently he has been front and centre in the Chagos Islands sell-out, the EU reset, and kowtowing to Xi’s Beijing which has culminated in the China Spy Case fiasco.   

During his wilderness years Powell wrote an interesting book which not only revealed Powell’s view of power, but also his many contradictions. Entitled, "The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World" there were times reading it when I thought the title should have been "The New Utopia: How to Give Power to Others in the Modern World".  In the book Powell wrote, “[Machiavelli] was the first writer to consider power and how it could be used and retained in a utilitarian rather than a utopian way”.  And yet it is precisely a form of virtue signalling globalist utopianism that is (it is not science) the essence of his statecraft.

Normally, I avoid writing pieces ad hominem, but Powell IS British foreign and security policy at present such is the dearth of talent in the Starmer administration. Whilst I do not know Powell, we were contemporaries at University College, Oxford.  We both read Modern History, and we even had the same Senior Tutor, the brilliant Dr L. G. Mitchell.  There our similarities end.  Powell was a couple of years ahead of me and whilst he went to the posh King’s School, Canterbury I went to the bog standard Castle Comprehensive School, while Powell was Establishment spawn, I was an oick from the sticks, why I still believe in Britain as a Power, Powell together with much of the British Establishment, does not.  

It is the issue of class which is the difference between us and which is unique to Britain.  Powell’s Establishment class have failed and they know it.  They believe Britain is finished and no longer able to compete in the world.  Petits bourgeois like me reject such nonsense as the basis for policy.  Whilst I accept that Britain is no longer a world power it is still a European power of some weight and can compete if led well. 

Powell’s weakness is the absence of leadership, something he shares with his boss in Downing Street.  This absence of leadership is strange because one of his brothers, Charles Powell (King’s School Canterbury and New College, Oxford), and Baron Powell of Bayswater, was Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy advisor.  The consummate Establishment insider ‘Pole’ (as he pronounced his surname) did believe Britain was still a power of some weight albeit fading.  Like his formidable and at times over the top boss he also believed it could be applied to effect in pursuit of a clearly understood British interest.

Perhaps Powell did once believe such things.  He was, after all, an architect of Tony Blair’s Liberal Humanitarianism in which British virtue and power became a forced marriage of convenience. When Blair over-reached trying to shape US policy post-911 in Afghanistan and Iraq Liberal Humanitarianism seems to have morphed into the vacuum of Virtue Imperialism. It is as though Powell was so bruised by the experience of the Iraq fiasco that he went from an advocate of British over-reach to the under-reach self-evident in what passes for Virtue Signaller-in-Chief Starmer’s statecraft.  

Given Powell’s provenance it is perhaps hardly surprising Virtue Imperialism has become the final tragic manifestation of British imperialism. Which brings me to the paradox at the heart of Powell’s statecraft: for all the Establishment’s declinism and defeatism they still remain arrogant enough to believe that if Britain leads the way across the Hard Yards of Virtue, the world will follow. It will not. 

Powell is in essence Mephistopheles in the forging of Starmer’s Faustian Pact with False Virtue. This is why Britain is paying Mauritius to take the Chagos Islands off Britain’s hands, even though Diego Garcia is a strategically vital asset for both the UK and US. It is also why much of the Cabinet Office and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (or whatever it is called these days) is so keen to make Britain the new Hong Kong, China’s offshore European island.  For much of the Establishment China can do anything to indebted Britain so long as Beijing keeps London politically and financially afloat.

Powell would tell me that he can see the books and knows Britain’s dire financial reality, whilst I do not. In fact I do but that is no excuse for the policy Powell is crafting. A policy that pretends it is committed to multilateralism and institutions such as NATO, talks a lot about increasing Britain’s fighting power to strengthen Alliance deterrence, but in fact does little to turn words into deeds.

It is not all Powell’s fault. Working in this Downing Street Powell is all too aware that many in the Labour Government believe patriotism is a form of mental disorder and that ‘virtue’ is an end in itself for a country so burdened by the guilt of its imperial past.

Ultimately, Powell and the British Establishment have become so wedded to managing Britain’s decline that it has become an end in itself.  They exaggerate British weakness, confuse weakness for virtue and ‘law’ for power to avoid an uncomfortable truth: Britain cannot hide from its residual power. Power breeds responsibilities however hard London tries to replace hard interests with meaningless virtue.

Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" to curry favour with the virtue-less Medici who never confused virtue with interests.  He understood that Sixteenth Century Florence was to the other city-states in Italy what Britain is to the contemporary world.  As such he saw real virtue in the application of clever statecraft that strengthened Florence’s relative position.  As Machiavelli said, “it is better to be adventurous than cautious”.   Powell?

Julian Lindley-French

    

Rose-tinted Riga: The Riga Test 2025

 

“Nostalgia is not a strategy”.

For twenty years I have had the honour of attending the wonderful Riga Conference in Latvia.  Every year I have attended I have used the conference to pose the Riga Test – are the good citizens of Riga safer this year than last from their noisy and aggressive neighbour.  The answer?  No.

This was probably my last Riga Conference because for much of it I felt like a spare part who had outstayed his welcome.  There is a perfectly good reason for that because it is time for a new generation of leaders and analysts to take over.  Any legacy I may be leaving is in good hands.  There is a lot of strategic talent coming through.

That said, I left Riga concerned.  My concerns are not with the younger generation but my own and the complacency in which they seem so mired.  Too many senior conference attendees either in positions of power or recently retired seemed all too comfortable, certain that they knew what Putin intends to do next to Latvia and its neighbours Estonia and Lithuania.  If I do not know, they do not know. Their argument rests on the belief that so long as Russian forces are mired in the mud of Ukraine the Baltic States are safe.  They also believe that NATO has Putin exactly where it wants him.  I am not so sure. The number of times at the conference I heard something along the lines of Putin will not do this or that seemed to tempt fate to this Oxford historian. The ‘job’ of deterring Russia is by no means done and it is a profound mistake to believe that just because a Western leader would not take a big risk, a ‘cautious’ (and quite possibly desperate) Putin would not. 

It is precisely this kind of thinking I have been warning against for years. Putin does not think like a Western democrat, and it is a profound mistake to transfer the Western way of thinking onto either Vladimir Vladimirovich or the men around him. It is also precisely because Putin is mired in Ukraine that makes him so dangerous.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Russia’s way of war and its four distinct elements: wars of conquest, wars of destruction, wars of coercion, and wars of exploitation. For Putin war is simply a military means to a grand strategic end – the re-establishment of Russian control over its ‘near abroad’ by whatever means available.  That is what Putin means when he talks of Russkiy Mir.  Ukraine is simply one step towards that grand strategic end which Putin passionately believes he will one day realise simply and tragically because Russians are prepared to suffer more than other Europeans, particularly Western Europeans.

On October 14^th, Vyacheslav Volodin, the Chairman of the Russian States Duma was explicit. Latvian authorities, he said, were persecuting fellow Russians and Moscow had a duty to protect its “compatriots”.  No doubt my conference colleagues would comfort themselves with the thought that NATO stands ready.  Does it?  I have never known the Americans and major Western European powers more politically distracted and strategically inept and thus open to a Russian war of exploitation against them.  Not since the Cold War has the Russian state been so geared for a war of coercion on its neighbours, be it with fighter incursions, drone incursions, sabotage, or a host of other ‘accidents’.  Whilst the West talks about a counter-drone wall, the Russians are already knocking it down.

Even Russia’s ability to conduct a war of conquest is not as far-fetched as my complacent colleagues would like to believe. A former commander of the US Army in Europe asked me to pose a simple question at the panel on military mobility I chaired. In the event of a major Russian attack that combined all four wars of coercion, exploitation, conquest and destruction simultaneously and across the spectrum of information, cyber, sabotage and military power could Latvia hold out the two weeks it would take for Allied forces to arrive in strength.  No.    

Which brings me to what was really missing at this year’s Riga Conference – any elite sense of urgency and a lack of what I call a real joined up defence against exploitation, coercion, conquest and destruction. Declarations have been signed, commitments have been made but to my trained and experienced eye words still seem more important than deeds to free Europe. Nostalgia is not a strategy; complacency is a crime.  

Thank you, Latvia and your mighty Riga Conference. It has been an honour to serve you. Bon voyage!

Julian Lindley-French