ALL human actions have unintended effects.
Some are minor and others, well they change the course of history.
The United States/Israeli war on Iran will undoubtedly have a ripple effect on world affairs for decades to come.
But one such unintended effect is that this war could very well determine the fate of Taiwan.
It seems overly dramatic to link the survival of Taiwan to a war raging more than 4 000 miles away.
It is not, it is prudence, the threat to Taiwan is not economic but military.
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Iran has enjoyed considerable success not only in targeting the Gulf nations, Israel but also US military assets in the region.
The most telling strikes have been those against the American air defence network; its radar and communication nodes.
This is a slap in the face of American military technology.
These prohibitively expensive, highly sophisticated systems are being take out by the very threat they were designed to counter.
Both high and low end Iranian missiles and drones are getting through and hitting their targets all throughout the theatre against some of the most potent air defence systems in the world.
This is the worst possible news for Taiwan.
China has invested heavily in its Anti-Access/Area-Denial (A2/AD) strategy as a counter to US military power.
This strategy is predicated on denying the US military access (A2) to the area around Taiwan and if they do access that operational area to deny them freedom of manoeuvre (AD).
As a result, China has built up a formidable arsenal of anti-ship ballistic missiles like the DF-21D and DF-26, hyper-sonic missiles, cruise missiles and AI enabled drones.
Most of these systems, if not all, can be launched from highly mobile wheeled launchers which have proved to be an impossible nut to crack ever since Desert Storm.
The biggest plus is that given the constraints of the Taiwan Straits, they can also be launched from mainland China with their launchers under an air defence umbrella.
It would be prudent to assume that all these systems will perform better than the Iranian systems by several orders of magnitude.
The Iran-Israeli/US War has in effect war-gamed for Beijing how to deny the US access to the Indo-Pacific theatre in the event of an invasion of Taiwan.
High-end American air defence radars, communication nodes, air bases, logistic hubs, troop concentrations are vulnerable to attack. Missiles and drones will get through.
In the eventuality of China launching them, this will be in massive numbers given the latter’s prodigious military-industrial capacity.
The Chinese must be rubbing their hands with glee at the events unfolding in the Gulf.
It must be kept in mind that in order to effect its A2/AD strategy, China does not need to decisively defeat the US, it only needs to raise the cost of American intervention to an unacceptable level.
American bases in Korea, Japan, Hawaii and perhaps even Australia can and will be hit, and hit hard causing casualties in the thousands.
Iran has by all accounts killed just seven US service members and yet there has been blowback.
It would be a brave American general or admiral who advises the White House to intervene militarily in the Taiwan Straits, it would be an incredibly foolish American president who decides to do so.
What the present conflict has done is perhaps seal Taiwan’s fate.
It has demonstrated, to both Beijing and Washington, that US military networks are not invulnerable.
Therefore, Taiwan will be invaded at some point should Beijing so chooses.
The cost of American intervention will be catastrophic and could very well be a Pyrrhic victory.
For the Taiwanese, it is perhaps time to make peace with Beijing or invest in serious asymmetric capabilities of their own.
American intervention has all but been taken off the board.
When Xi Jinping, the leader of China, meets his American counterpart Donald Trump next month, he can look him in the eye if he wants and tell him: “Taiwan will be ours!”