How far will we let China advance in its ongoing war in the Indo-Pacific, as we ‘prepare’ for war over Taiwan?
How far will we let China advance in its ongoing war in the Indo-Pacific, as we ‘prepare’ for war over Taiwan?
A key driver of U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific is the set of security arrangements necessary to prevent the PRC from taking Taiwan by military force. The former commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Phil Davidson, helpfully defined in 2021 what he and Pentagon planners saw as a six-year timeframe (by 2027) that reflected Xi Jinping’s thinking about taking control of Taiwan. Davidson also warned that the U.S. should acknowledge Xi’s directives to his own planners about Taiwan as a critical step on the road to Xi’s objective “to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order” by 2050. Xi turns 72 this year. While he is unlikely to be in power in 2050, his legacy depends on this vision. That vision depends on Xi achieving the absorption of Taiwan before it is too late for him to accomplish.
Xi’s designs on Taiwan have become known in strategic planning circles as the “Davidson window,” and focused U.S. and allied planners on shortfalls in shipbuilding, weapons procurement, and the range of priorities that would be needed in the U.S., Taiwan, and our other allies in the region to counter Chinese ambition to displace the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific. But Beijing does not intend kinetic military confrontation if it can achieve its objectives without it. It isn’t clear that Xi has much confidence in his military leadership, which he has purged and continues to do — for corruption and incompetence, and to eliminate potential rivals. Xi knows that, as with all military conflict, a hot war with Taiwan would proceed quite differently than anyone can know (see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.) This also is contrary to Xi’s ideology, which is informed by traditional Chinese philosophers, including Sun Tzu, who argued, in effect, that armed conflict is for suckers; the last preference for achieving strategic objectives.
The subtle implication of Davidson’s assessment deserves more immediate attention than as a harbinger of armed conflict in the next couple of years. In fact, the battle that China intends to wage already has started. China is not “preparing” for war — it is now fighting the war it wants, on its own terms, as it clamps down on its objective. “All warfare,” Sun Tzu wrote, “is based on deception.” And there’s no greater deception than creating the impression of preparations for a shooting war but achieving the war’s desired objectives without firing a shot. That’s what Xi is after.
The U.S. and its allies also must shift away from the mindset of “preparing” for the real war and begin to face reality: the conflict is upon us. As Davidson noted, China is trying to deter the U.S.. The U.S., simply put, must make it clear that it will not be deterred. China’s goal is nothing less than control of the Indo-Pacific, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of global trade and is the most valuable aquatic real estate in the world. America’s own prosperity and security depend on the Indo-Pacific. Even with all of its serious internal challenges and its declining economic, social, and demographic fortunes, if the PRC can establish dominance there, it would control critical global access points —affecting shipping, supply chains, and much else — that would enable Beijing to impact the global order and global outcomes to a degree that was on par with the United States. The U.S. must use its full range of capabilities to prevent that from happening.
China wants to take control of Taiwan because doing so would cause reverberations that would help Beijing achieve the longer-term goal of Indo-Pacific dominance, even if that is never stated as the desired outcome. That program is well along, and it has many elements, including some from which the PRC has made significant gains already. This program includes:
Military build-up and aggressive power projection: The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is the world’s largest navy. The force includes aircraft carriers, submarines, and amphibious assault ships capable of power projection in the region. Beijing is flexing these capabilities throughout the Pacific, challenging freedom of navigation and harassing civilian shipping and the naval operations of the U.S., Australia, Philippines, and other nations as it seeks de facto control over contested waters in the region.
South China Sea militarization: China has transformed reefs and islands into military outposts with runways, missile batteries, and radar systems. This happened as the world stood by and watched, accepting Beijing’s false assurances over many years that it was not developing these land masses and that, even if it was, they were not intended for military purposes. It’s important to understand how China pulled this off, because it is the model for how it intends to achieve dominance over the region in general, and over Taiwan in particular. It is the game plan that Beijing used for its takeover of Hong Kong despite treaty agreements that precluded it: Deny, obfuscate, and gaslight to avoid and deter a reaction until the communist government has raised the costs of meaningful opposition beyond what the U.S. and like-minded countries are willing to bear.
Economic investment and coercion to attain strategic infrastructure: China has been funding infrastructure around the world, including ports and runways, to create a network of capabilities that will allow it to operate more freely in the region and beyond. Concern over this is behind the objection of the Trump administration to Panama’s allowing a Hong Kong–based company to operate ports on either end of the Panama Canal. That raised eyebrows when the deal was struck in 1997, as Hong Kong was operating independently from Beijing, given the terms of the U.K. handover agreement that went into effect that year, and was expected to endure 50 years. By the time the port contract was extended in 2021, Hong Kong had become a de facto province of the PRC. U.S. pressure has led to Panama’s decision to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a modest setback for a program China has used to expand its control of key infrastructure around the world. Debt diplomacy is at the core of the program, with China having taken control, or on track to do so, of facilities in Sri Lanka, the Horn of Africa, southeast Asia, and elsewhere, owing to the onerous financial terms that come with these agreements. This will continue as long as Beijing thinks it can, although the U.S. and allies having begun marshaling some effective resistance over the past several years.
