Taiwan Is the New Berlin

American histories of the Cold War tend to depict the Berlin Wall as a symbol of the era’s worst depredations. In doing so, however, Americans forget the complexity of the 15-year crisis over the status of Berlin that preceded the wall’s 1961 construction—a nuanced story that holds powerful lessons for today’s great-power struggle. In fact, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was relieved when the wall began to go up in 1961, a stark contrast with President Ronald Reagan, who 25 years later powerfully exhorted the Soviet Union to “tear down this wall.” Between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, the question of who would control Berlin—the Americans and their allies or the Soviets—had been the Cold War’s most dangerous flash point, threatening to escalate the two countries’ rivalry into a hot or even a nuclear war. Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Kennedy managed this crisis deftly. The city’s partition was an enormous human tragedy for the people of East Germany. But it also represented the end of the Cold War’s riskiest phase.

As the United States now accelerates its plunge into a dangerous rivalry with China, U.S. policymakers must not forget the lessons of the Berlin crisis—lessons about how two sparring superpowers tiptoed back from war and ultimately arrived at an uneasy détente. Today’s new global battle for hegemony and influence has an analog to Berlin: Taiwan. There are, of course, key differences between the two. Taiwan is more strategically important to China than Berlin ever was to the Soviet Union, both symbolically and geopolitically. The United States’ official policy toward Taiwan’s defense has been one of strategic ambiguity, unlike Kennedy’s explicit commitment to defend West Berlin at all costs—although President Joe Biden has repeatedly proclaimed his intent to defend Taiwan. But the similarities are more meaningful. The United States’ competition with China is a sprawling, multifaceted struggle that bears remarkable similarities to the Cold War: it is a race for diplomatic and economic influence, a conventional and nuclear arms race, a space race, a scramble to establish military bases in Africa and East Asia, an ideological struggle between authoritarianism and democracy, a tech and economic war, and an espionage war.

Taiwan, like West Berlin, is small, but it is the only place in the world where that competition risks sparking a hot conflict and, indeed, the only place where both countries are actively preparing for war. There is little real chance that either the United States or China will commit themselves to risking nuclear war over the small reefs in the East China and South China Seas. Taiwan, like Berlin, also has a powerful symbolic value—as a strategically vital semiconductor-manufacturing powerhouse and, more generally, as an example of a democratic and free China. It is also a geopolitically crucial place that U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, in the 1950s, called an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”

If U.S. policymakers revisited and learned from the Cold War’s Berlin crisis and its role in midwifing the United States’ 1970s détente with the Soviet Union, they would better understand how to navigate their strategic predicament when it comes to managing the current geopolitical confrontation with China. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders made multiple early attempts to improve relations, from the 1950s meetings between Eisenhower and Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to the 1961 Vienna summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Yet the Soviets’ ongoing threat to end West Berlin’s status as a free capitalist enclave stymied all those efforts. Only when Washington was able to convince Moscow that it was serious about defending the city did the Soviets blink and pull back from confrontation. And only when the construction of the Berlin Wall commenced in August of 1961 did an opportunity arise to hold a hot war at bay and stave off some of the era’s most catastrophic potentials, including a nuclear holocaust. Today, a similarly muscular deterrence strategy to convince China that an invasion of Taiwan would trigger catastrophic consequences is the United States’ best chance to achieve a similar détente with China.

HOW TO CARRY A BIG STICK

After World War II ended in Europe in May 1945, the war’s victors—the Allied powers and the Soviet Union—divided conquered Berlin into sectors that each side would administer. Almost immediately, however, the city became a tinderbox for tensions between the Soviets and the West. In 1948, threatened by the Allies’ efforts to create a separate West German state with a new currency and a capitalist economy, the Soviet Union tried to shut off access to West Berlin. Recognizing that West Berlin had come to represent a “symbol of the American intent” and that remaining in Berlin was “essential” to the United States “prestige in Germany and in Europe”—as General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the American area of Berlin, put it—the Truman administration opted for a strategy of strong support for the embattled city, launching the legendary Berlin airlift.

