By: Jens Kastner
As with the unfolding of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, which pushed the Hong Kong uprising against Chinese rule out of the world’s top news headlines, the Ukraine war has in recent weeks been pushed from its two-year position at the top of the news cycle, first by Azerbaijan's one-day war in Nagorno-Karabakh and the flight of 100,000 refugees, Serbia's unprecedented military buildup at the Kosovo border and finally the Israel-Hamas war. That has ominous concerns for Taiwan, according to some scholars.
The chaotic global situation is raising their fears that if suddenly there were more difficult-to-correlate conflict outbursts occurring simultaneously in different parts of the world, it would make a good starting position for a Chinese move against Taiwan, a situation that other strategists doubt, however. The celebrity historian Niall Ferguson, for instance, in a recent opinion piece in the Sunday Times warned that “a war in the Middle East might be the next crisis in a cascade of conflict that has the potential to escalate to a Third World War, especially if China seizes the moment — perhaps as early as next year — to impose a blockade on Taiwan.”
That correlates with the fact that, as Rick Fisher, Senior Fellow on Asian Military Affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, points out, by the late 1990s the US had abandoned its Cold War strategy of being prepared to fight two wars simultaneously. Fisher told Asia Sentinel that consequently today the US would be hard pressed to fight one major war in Europe or Asia, let alone the Persian Gulf, the Golan Heights, the Baltics, and Poland or the Falkland Islands, not to mention the Taiwan Strait—wars that are made real by the China-Russia-North Korea-Iran Axis, with China directly responsible for North Korea's and Iran's capacity to make war…
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