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It’s still before dawn when hundreds of Chinese missiles begin to rain down on Taiwan. Much of the self-governing island’s air and naval forces are obliterated in a matter of minutes. Chinese special forces storm the residence and offices of the Taiwanese president, executing the “decapitation strike” they’ve trained for years to carry out. Swarms of aircraft and drones pound Taiwanese defences, as up to 50,000 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) paratroopers descend on the island, attempting a blitz assault to capture landing zones for a helicopter-borne second wave before making a drive for the beaches.
Hundreds of thousands of PLA troops are about to make landfall in the largest amphibious operation since D-Day. The long-anticipated invasion of Taiwan has begun.
In Washington, the President is presented with an urgent and daunting decision. Extensive wargames have repeatedly indicated that Taiwan’s only hope for survival is for US military forces to intervene immediately and decisively, blasting much of the PLA invasion force out of the water while they are still exposed and vulnerable. Hesitation, they have learned, always leads to a grinding war of attrition that Taiwan is destined to lose. Indo-Pacific Command urges the President to unleash its “Hellscape” plan: using swarms of drones, anti-ship missiles, and attack submarines to temporarily turn the Taiwan Strait into a watery no man’s land, buying time for American reinforcements to arrive. But there is no way around the obvious reality: this will mean war between the world’s two largest nuclear-armed superpowers.
Moreover, the commanders of US air and space forces insist they be authorised to immediately attack China’s “kill chain”, the network of satellites, sensors, and command, communication, and control centres that allow long-range weapons to find and accurately hit targets. Both sides have a huge incentive to strike first, before the other does: leaving them effectively blinded. American military satellites, in particular, are invaluable, irreplaceable, and sitting ducks. The President knows his counterpart in Beijing is weighing up the same decision. But there’s a big problem: not only are many of these systems on the Chinese mainland, they’re often the same ones used to target nuclear weapons; destroying them could be interpreted as the prelude to nuclear attack — in which case the incentive becomes to “launch ‘em or lose ‘em”. The situation is already escalating out of control.
Meanwhile, China’s leader has already hesitated: he has declined to open his gambit with a Pearl Harbor-like attack on vulnerable US bases and carrier groups around the Pacific, hoping Washington may yet back down and surrender Taiwan without a fight. But he has resolved that if the US does intervene, he will immediately sign off on massive strikes against not only American forces but also the allied Japanese, South Korean, and Philippine ones as well. Russia and North Korea are awaiting a green light to play roles of their own. Suddenly, the world teeters on the edge of World War III.
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Though this scenario is fiction, for now, the chance of a major conflict over Taiwan in the not-so-distant future is real, and growing. Xi Jinping has declared in no uncertain terms that the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China is not only essential but the very “essence” of the leader’s epochal vision for the “great rejuvenation” — making China great again by reestablishing it as the world’s number one superpower. For Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, the island democracy of 24 million people is already their territory, separated from them only by Western imperial meddling. Its return to their control is non-negotiable. As Xi thundered in a major speech in 2022, “The wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Complete reunification of our country must be realised, and it can, without doubt, be realised.”
Xi has assigned specific dates to this goal. He has declared that reunification must be achieved no later than 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China, but has also named 2035 as the date when China’s rejuvenation should be “basically realised”. Given that in 2035 Xi will likely still be in power, albeit aged 82, and that retaking Taiwan would be the nationalistic triumph to cement his political legacy in China, this appears to be his real deadline. That makes him a man in a hurry, and so he has ordered China’s military to complete its modernisation programme and be ready to “fight and win” a major war over Taiwan with a peer competitor (like the United States) by 2027.
Still, Xi would clearly much prefer to take Taiwan without fighting, if at all possible. China faces numerous internal challenges — including a slowing economy, a demographic crisis, widespread corruption, and social instability. And Xi seems to have prioritised these issues over external threats (to limited success). More important, though, is the fact that war is always an inherently unpredictable and risky business, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated for analysts in Beijing. An invasion of Taiwan would be a risk of far greater magnitude, with the penalty for failure likely to be, at a minimum, the economic devastation of China, the political delegitimisation of the CCP regime, and the end of Xi Jinping.
There is another reason for Beijing’s hesitation. It has long believed that the United States and the broader West is in terminal decline, that time is thus on China’s side, and that it can simply wait until American power collapses of its own accord. As a recent Heritage Foundation report details, “observation and assessment of Western civilisational strength or decline helps to shape almost every aspect of China’s policies, both foreign and domestic”. And it has paid close attention to the West’s “culture war” in particular. Viewing progressive “Left-liberal ideas as profoundly corrosive and destabilising”, the CCP has concluded that “the West’s will and ability to put up a fight are degrading over time”, and that “if it remains on its present course, the West could even withdraw from the world stage, collapse, or split apart”. As long as China believes this, it has no logical reason to ever bother fighting the United States over Taiwan at all.
Yet this conclusion is precisely why we may now be entering a period of particular danger. Should Beijing assess that, under the Trump administration, America is successfully reversing its decline and entering an era of cultural, economic, technological, and military revitalisation, then its strategic calculus is liable to flip. Like Imperial Japan, which before Pearl Harbor became obsessed by the motto “if the sun is not rising, it is setting”, China might conclude that its window of opportunity could be lost. In that case, China’s incentives would suddenly invert: it would seem advantageous to attack sooner rather than later, before its relative strength vis-à-vis the United States declined.
