Ukraine-Taiwan: How a weak domino theory could lead to disaster

“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences,” wrote sociologist W. I. Thomas. The aptly named Thomas theorem, formulated in the early 20th century, reflects one of the constant perils of statesmanship and is deeply salient to ongoing debates over Washington’s Ukraine strategy as the war drags into its twelfth month.

Sens. Lindsey Graham, Richard Blumenthal, and Sheldon Whitehouse traveled to Kyiv earlier in January to pledge continued U.S. support for Ukraine. "[Speaker] Kevin McCarthy said no blank checks. That makes sense to me. We're not asking for a blank check. I'm not,” said Graham. “I'm asking for military aid to accomplish the purpose of driving Russian invaders out of Ukraine. If Putin gets away with this, there goes Taiwan. If Putin's successful in Ukraine and is not prosecuted under international law, everything we said since World War II becomes a joke."

Not only the fate of Taiwan but the legitimacy of the entire postwar international system hinges on the outcome of the Ukraine war, contend some Western officials and politicians. The conflict “is not simply about the survival of Ukraine, it's also about US security & the future of democracy in the 21st Century,” former National Security Council official Alexander Vindman tweeted late last year. “Ukraine success warns-off future authoritarian aggression. While Russia's success manifests a world where large states prey on smaller states.”

What happens in Ukraine, the argument goes, is nothing less than a referendum on the viability of democracy across the world; the United States must therefore do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to support Kyiv’s cause.

This discourse of a global struggle for democracy has been a vehicle for cultivating bipartisan consensus around the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy — Republicans who may otherwise be skeptical of an entanglement in Eastern Europe are being wooed with the tempting proposition that aiding Ukraine means containing China against Taiwan. There is only one problem: it’s not true. The Ukraine-Taiwan analogy is both empirically baseless and conceptual flawed. It is a reboot of the ill-conceived Cold War-era domino theory and risks enabling similarly catastrophic blunders if not thoroughly dispelled. 

At its core, the analogy offers a causal mechanism for assessing outcomes and intent: we are told that Putin’s “success” in Ukraine will trigger a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Yet there is no evidence that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and senior CCP officials are guided by this kind of thinking, nor do they have any reason to be. One of the major Chinese considerations around a Taiwan invasion scenario is the balance of forces in the region. Current and prospective U.S. military aid to Taiwan, as well as the local presence of U.S. forces and their potential intervention, are already baked into Chinese calculations.

More U.S. aid for Kyiv does not mean more aid for Taipei or a more robust U.S. force posture in east Asia. Why should the CCP base its military plans on developments in a wholly unrelated theater thousands of miles away rather than simply going off the facts on the ground?

In fact, China’s risk-benefit analysis for a Taiwan contingency is entirely different from the circumstances leading up to the Ukraine war. The Biden administration explicitly and repeatedly stated in the run-up to the Russian invasion that it will not put boots on the ground in Ukraine and would instead seek to impose costs on Moscow through a combination of sanctions and military aid. This is in stark contrast to Washington’s long-held policy of strategic ambiguity, which holds that the U.S. may (or may not) intervene militarily to defend Taiwan from Chinese attack.

There is nothing preventing Washington from maintaining a credible deterrent on Taiwan, backed by the U.S. military’s consistent efforts to bolster its presence in the region, regardless of how the Ukraine conflict plays out over the coming year.

It is not only possible but necessary to pursue two separate sets of policy objectives with respect to Ukraine and Taiwan if for no other reason than because the underlying circumstances, from the balance of forces on the ground to the military and political variables at play, are different. It is possible to effectively signal a deterrent on Taiwan, as Washington has done for decades, without overcommitting in Ukraine on the baseless assumption that Xi is eagerly anticipating Russian control over, say, Bakhmut, Zaporizhzhia, or Odessa as some kind of green light to launch a completely unrelated war in a faraway part of the world.

The Kyiv-Taipei analogy appears to be driven less by concrete evidence or comparable military circumstance and more by loose aesthetic parallels. Russia and China are framed in tandem as adversaries in the broader global struggle between autocracy and democracy. This values-driven framework envisions an “autocratic camp,” as former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen put it, coordinating to harm the United States and its allies across the world. It attributes intent and predicts outcomes purely according to a regime's predetermined characteristics.

None of this is to suggest that China can never invade Taiwan, but it is to suggest that the decision to do so will not be based on how Russian forces are performing in Ukraine.

There is no intrinsic connection between what happens in Ukraine and what could happen to Taiwan. But if policymakers insist on imagining it, then the linkage would be real in its consequences, as the aforementioned Thomas theorem suggests. The result could very well be a revival of the same domino theory-inspired thinking that precipitated the Vietnam disaster. By tying its own hands with the misguided conviction that anything less than total Russian defeat will inevitably lead to Chinese warships crossing the Taiwan strait, Washington could find itself embroiled in a quagmire that would ironically make Taiwan less safe by strengthening China’s geopolitical hand and diverting military resources that could have gone to Taipei.

To be sure, there is an urgently vital discussion to be had around the war’s long-term effects on the Russia-China-U.S. strategic triangle and the concrete steps that can be taken to mitigate the ongoing emergence of a common eastern front against Washington and its allies. But the fixation on an illusory link between Ukraine and Taiwan obfuscates more about these two conflicts than it reveals and only serves to heighten the risk of serious miscalculation.