Trade and investment pressure: China has been flexing its trade muscles to squeeze global supply chains, including semiconductors, batteries, shipping, and rare earth metals. This helps pressure countries to align with its interests.
Diplomatic and political influence: China is exploiting differences among the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) members to keep them divided and prevent coherent opposition to PRC territorial claims. Most countries in the organization want to maintain productive ties with both the U.S. and China, but the perceptions of China’s true aims in the region are uneven. Most are concerned — the fellow communist government in Vietnam is wary and maintains important relationships with the U.S., while Cambodia and Laos are in effect client states of the PRC. China exploits these differences to prevent ASEAN from serving as an effective diplomatic bulwark against its expansionist strategy. Even with stalwart U.S. allies in Japan, South Korea, and Australia, Beijing has been effective at exploiting internal political differences over how hard a line to take. That further complicates U.S. diplomacy in the region. The diplomatic work extends beyond the region. The Economist estimates that some 70 countries, including many in the Global South that have entered into a Belt and Road Initiative relationship with China, have made agreements with Beijing to support “‘all’ efforts by China to unify [Taiwan] with the mainland.” The implications of this are significant. China is challenging the sovereignty of other countries in the region, ramping up military activity throughout the Pacific, and using its diplomatic and economic influence to isolate and intimidate Taiwan. Now, 70 other countries in effect agree with China’s clear changes to the status quo. The PRC could impose a naval blockade on Taiwan, for instance, and there would be broad concurrence that Beijing has the right to do so.
Promoting an alternative international order: Beijing is the leader of an alternative architecture for global order. It includes Russia, Iran, many countries in Central Asia, and, to some degree, Brazil and India. China has invested in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS as explicit alternatives to the Western, U.S.-led international order. A core objective of these organizations is to gain general acceptance of Beijing’s vision for a China-centric Indo-Pacific.
Beijing has been clever over many years as it has built this engine of diplomatic, security, and trade and economic arrangements, creating multiple levers to pull on and gradually increase pressure across many fronts, dialing it up or down where the opportunities exist. Through a mix of military aggressiveness, grey zone tactics (e.g., declaring “sovereignty” over national waters around islands that it creates from nothing) and diplomatic maneuvering. The net effect, it hopes, will be to create a new reality — to slowly change the status quo, with no sudden moves — after which its absorption of Taiwan will be seen by the U.S. and its allies as an inevitable step not capable of being opposed. Just as happened with Hong Kong, where hardly an eye was batted.
It also seems likely that Beijing will dangle what appear to be significant concessions — a comprehensive bilateral trade agreement with the United States, for instance — that depend on a tacit or explicit arrangement about Taiwan that contravenes the existing declarations that have kept Taiwan free from Beijing’s control. This is the future that Xi Jinping is creating through his own version of a maximum pressure campaign designed to shift the world’s perceptions in ways large and small over time. Why should he doubt its continued effectiveness? China now has military bases on islands he insisted did not even exist a decade ago, while Hong Kong is integrated into China’s political and economic systems.
Absorbing Taiwan is an important objective for Beijing, but it will be the reverberations that emanate from the PRC absorbing the island without a hot war that will create the conditions key to China’s achievement of Indo-Pacific hegemony — in other words, winning the war it has chosen to fight, without a shot.
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There is only one possible outcome if China succeeds: Winner takes all, and loser pays. There should be no doubt that the U.S. would be the loser in this scenario, and we would be neutered in the region. Our alliances in Asia, with Japan and South Korea, with Australia, would collapse as those parties and others realized they had to accommodate Beijing. Why would they have confidence in U.S. security partnerships if the U.S. readily abandoned Taiwan?
In that scenario, China would in effect become a troll as in ancient folklore in the Indo-Pacific region, with a tribute to be paid to Beijing across the economic system. The world depends on this region for most trade and for the advanced semiconductor fabrication that serves the central nervous system of global markets and economies. Beijing also would dictate the terms for military alignments in the region, giving it space to continue to build its nuclear and conventional forces and, despite assertions to the contrary, to become a decisive voice in geopolitical matters around the world.