This danger is accentuated by the fact that China currently has a number of significant advantages in a war over Taiwan. In fact, the United States has “had its ass handed to it for years” in most wargames, as David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defence, memorably put it. In particular, China possesses huge material advantages, including massive stockpiles of anti-ship missiles that can strike US surface ships from long range. Meanwhile America would run out of critical munitions within an estimated three to seven days and be unable to replace them, given that it currently takes its manufacturers nearly two years to produce a single cruise missile.
In general, a lack of domestic manufacturing capacity is the West’s most damning weakness when it comes to modern warfare. Even after three years of war in Ukraine, the United States and Europe combined still cannot match the capacity of Russia to manufacture basic munitions like artillery shells. Russia currently produces some three million shells per year, compared with 1.2 million by the US and EU together.
Unlike during the Second World War, today the United States is no arsenal of democracy. As it stands, were it to find itself in an extended war of attrition with China, an industrial titan which manufacturers a full 29% of the world’s goods, the US appears likely to find itself at a shocking disadvantage. For one thing, China maintains an astonishing 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US, as a leaked slide from an Office of Naval Intelligence briefing starkly exposed in 2023. China already possesses the world’s largest navy, with more than 370 vessels, compared with the US Navy’s 296.
All of which is to say that, if the CCP comes to believe that the Trump administration will succeed in its stated goal of revitalising America’s fortunes, then it may see the near future as the best time to challenge it over Taiwan. Although that is likely to begin with a series of intermediate steps designed to test US resolve, such as a blockade of the island, rather than a full-scale invasion, intentional or unintentional escalation is not out of the question.
The situation is not hopeless, however. The United States and Taiwan don’t need to be able to dominate China militarily to prevent a war; they merely need to make an attack on the island appear so exceptionally costly to China that it never dares pull the trigger. This is what Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, calls a “strategy of denial”, and it can be accomplished by focusing squarely on mass-producing and deploying asymmetric weapons such as drones, missiles, and sea mines to turn Taiwan into a veritable porcupine.
This plan is sensibly straightforward, yet still somehow manages to rankle much of Washington, including people within the conservative coalition. On the one hand, it offends the hawkish neoconservative remnant of the Republican Party, because, as Colby has explained, taking Taiwan’s defence seriously — along with the reality of China’s strength and America’s limits — will necessarily mean prioritising Asia, requiring allies in Europe and the Middle East to provide more for their own defence instead of attempting to police the entire world ourselves.
Moreover, a focused strategy of asymmetric denial would mean reorienting billions of defence dollars currently being wastefully spent on those items most beloved by defence contractors and lobbyists: flashy big-ticket machines, such as aircraft carriers — which also happen to already be militarily obsolete. Like the battleships of old, these weapons are relics of a more ostentatious age, kept alive by Congressional pork politics, not military necessity. Finally, the strategy flies in the face of the Republican old guard’s neoliberal free-trade and free-market pieties, given that it will require a concerted, state-backed industrial and trade policy designed to quickly maximise American domestic manufacturing and rein in insecure globe-spanning supply chains.
On the other hand, the idea of defending Taiwan also causes a portion of the more non-interventionist MAGA base to bristle. Why, they ask, should America ever waste its blood and treasure to fight for an island on the other side of the world? This is a good question, but it has a good answer.
The stakes of a conflict over Taiwan are of an entirely different category than any of the wars of choice the United States has involved itself in this century. Although little Taiwan is a democracy facing down an authoritarian great power, defending an abstract ideal like democracy is not the real reason for the United States to intervene over Taiwan. Rather, the blunt truth is that if the United States fails to protect Taiwan (as it has done since 1949), this would, more than any other geopolitical catastrophe, demolish our credibility as a security provider, conclusively mark the decisive moment China achieved hegemony as the world’s new dominant superpower, and lead to the rapid collapse of the web of alliances and institutions charitably known as the “liberal international order” and less charitably as the American Empire.
And while many on the populist Right, myself included, are deeply sceptical of America’s sprawling empire and the vast costs of maintaining it, its sudden collapse would have swift and devastating consequences for the American nation at home. For one thing, our economy today is utterly dependent on running both a massive trade deficit of imports and gargantuan federal debts. The former depends on the latter, and both are completely dependent on the US Dollar maintaining its “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s reserve currency — a status it retains essentially only because the United States is the world’s top dog. A clear victory by China over Taiwan would end that privilege, with the world quickly reordering itself for a Chinese century. In the defeated United States, the result would be a simultaneous debt, financial, and economic crisis of a magnitude that would make the Great Depression seem mild. Americans’ standard of living might never recover.
The case for defending Taiwan is, therefore, firmly a matter of America’s national interest, not idealism. And to do so would be to maintain peace through strength — to avoid war through deterrence — not to seek forever wars abroad. The Trump administration should be prepared to make that case. Moreover, in so doing it can point out that all the steps necessary (bringing industry home, disciplining defence procurement, restoring military competence, and pushing allies to do more for their own defence) are fully in line with a broader America First agenda. This rearmament would be a campaign of nation-building at home, not abroad.
Still, even if political unity on the issue can be achieved, the Taiwan problem promises to be among the most pressing and consequential challenges President Trump faces throughout his second term. Taiwan lies at the centre of the emerging new cold war between China and the United States, and the intensifying risk of that clash going hot is already reshaping the world. The looming spectre of war over the island marks the end of one era — decades of naïve “end of history” idealism, unthinking globalisation, and heedless military adventurism — and the beginning of a new age of renewed realism among nations. To deal with the next decade of acute peril, the United States will need to develop a new foreign policy to match, one that combines realism and resolve in equal measure.
Original article: UnHerd
