In late October 1975, as the United States sought to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and forge an entente with communist China, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger traveled to Beijing to meet face-to-face with an ailing Chairman Mao Zedong. At the time, Mao told Kissinger that China could wait 100 years to “unify” Taiwan if necessary: “if you were to send [Taiwan] back to me now, I would not want it, because it’s not wantable. There are a huge bunch of counter-revolutionaries there. A hundred years hence we will want it, and we are going to fight for it.”
Some fifty years later, President Xi Jinping is angling to accelerate Mao’s timeline. In 2013, he said the Taiwan issue “should not be passed down generation after generation.” Indeed, under Xi’s leadership, China has undertaken one of the largest peacetime military buildups in history—with a focus on amphibious, naval, and precision-strike capabilities tailor made for seizing Taiwan and denying U.S. and allied forces the ability to interdict Chinese forces in the region. And in 2023, then-CIA Director Bill Burns confirmed that Xi told the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.
Yet, as Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “those skilled in war subdue the enemy’s army without battle.” Brute force is just one of Xi’s options. Xi has also embraced grey zone tactics designed to test the mettle of Taiwan’s military, political leadership, civilian population, not to mention that of the United States. As the Australian Strategic Policy Institute concluded, “While more overt options, such as a full-scale invasion or naval blockade, remain possible, they carry significant risks that could threaten the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power. As long as Xi views these risks as credible, actions that could rapidly escalate to war are unlikely to be his preferred course.”
In an October interview with the Economist, Taiwan’s top naval commander described China’s coercion campaign as an “anaconda strategy,” with China aiming to “slowly, but surely” surround the island to constrict it. Others have described it as boiling a frog.
Last year, the PLA flew a record 3,075 flights into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ), up 81 percent from 2023. Maritime incursions have also increased, with China’s coast guard and navy now patrolling the island for days at a time, including on the eastern side, rehearsing blockades or maritime quarantines with remarkable speed. Chinese coast guard patrols have likewise conducted unilateral “inspections” of Taiwanese vessels and harassed Taiwanese fishing trawlers off the islands of Kinmen. At times, Chinese-flagged vessels have also severed undersea internet cables connecting to small Taiwanese islands off of the Chinese mainland. In 2024, Taiwanese government computer systems were subject to some 2.4 million cyberattacks per day, with most incidents attributable to Chinese hackers. In March, the PLA also debuted a fleet of three special barges, capable of forming a long, heavy duty landing bridge that could enable amphibious forces to make landfall on Taiwan in the event of war. Then, there are the non-military measures, such as a 2023 import ban on Taiwanese mangoes and fish, strict restrictions on cross-strait travel, and myriad diplomatic provocations.
Xi could order the PLA to enforce a total blockade of Taiwan—though blockades are considered an outright act of war. Rather than a formal blockade, Xi could direct Chinese forces to implement a maritime quarantine by deploying the China Coast Guard (CCG) to forcibly inspect inbound and outbound vessels from the island of Taiwan, and re-routing cargoes to mainland China. Last year, China rehearsed a maritime encirclement of Taiwan, and PLA and CCG vessels surrounded key chokepoints in less than 24 hours.
Such actions would lay bare Taiwan’s acute vulnerabilities as an island that imports 97 percent of its energy resources, 70 percent of its food supply, and generates over 100 percent of its GDP from trade. In a quarantine scenario, Xi’s likely goal would be to achieve swift and substantial political concessions from the Taiwanese government—such as a commitment to reunify and temper relations with the United States, restrict military activities, submit to Chinese customs enforcement, and other concessions.
One of the challenges is that China could make it difficult to differentiate between exercises and a potential kinetic escalation. It’s possible China could mount major exercises or rehearsals, test the waters with, for example, the interdiction of ships and, depending on how the United States and others responded, either stand down as the “exercise” ended or, if left unchallenged, continue to escalate. At what point would the United States feel compelled to intervene?
For the time being, Chinese bellicosity has failed to achieve its principal objective of convincing the Taiwanese people to embrace their ties to mainland China and elect dovish political leadership. Now, 67 percent of surveyed people in Taiwan identify as “primarily Taiwanese,” rather than “primarily Chinese”—a stark reversal from where polling stood in recent decades, when most residents of the island identified as Chinese or Taiwanese and Chinese. Recent polling also suggests the vast majority of Taiwanese would be willing to fight for the island in the event of a conflict with their communist neighbors.
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te and his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen, have ramped up defense spending, extended mandatory military service for military-aged males, and forged closer ties with the United States. Earlier this month, Taiwan wrapped up its 10-day Han Kuang military exercises—the largest and longest military drills it has ever held. But the island can only do so much to deter Beijing on its own, even if it adopts the so-called porcupine strategy of asymmetric warfare. As the military axiom goes, “quantity has a quality all of its own,” and Taiwan’s armed forces pale in comparison to China’s swelling military. As a recent CSIS wargame found, “the ‘Taiwan stands alone’ scenario resulted in a PLA victory. The outcome was never in doubt, with the PLA making slow but steady progress throughout the operation.” There is no escaping the inconvenient truth that external support, namely from the United States, is the lynchpin of Taiwan’s continued autonomy.
This raises the foremost strategic question for the second Trump administration’s foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific: can we continue to maintain deterrence in the Taiwan Strait?
The United States has long maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan, but strategic ambiguity is far from self-sustaining. It demands a credible threat of intervention, and the price of credibility is rising rapidly in line with China’s burgeoning military capabilities. While there isn’t any ambiguity about who the decisionmaker will be for the next four years, Trump’s desire to shoulder this burden is very much an open question. On one hand, he has appointed a number of China hawks to his administration, including Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Bridge Colby. He has escalated (and partially de-escalated) the trade conflict with China. His administration also resolved to speed up foreign military sales, a major pain point for Taiwan which has a $21 billion backlog of critical U.S. weapon systems, and even called on Congress to appropriate $1 billion for Taiwan’s self-defense this year. On the other hand, Trump is avowedly opposed to entering new wars and is eager to strike grand bargains. Would a grand bargain with Xi involve selling Taiwan down the river in exchange for trade or commercial concessions?
In recent months, Trump said Taiwan “stole” the U.S. chip industry; decried the country’s nearly $74 billion trade deficit in goods; threatened 32 percent tariffs on all Taiwanese imports (and a 25 percent tariff or higher on semiconductors); and demanded that Taiwan pay the United States more for its security. And while the foreign policy experts and both aisles of Congress remain staunch supporters of Taiwan, their views are increasingly at odds with U.S. public opinion. In recent surveys, only 36 percent of polled Americans support sending U.S. troops into harm’s way to break a Chinese blockade or repel a Chinese invasion of the island.
If there is any constant in foreign policy today, it’s that the status quo is more fragile than ever. When Mao told Kissinger the Taiwan question wouldn’t be resolved for a century, Kissinger was quick to retort, “it won’t take a hundred years. Much less.”
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