Taiwan: Trump’s Most Dangerous Global Challenge

PLA amphibious landing drill. Photo: PLA.

It’s still before dawn when hundreds of Chinese missiles begin to rain down on Taiwan, striking airfields, radar arrays, anti-aircraft batteries, and communications centers temporarily silenced by cyber-attacks. Much of the self-governing island’s air and naval forces are obliterated in a matter of minutes. Pre-infiltrated Chinese special forces storm the residence and offices of the Taiwanese president, executing the “decapitation strike” they’ve trained for years to carry out. Soon swarms of aircraft and drones arrive to pound Taiwanese defenses 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 of this scenario have repeatedly indicated that Taiwan’s only hope for survival is for U.S. 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, in contrast, 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 to use 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 U.S. air and space forces insist they be authorized to immediately attack China’s “kill chain,” the network of satellites, sensors, and command, communication, and control centers that allow long-range weapons to find and accurately hit targets. Both sides have a huge incentive to strike these first, before the other does, leaving them blinded and unable to effectively return fire. American military satellites in particular are invaluable, irreplaceable, and sitting ducks. The President knows his counterpart in Beijing is weighing the same decision. But there’s a big problem: not only are many of these systems sitting on the Chinese mainland, they’re often the same ones used to target nuclear weapons; destroying them risks being interpreted as the prelude to nuclear attack – in which case the incentive becomes to “launch ‘em or lose ‘em.” The situation already seems to be escalating out of control.

Meanwhile China’s leader has already hesitated in one respect: he’s declined to open his gambit with a Pearl Harbor-like attack on vulnerable U.S. bases and carrier groups around the Pacific, hoping Washington may yet back down and surrender Taiwan without a fight. But he’s resolved that if the U.S. does intervene he will immediately sign off on massive strikes against not only U.S. forces but allied Japanese, South Korean, and Philippine ones as well. Russia and North Korea are awaiting a greenlight to play roles of their own. Suddenly, the world teeters on the edge of World War III.

A Moment of Particular Danger

This scenario remains a fiction, for now. Nonetheless, the chance of a major conflict over Taiwan in the not-so-distant future is very real, and growing. China’s leader 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 his epochal vision for his country’s “great rejuvenation” – making China great again by reestablishing it as the world’s No. 1 superpower. For Xi and the Chinese Communist Party the island democracy of 24 million people is already Chinese territory, separated from them only by Western imperial meddling, and 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 realized, and it can, without doubt, be realized.”

Importantly, Xi has assigned specific dates to this goal. He’s 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 realized.” Given that in 2035 Xi is likely to still be in power, albeit aged 82, and that retaking Taiwan would be the nationalistic triumph to forever cement his political legacy in China, this appears to be his real deadline. That makes him a man in a hurry, and so he’s ordered China’s military to complete its modernization program and be ready to “fight and win” a major war over Taiwan with a peer competitor (i.e. 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. So far Xi seems to have aimed to avoid any external conflicts while focusing on addressing these issues (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 helped demonstrate for Beijing. What Vladimir Putin evidently expected would be a quick “special operation” turned into a botched blitzkrieg and then a grinding war. 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 delegitimization of the CCP regime, and the end of Xi Jinping.

There is one more key 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 evidences in detail, “observation and assessment of Western civilizational strength or decline helps to shape almost every aspect of China’s policies, both foreign and domestic.” And it has payed close attention to the West’s “culture war” turmoil in particular. Viewing progressive “left-liberal ideas as profoundly corrosive and destabilizing,” 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 revitalization, 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 to overtake the United States and retake Taiwan could be lost without taking a decisive gamble. 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.

“We must liberate Taiwan”

We Are Not Prepared

This danger is accentuated by the fact that China would currently have 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 defense, memorably put it. In particular, China possesses huge material advantages, including massive stockpiles of anti-ship missiles that can strike U.S. surface ships from long range. Meanwhile the U.S. would run out of critical munitions within an estimated three to seven days and be unable to replace them, given that it currently takes U.S. manufactures 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, as the conflict in Ukraine has served to reveal. Even after three years of war, the United States and Europe combined still cannot match the capacity of Russia to manufacture basic munitions like artillery shells. Russia currently produces some 3 million shells per year, compared to 1.2 million by the U.S. and EU together, in part because regulatory and structural inefficiencies mean a single 155-millimeter shell costs as much as $6,000 to produce in the West compared to $600 for a comparable shell produced in Russia. Strikingly, the U.S. no longer even produces any of the TNT explosive needed to make basic munitions at home, having begun sourcing it from abroad instead – including choosing to contract it (before the war) from factories in eastern Ukraine.

Unlike in WWII, 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 percent of the world’s goods, the U.S. appears likely to find itself at a shocking disadvantage. For one thing, China maintains an astonishing 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States, 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 to the U.S. Navy’s 296.

All of which is to say that, if the CCP comes to believe that the Trump administration will actually succeed in its stated goal of revitalizing America’s fortunes then it may see the near future as the best time to challenge the United States over Taiwan. Although that is likely to begin with a series of intermediate steps designed to test U.S. resolve, such as a blockade of the island, rather than a full-scale invasion, intentional or unintentional escalation is not out of the question.

How to Defend Taiwan, and Why

The situation is not hopeless, however. The United States and Taiwan don’t need to be able to dominate China militarily in order to prevent a war; they merely need to make an attack on the island appear so exceptionally costly to China that it never dares to 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 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 defense seriously – along with the reality of China’s strength and America’s limits – will necessarily mean prioritizing Asia, rebalancing attention, resources, and military forces there over Europe and the Middle East, and requiring allies in those regions to provide more for their own defense instead of attempting to police the entire world ourselves.

Moreover, a focused strategy of asymmetric denial would mean reorienting billions of defense dollars currently being wastefully spent on those items most beloved by defense contractors and lobbyists: flashy big-ticket machines, such as aircraft carriers – which also happen to already be militarily obsolete due to precision weaponry. Like the battleships of old, these weapons are relics of a more ostentatious age, kept alive by Congressional pork politics rather than military necessity. Finally, the strategy flies in the face of the 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 maximize 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 understandably 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 does have 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, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Although little Taiwan is a democracy facing down an authoritarian great power, defending an abstract ideal like democracy is not the real reason the United States would intervene over Taiwan. Rather, the blunt truth is that if the United States fails to protect Taiwan (as it has effectively 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 skeptical 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 is today 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 U.S. 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 over Taiwan by China 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 doing so it can point out that all of the steps necessary (bringing industry home, disciplining defense procurement, restoring military competence, and pushing allies to do more for their own defense) are fully in line with a broader America First agenda. Such a campaign would be one 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 center 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 specter of war over the island marks the end of one era – decades of naïve “end of history” idealism, unthinking globalization, 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.

A version of this essay was also published by UnHerd.