Conrad Black’s column on Free China this week gives a glimpse of his astounding fluency in military history. We’ve touched on this before. His home library includes something like 20,000 well-read books and, in cases of leaded glass, a collection of model warships, with whose history His Lordship regales visitors. His column this week warns of just how daunting an invasion of a highly defended island like Taiwan would be. 

It reminds us of an anecdote about Cuba from one of our favorite books, “Total Poker,” by David Spanier. It’s about how, during the Missile Crisis, President Kennedy was briefed by a Marine general named David Shoup. The general presented “an overlay of Cuba and placed it over the map of the United States,” Spanier wrote. JFK and his military brass were surprised to see “Cuba was not a small island along the lines of, say, Long Island at best.”

On the contrary, it spanned 800 miles, the distance from New York to Chicago. After letting that sink in, General Shoup “took another overlay, with a red dot, and placed it over the map of Cuba.” He explained: “That, gentlemen, represents the size of the island of Tarawa.” General Shoup had won a Medal of Honor there, Spanier reports. He told Kennedy “it took us three days and eighteen thousand Marines to take it.”

Just to mark the perspective, Tarawa is 800 yards wide and two miles long. Of the 18,000 Marines who appeared in arms there, 1,009 perished and 2,009 were wounded. The order of battle listed in Wikipedia also includes a total of 35,000 troops, five escort carriers, three old battleships, two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, 22 destroyers, two minesweepers, and 18 transports and landing ships.

Today’s Chinese party boss, Xi Xinping, has to know all this. His generals have to know it, too. Free China isn’t much more than a quarter the size of Cuba, but it’s more than a thousand times bigger than Tarawa. General Shoup’s point about Cuba — and Conrad Black’s about Taiwan — suggests that the People’s Liberation Army could be looking at catastrophic casualties should Beijing wheel on the Republic of China.

No wonder, Taipei has been, as the Financial Times reports,  “jolted into action” by the brazenness of Russia’s Ukraine war and “is now laser-focused on making the country more resilient to a Chinese attack.” America is urging a focus on “cheap and survivable weapons” like mobile missiles. Our own Marines are rewriting their strategies, partly to deal with Communist China’s emerging threat in the Pacific.

The Taiwanese government is proposing measures including boosting its military budget — currently 2 percent of GDP — and extending mandatory military service to a year from four months. Yet of Taiwan’s self-defense plans, an unnamed official tells the FT “our goal is to be ready between 2025 and 2027.” That raises concerns that “the Chinese Communists could think that striking earlier is better — before we and the US are ready.”

In that event, the wild card, as it were, is whether the American military would enter the fray. Mr. Biden’s remarks about defending Free China were seen by “senior officials in Taiwan,” the FT wrote, as “trying to deter Beijing by signaling more clearly it might have to fight the US, too.” Beijing’s foreign ministry was quick to respond, warning America not “to go down the wrong path,” or “the US will have to pay an unbearable price.”

Spanier would no doubt ask if Beijing — or Mr. Biden — is bluffing. He notes that General Shoup opposed invading, or even bombing, Cuba. He told Spanier “The Russians were bluffing. They didn’t want a world war over Cuba.” America “had all the cards in our hand” because of our larger “missile capacity.” Even so, “the U.S. was bluffing too, because we didn’t want a world war either. But we were bluffing with the best hand.” 

It’s not our intention to oversimplify the high-stakes geopolitical dynamics at play when diplomacy veers toward military confrontation. Yet at a time when China is launching a new aircraft carrier and expanding its military footprint globally and when America is shrinking the size of its navy, it hardly seems unreasonable to wonder who — between Messrs. Xi and Biden — holds the better hand.