Commentary
On Dec. 7, 2022, Dr. Edward Luttwak, a strategy consultant to the U.S. government, gave the keynote speech at Japan’s National Institute of Defense Studies (NIDS) International Symposium on Security Affairs. The speech was entitled “Can China Fight a War?”
Most news outlets did not cover the NIDS conference and almost none of them mentioned Luttwak’s speech. News sources missed an opportunity to highlight some of China’s most important strategic weaknesses. These should be ferociously pursued if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) orders the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to conduct a military operation against Taiwan.
Can China Wage a War?
Dr. Luttwak noted at the beginning of his speech that he cannot answer the question: “Would the Chinese government actually initiate war operations; would it go to war against Taiwan?” He noted that leaders of countries (such as Putin in the Ukraine or Bush in Iraq in 2003), “are quite capable of starting wars they cannot possibly win. That is true of Russians and Americans, and it’s even more true of China.”…