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Trump’s strikes on Venezuela should raise alarms for the West emphasizes that the national security strategy a document recently released should be taken seriously by europe in a sense that it emphasizes or rather reiterates the importance of the western hemisphere for u.s military strategy and as a result it certainly what we are seeing in venezuela or what we have seen overnight.
certainly has implications in terms of security for both europe And Asia and how I would tie it into the whole China question that you mentioned at the beginning of your presentation is also a question of opportunity costs, right?
In a sense, does this weaken or strengthen U.S. deterrence vis-a-vis China? And that’s an open-ended question, in my opinion.
You all woke up this morning to find that Venezuela had a new leader, or at least had lost its old leader, spirited away apparently by the Americans.
I’ll be finding out a lot more about that in this forthcoming interview, which is because this is the programme which in 20 26, much as in last year, likes to keep you up to date on Armageddon and the possible means of avoiding it.
If Russia appears the main threat to the Western Europe at least, it may of course be China where our various new Cold Wars suddenly become unaccountably warmer, even if our government is reluctant to name China as a threat at all.
Certainly it’s China which occupies the thoughts of the United States, other than Venezuela of course.
Quite aside from trade, there are very fractious disputes over the independence of Taiwan, which China has been menacing recently, and China’s expansionism generally in the Pacific. It was thought that a war between the USA and China might be short and sharp, but my next guest challenges that hypothesis. Franz Stephan Gaddi is a military analyst who has advised both the US and other Western forces, and he believes it’s more likely to be a hybrid war of attrition, a scenario for which the USA is arguably ill-prepared and which runs the risk of escalation. Now, he joins me now. I’ve got to ask, though, before we get on to China, Franz Stephan, Remarkable what’s happened overnight in Venezuela.
What is Trump up to? It’s unclear at this stage. We don’t quite know what exactly the strategy behind all of this is. Is it the beginning of a regime change operation or is this really just a special operation forces raid aimed to capture the Venezuelan president, bring him back to the United States and have him stand trial on drug trafficking charges?
It’s unclear, but I do think it emphasizes that the national security strategy, a document recently released, should be taken seriously by Europe in a sense that it emphasizes or rather reiterates the importance of the Western Hemisphere for U.S. military strategy.
And as a result, certainly what we are seeing in Venezuela or what we have seen overnight certainly has implications in terms of security for both Europe And Asia, and how I would tie it into the whole China question that you mentioned at the beginning of your presentation is also a question of opportunity costs, right? In a sense, does this weaken or strengthen U.S. deterrence vis-a-vis China?
And that’s an open-ended question, in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, they don’t naturally fall together, Venezuela. I mean, one assumes that Cuba is within his crosshairs as well, somewhere further down the line.
Well, how you can combine, I would say, China and Venezuela is on the question that I also mentioned in my book regarding the availability of certain types of munitions for a potential war against China in East Asia.
And we don’t quite know how these strikes have happened, but if they have used precision munitions, long range strike capabilities, uh cruise missiles and so forth these would be the exact same weapon systems and munitions that you would use in a potential war against china and these types of munitions are in short supply and that’s also the reason why when the trump administration entered office at the beginning of last year actually temporarily suspended military aid to ukraine because there was big concern that it wouldn’t have enough munitions available for a potential conflict against china so this sort of contradicts i think in part at least what some of the China hawks within the US administration wanted to do.
China has been menacing Taiwan recently with naval exercises just off the coast of Taiwan and firing missiles over Taiwan as well.
The feeling is that at some point down the line there will be either an invasion or an assault upon Taiwan. Does the USA have the capability and indeed the willpower to do anything about that? So first off, I’m not positive whether China will actually use military means to coerce Taiwan into rejoining the People’s Republic of China, or at least become part of Red China.
So I think the verdict here is still out. What I do think is happening is a concerted effort by Xi Jinping under his reign to first and foremost solve the Taiwan issue while he’s still in power.
Whether that’s through peaceful means or military means, it’s unclear at this stage. To answer your question, does the United States have the capability to conduct a war against China over Taiwan?
In part, yes, at least for a couple of days, in my opinion. And that’s what I also outlined in the book. The reason for that is that the United States or US military doctrine still by and large focuses on rapid decisive military campaigns, that is rapid knockout blows against Chinese military targets. hitting command and control knots, hitting command posts, paralyzing essentially Chinese military leadership through cyber attacks, attacks in the electromagnetic spectrum and precision strikes, that is cruise missiles and other long-range precision munitions.
And I think what I outline in my book is essentially the predicament of the United States in that That is, on the one hand, the United States is probably not capable of conducting such a rapid, decisive military campaign successfully against China.
