Where might conflict flare up in 2023?

By Dominic Ziegler: Banyan columnist, The Economist, Singapore

THE RECENT debate about whether a new cold war is playing out in Asia is beside the point. In 2023 rising tensions will underscore how for all the optimism in the early 1990s that the world was bending towards the West’s notions of an open, rules-based order, the original cold war never ended in the region. Just as Russia’s war in Ukraine proved that point definitively in Europe in 2022, the coming year will see the next iteration of a great global struggle between liberalism and autocracy play out in Asia.

Here, the contest is between the United States and China. Its roots go back decades, to the end of the second world war. The defeat of Japan in 1945 rendered America henceforth an Asian superpower. It let America project military force from the territory of its defeated opponent and shape events in the region. It also created, in Japan, a democratic outpost of the West. Today, the novelty is that a second superpower, communist China, vies for supremacy in Asia. But current tensions feed on old sources that spring from East Asia’s post-war turbulence.

The coming year will be the next iteration of a great global struggle in Asia

The chief example has to do with Taiwan. Viewed from Beijing, the island is the last, great unfinished piece of business in the civil war that the Communist Party won on the mainland in the late 1940s. The defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan, which has been backed by America ever since and is now a thriving democracy and a semiconductor superpower. Retaking Taiwan is, for the party, a sacred goal. For an assertive China, Taiwan is also key to projecting power throughout East Asia and out into the western Pacific.

As Chinese power has grown, so has its bellicosity towards Taiwan. President Joe Biden has stated several times that America would defend Taiwan if it were attacked. This change from a long-standing policy of keeping China guessing about America’s intentions worries some in Washington, who fear it might provoke China to act sooner rather than later.

Yet while the temperature around Taiwan will rise in 2023, it is unlikely to boil over into hot conflict. For one thing, President Xi Jinping, no reckless gambler like his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, needs time to proof China against the kind of sanctions and economic blockade that have crippled Russia. Accordingly, in the coming year China will instead test the mettle of America and its Asian allies in the South China Sea (most of which China claims and where it has built bases), and in the waters around Japan, which is ever more critical of China’s intentions. China is more likely to provoke a crisis around Japan’s disputed Senkaku islands (called the Diaoyu islands by China) than around Taiwan itself.

Another cold-war hangover is North Korea, a family-run nuclear thuggocracy protected by China. In 2022 its leader, Kim Jong Un, asserted the right to conduct a pre-emptive nuclear strike should North Korea feel threatened with attack. Before the end of 2023, and possibly much sooner, he will provoke condemnation by exploding a nuclear device, the state’s seventh test and the first since 2017. The device will be smaller than previous ones. Mr Kim will once again help underline the world’s paucity of options in the face of a despotic ruler, with China and Russia at his back, who is prepared to immiserate his people in favour of spending on a programme of nuclear blackmail.

A disputed border in the Himalayas has even older provenance and will provide another potential Asian flashpoint in 2023. The high-altitude dispute between China and India has its roots in the hazy frontiers drawn when Britain was India’s imperial power. A border war erupted in 1962, which India lost. In 2020 a bloody brawl left 24 soldiers from both sides dead. Neither country is itching for a fight. Mr Xi wants to concentrate on Taiwan, while Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, knows that, in the mountains, India is outgunned. But new roads on both sides risk eroding the buffer zones separating the two armies. Once-warm personal relations between the two leaders have grown frosty. It all raises risks in the hair-trigger Himalayas.

Meanwhile, conflict will continue in Myanmar. Since post-war independence, the country and its many ethnic groups have never fully been at peace. The cruelty and incompetence of the army, which seized power in a bloody coup in February 2021, will further fuel a sprawling conflict in which ethnic armies and the democratic opposition have teamed up against the junta. But the generals have the guns—and the backing of China. Neither it nor America wants Myanmar to be another cockpit of great-power competition. Even so, the country’s conflagration is likely to burn for years.■

Dominic Ziegler: Banyan columnist, The Economist, Singapore

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition of The World Ahead 2023 under the headline “Flashpoints to watch”