Mindful that The Art of War emphasizes the need for quick victory, Putin's fiasco in Ukraine will be of profound disappointment to the Chinese leader. Moreover, he will take a serious lesson from the failure of Russia's invasion.
Sun Tzu emphasizes the need not only to know one's enemy but to know oneself. At this point it is difficult to assess what motivates Xi Jinping respecting his ambitions for Taiwan. We think we know what motivated Putin respecting Ukraine. The most likely analysis of Xi Jinping is that he is a flat-out fully dedicated communist who has drunk the Kool-Aid and is ideologically and emotionally committed to seize Taiwan. If that is the case, it will make it more difficult for him to comply with the mandates of The Art of War which will tell him to avoid conflict when other means might suffice.
Xi Jjinping will survey the environment with respect to his ambitions to take over Taiwan. He will, of course, weigh the power of the Taiwanese themselves to defend their island and he will further consider the power of the United States to intervene. Certainly, he will consider whether Joe Biden has the stones to intervene and will come to conclusions concerning each of these factors. But this article is concerned about the impact of sanctions on the dollar as a reserve currency and this makes up a very serious part of the environment that Xi Jinping will not fail to consider.
If xi jinping applies the principles of The Art of War he will recognize that his best course now is not to invade but to appear to cooperate with Taiwan, the United States and world opinion. This is for the obvious reason that he would like to avoid the sanctions that would probably come in the wake of an invasion. More important, he will know that the sanctions imposed on Russia have a chance of crashing the dollar as the world currency. If that occurs the military power of the United States will be dramatically vitiated because America will sink into a Great Depression aggravated by inflation caused by doomed Keynesian attempts to spend to recovery.The battlefield environment would then be greatly altered in xi jinping's favor.
There is, however, a counter consideration fo xi jinping if he delays an invasion as he waits for Taiwan to virtually fall into his grasp. His own economy is in desperate trouble with the all-important real estate sector in effect bankrup and generating knock on effects for the rest of hi economy that, anyway, is now struggling with Covid lockdowns and supply chain blockages.
He may conclude that he is in foot race with America to see whose economy will suffer first. He may conclude that it is not in his interests at this point in his marathon contest over generations to eclipse America to sacrifices economy. He might conclude that if America loses the dollar as reserve currency, America will plunge into a deep recession which in turn will drag China down. He may think that the risk for China of a deep recession are worse than the advantages that it might provide in his generations long contest with America. He might conclude that the risk of internal unrest, the internal bogeyman of the Chinese government, is simply to grave an existential risk to court.
Indeed, is even possible for these reasons that Xi Jinping will pressure Putin to cut his losses and at least enter into some sort of armistice to begin to take sanctions off the table. A world of sanctions is not a healthy world for China, no matter how ineffective many of those sanctions when directed against China might be because China is winning so long as the world sleeps. Ukraine is waking the world up and that is not in China's interest.
Whatever scenario xi jinping chooses, it is possible that these events in Ukraine have in fact made an invasion of Taiwan less likely and might even have delayed one that was already scheduled. He may want to put the world back to sleep.