On the other hand, if it were to succeed, it could actually rapidly raise escalatory risk, so-called vertical escalatory risk. That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s the point you make in your book, which is that any such swift action, unless it was unfathomably successful immediately, would run the immediate risk of escalation, wouldn’t it?
Well, I mentioned 2 types of escalation. first off, vertical escalation, which in many ways is the more dangerous one, because this essentially means that there’s a potential that your conventional war could turn nuclear. And to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, nuclear weapons concentrate the mind, right? So I don’t think policymakers in Washington, D.C. or in Beijing would be ready to actually seriously engage with the possibility of a nuclear escalation.
And I think that in itself, this inability to really think through what it would be means to vertically escalate such a conflict already creates additional risks that such a nuclear exchange would actually happen. But there’s also horizontal escalation that is really the spreading of the conflict to other parts of East Asia. And that’s a real risk also that it’s not just going to be Taiwan, the United States and China, but that also Australia, Japan, the Korean Peninsula could potentially get involved in such a conflict.
And it will have direct consequences for Europe as well, because the Asian and European security uh fears are really interlinked with one another and if there is a war breaking out in East Asia that could also mean that Russia will try again to renew aggression not just against Ukraine but it also could probably test NATO at the same time that’s the reason why the US military works with a 2bore construct essentially so they need enough forces.
If war were to break out in East Asia, they need enough forces to also support the European theater of operations, a potential European theater of operations and vice versa. So I think in Europe, it would be a mistake to think that a war in East Asia involving the United States would not involve Europe. Thank you for that. That cheered me up no end.
I mean, the view at the moment is that Trump is very Western Hemisphere based in terms of where he thinks action should take place and dramatic action, as we’ve seen in Venezuela overnight. The Pacific, a little less so, even though it is, of course, part of America’s backdoor. Well, I wouldn’t say that. first of all, I would say that Trump is highly unpredictable. Secondly, I would say that if you look at the national security strategy, China still plays a fairly prominent role in it. And I do think there is an internal debate within the US administration about the role of China.
I think what we really need to understand when it comes to the United States under Donald Trump is that we can’t really think of the United States in singular when it comes to foreign policy and defense policy. I think you’re going to see the emergence or we have seen already the emergence of multiple centers of power within the US administration pursuing different policies.
And that I think makes it much more difficult to ascertain the future course of action of the United States. I think what I really In English, you say the United States is, right? In the past, up until the U.S. Civil War, you use plural for the United States the United States are right and I think we need to uh get a better understanding or we need to start thinking again in the United States in terms of plural rather than singular to get an understanding of where U.S foreign uh and defense policies uh in plural right are heading I think there’s going to be a lot of uh contradictory impulses within the Trump administration.
And whenever you have that, it creates uncertainty, obviously, in the international system, particularly since the United States is the most important country. But it’s going to be very difficult for European and Asian policymakers to really discern what’s happening.
And let’s see really what’s going to transpire in Venezuela, whether this is just a short and sharp military campaign. to essentially get the Venezuelan leader out? Or is this really the start of something larger? We just don’t know at this stage.
No, it’s interesting. I mean, you’re absolutely right, aren’t you, that there’s such divergent views within even the administration. I had a lunch 3 or 4 years ago with Mike Pompeo, whose entire conversation was based upon his shock at the level of Chinese penetration within the American system.
Post offices, I think he was talking about particularly as well, and that that was America’s number one foreign office priority. Yes, indeed. And I think we’re going to see much more of that. I mean, I think the strikes on Venezuela are just one case in point.
We’ll see whether there are any renewed tensions in East Asia. But I mean, for us Europeans, obviously, Ukraine is the most prominent example where U.S. policy is somewhat contradictory on the one hand. the trump administration has made clear that it’s not interested in helping ukraine attain a victory over russia and ukraine for multiple reasons on the other hand it’s also not going to drop ukraine at least not right away it wants europe to assume responsibility for ukraine but at the same time it also wants to lead discussions or peace negotiations and then on the other hand if we look at asia Here the United States emphasizes its old network of alliances with Japan.
Certain elements within the Pentagon have emphasized that they want Japan to do much more in terms of military spending. But on the other hand, there’s also this idea behind U.S. policy regarding a grand bargaining, economic bargaining with China at the expense of Taiwan, or at least they would be willing potentially to sacrifice Taiwan at the expense of such a grand economic bargaining, a new trade agreement or something like that.
So it’s very difficult for the Taiwanese actually to really know what would happen in the event of a conflict.
And I think all of this together really weakens deterrence vis-a-vis China. That is, U.S. deterrence vis-a-vis China when it comes to the Taiwan question.
So I do think all of this actually paradoxically increases the chances of a military confrontation in East Asia rather than lowering it, despite the United States and China potentially getting closer on some economic issues.