Although the Soviets lifted the blockade in mid-1949, tensions over Berlin never fully abated. Khrushchev understood that West Berlin was strategically important to the Soviet Union, too, as a capitalist territory inside the communist camp that was compelling a very visible brain drain out of East Berlin. So he chose a confrontational tack. Soviet troops were still arrayed around the isolated city, and European, Soviet, and U.S. leaders knew that in a conventional battle, communist forces could easily seize West Berlin. 

Throughout the 1950s, as the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States escalated into a proxy war in Asia, a nuclear arms race, and a full-blown struggle for ideological influence worldwide, West Berlin—and particularly its symbolism as an example of the success of the capitalist model—remained a critical point of confrontation. The United States believed that working to preserve the balance of power in Europe was worth risking a war with the Soviets. Losing West Berlin would be seen as a major defeat for the United States and might embolden Moscow to be more aggressive worldwide. But European and Soviet leaders also always wondered what the United States would actually sacrifice to protect the city. Would—or should—a U.S. president and NATO go to war for the freedom of the people living in West Berlin?

Kennedy showed his determination to defend U.S. interests in Europe, even at an unimaginable cost.

In the late 1950s, as millions of East Germans fled to West Germany, the conflict over Berlin came to a head. In November of 1958, Khrushchev issued an ultimatum to the United States and its allies, demanding they pull their troops out of West Berlin within six months. But Eisenhower resisted the blackmail attempt and Moscow blinked, withdrawing the demand. Three years later, at the 1961 summit in Vienna, Kennedy hoped to agree on a balance of power in Europe with Khrushchev, but the summit broke down and failed to arrive at a resolution on the status of West Berlin. On July 25 of that year, Kennedy delivered a televised address from the Oval Office to alert the American public that the situation in Berlin risked escalating into war. “We have given our word that an attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all,” he said. “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force.” Warning that the conflict could even devolve into a nuclear exchange, he directed Congress to allocate $207 million to, in part, identify and mark existing spaces for nuclear fallout shelters across the United States and to improve the country’s air raid and fallout detection systems.

Kennedy’s determination to defend American strategic interests in Europe, even at an unimaginable cost, caused the Soviets to blink once again and abandon their ambitions to extinguish freedom in West Berlin. Just a little over two weeks after Kennedy’s address, East Germany—under orders from the Soviet Union—began the massive operation to erect the barrier that would end up dividing Berlin for more than a quarter of a century. In Washington, Kennedy expressed a reaction that may surprise Americans who grew up learning about the Berlin Wall’s evils: relief. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” he wondered privately to his aides. He deduced that erecting the wall was Khrushchev’s way of de-escalating the conflict. “It’s not a very nice solution,” Kennedy concluded, “but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

THE TAIWANESE TINDERBOX

Kennedy’s intuition proved correct. Although the Cold War dragged on for three more decades, the de-escalation of tensions over Berlin and the building of the wall represented a turning point. The struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States would provide many more tense moments, including the 13-day Cuban missile crisis that emerged, in part, from Khrushchev’s frustration at losing the confrontation over West Berlin a year earlier. But never again did it approach the extreme danger of the period between 1961 and 1962. The United States and the Soviet Union were able to find a sustainable détente undergirded by more clearly articulated arms control agreements and spheres of influence that each side could live with. Almost certainly, there would never have been a Cold War détente had the Berlin Wall not been built, an act that reduced the threat to West Berlin.

Today, the United States is again embroiled in a great-power rivalry whose extraordinary complexities are coalescing in a pitched struggle over the future of a territory barely larger than the U.S. state of Maryland. The Berlin crisis shows just how dangerous such flash points can be in a global competition between two large nuclear powers. During the 1950s, Soviet leaders wondered how much the United States really cared about Berlin and looked for ways to test American resolve. Similarly, today, many wonder whether the United States would truly defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.

But the United States can no more draw back from the Taiwan conflict than it could abandon West Berlin. If China is permitted to conquer Taiwan without the United States coming to the island’s aid, it would be a disaster for the Taiwanese people. In the summer of 2022, Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, declared that China intends to “re-educate” the Taiwanese population “to eliminate separatist thought and secessionist theory.” A white paper on Taiwan policy that the Chinese government released shortly afterward—leaving open the possibility of an extended military occupation of the island—made it clear that Lu’s statement was no mere bluster. China would surely do to Taiwan what it has done to Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong: attack human rights and suppress liberties such as the right to peaceful assembly, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to practice one’s religion.

Today, many wonder whether the United States would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.

More broadly, a Chinese conquest of Taiwan would rapidly reconfigure the geopolitical power structures across Asia and the Pacific and beyond by establishing a Chinese sphere of influence over East Asia. The United States’ ability to guard trade routes to secure its economic growth, protect allies from Chinese military and economic coercion, and project its power across Asia would drastically decline, because a Taiwan controlled by China would become a strategically vital naval, missile, and radar base that would pose a stark risk to the U.S. Navy’s operations in the Western Pacific. And many countries throughout Asia and the Indo-Pacific, and even worldwide, would lose their faith in the United States’ security guarantees. Economically important nations such as Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea would have to shift their national security policies to accommodate China, the new regional superpower, much as states in Central Asia must accommodate Russia and its interests. 

Newly emboldened by its seizure of Taiwan and its increased strategic influence in East Asia, China’s bellicosity would likely grow dramatically, as appetite tends to grow with eating. China’s takeover of Taiwan would create a world in which, as Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested in 1997, corporate and world leaders would ask themselves before making a decision, “What would Beijing think of this?” rather than “What would America think of this?” Recall the efforts made by corporations such as the NBA to stay on China’s good side, and imagine these amplified a hundredfold. 

BUILD THAT WALL

During the Berlin crisis, U.S. leaders realized that there could be no détente with the Soviet Union without forcing Moscow to back off its threats to destroy freedom in West Berlin. To do so, they had to stand strong and commit to the outpost’s defense against bullying and coercion from the Kremlin, without going so far as to trigger a conflict themselves. The United States must learn from this dance that Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy performed. These leaders preserved West Berlin’s position as a beacon of democracy while avoiding provoking a devastating global conflagration until an era of stability could take hold.

Ultimately, there can be no détente with China without the creation of a figurative “wall” across the Taiwan Strait. This would require the United States to position significant munitions—anti-ship missiles, mines, coastal and air defense batteries throughout the region and on Taiwan itself—enough to convince China that any attempt to take the island would prove futile. In addition, the United States must focus on increasing its economic leverage over China, and decreasing China’s over the United States, in key areas such as semiconductors, critical minerals, AI, biotech and synthetic biological products, space technology and green energy. Beijing must understand that even if it could somehow achieve a military victory over Taiwan, such a takeover would come at a devastating cost to China’s economy and prosperity. Once again, the United States’ strategy in this new cold war must be to convince the other side that an unsatisfactory status quo—in which the fate of Taiwan’s independence undetermined but which nevertheless contributes to peace and coexistence—is preferable to a potentially existential conflict.

But arriving at the détente the Soviet Union and the United States reached in the 1970s took time—something U.S. leaders came to realize in the early stages of the Cold War. The Chinese Communist Party’s rule over China may last for generations. Even if the Chinese government becomes more democratic, many of Washington’s conflicts with Beijing will not disappear, just as the fall of the communist regime in Moscow did not ease all the serious conflict between the United States and Russia.

Stalling can, once again, be a winning strategy. Slowing China’s advance down a month here and a year there is critical, as is letting China make its own mistakes. As it did during the Berlin crisis, the United States must now walk an incredibly thin, delicate line. By investing rapidly in military and economic deterrence without triggering a full decoupling from China, U.S. policymakers must make sure that Chinese leaders wake up and think, “Today is not the day to invade Taiwan”—but also imagine that tomorrow could be, so that they wake up one morning years from now with the same conclusion at which Khrushchev arrived in August 1961 about Berlin: the window to invade has closed entirely.

Just as it was during the Cold War, time is on Washington’s side. And if the United States can avoid a crisis over Taiwan in the next few years, China’s economic and demographic weaknesses will likely force Beijing into making more and more compromises, just as the Soviet Union did during the 1970s and 1980s. But the United States must use that time wisely. Fortunately, it has a historic blueprint.