Other regions likely would be impacted if China becomes the global rule-setter for the Indo-Pacific. Regional alignments with the U.S. in the Middle East and Latin America would be impacted. Meanwhile, resource-rich African countries already are under Beijing’s sway, owing to heavy infrastructure and mineral investments. We would find ourselves in the multipolar world that China and its likeminded anti-Western countries believe they want, where the United States was no longer the unquestioned dominant power and was forced to accept a diminished role. The U.S. would be seen as a declining power. China’s victory in such a war would gut U.S. credibility in Asia, give China dominance in advanced semiconductor fabrication, embolden China’s expansionism, and fundamentally shift the balance of world power. If China sets the rules on the Indo-Pacific, other regions — the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America — would align with Beijing, seeing Washington as a declining power.
While that would likely be accompanied by the spread of techno-totalitarian copycats and the rise of anti-democratic forces, the real issue for the U.S. is the damage that would be done to the economy and to the markets on which we depend. During the pandemic of 2020–2021, the world realized the price to be paid for dependence on China for global supply chains. Reshoring, friend-shoring, and other shifts away from China, which already had begun, accelerated as companies around the world recognized the unhealthy dependency on a manufacturing source of questionable reliability. If China dominates the Indo-Pacific, with its 60 percent of global population and an even greater percentage of manufacturing, electronics, shipping, supply chains, ports control, and critical minerals processing, the sense of urgency to prevent this from happening becomes obvious. In this sequence of events, Taiwan’s self-governance becomes the linchpin to U.S. global economic stability. “For want of a nail . . .”
A strain of strategic analysis examines this period, compares it to the Cold War era, and assesses China’s intent by recalling the Soviet Union and its actions. That is understandable, given that we are in a conflict involving two nuclear powers with conventional power projection capabilities. There are parallels. As during the Cold War, there is an influence campaign underway by both powers, as they try to draw countries into their respective camps. Also, as in the prior era, there is a sense that China — as some felt about USSR in the 1960s and 1970s —is a rising source of global influence against a complacent United States. There was a time that U.S. analysts likewise believed that the Soviet Union was on the verge of an economic breakout driven by global energy machinations following the Arab–Israeli conflicts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many today believe that China is on the cusp of a similar economic breakout because of its perceived dominance in renewables and cheap Russian energy. (Dispelling that requires a separate analysis; see an earlier piece on it here.)
But we’re in a very different conflict today. First, China is embedded in the global economy and global markets in an almost intractable fashion; the Soviet bloc was an economic pariah with no meaningful commerce with the U.S. and the West. Second, the lines are not fixed: There’s nothing that approximates the inner-German border, the Berlin Wall, or the Iron Curtain, which separated East from West. China, in fact, seeks to change well established international lines, quite apart from its obvious intention to do that across the Taiwan Strait. Across the Indo-Pacific, Beijing already has made significant strategic gains. Cambodia and Laos are client states, with military bases hospitable to the People’s Liberation Army. The military government in Myanmar has few friends; China recently has reengaged with it after a much closer relationship with it in the early years of the 2000s. China has done so with an eye toward economic, military advantages for each side, including Chinese access to the Indian Ocean to bolster what Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Djibouti provide through agreement or outright Chinese ownership. Across the Indo-Pacific, China controls 14 port facilities. In the South Pacific, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tonga, Papua New Guina, Kiribati — all have entered into various agreements with Beijing, to allow it greater access and control.
In some respects, a better analogy than the Cold War may be the period between Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway. The United States was caught off guard in December 1941. We were preparing for war — tepidly, mostly rhetorically — while Japan was at war, but we didn’t believe it. This gave Japan in 1941, much like China today, a strategic-assessment advantage that required the U.S. to spend six long months to even begin to stem Japanese advances throughout the Pacific before its victory at Midway. The next three years were the painful, destructive road back to victory.
In recognizing that China is on the move and is already at war to achieve control of the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. must be much more aggressive than it has been. China does not want a shooting war, which it would see as a breakdown of its chosen strategy. Just the same, it is using its military in provocative ways. The U.S. and its allies should respond in kind by ramping up resistance to China in disputed waters and airspace. Such responses would include freedom of navigation operations and other shows of military force. On the economic and influence front, India has banned DeepSeek and TikTok; President Trump should be matching those moves. There’s no potential economic deal on trade or fentanyl that would make up for China’s encircling Taiwan through de facto control of disputed waters and deterring the U.S. and its allies from freedom of operation in the region.
We must accurately assess the moment in which we find ourselves so that the correct actions can follow. Alas, there is a strategic-assessment mismatch between China and the West. China’s conclusion: We are at war, and the objective is Indo-Pacific hegemony and dominance over two-thirds of the globe and more than half of global trade. The West’s assessment, as of now: We are preparing for war to prevent China from taking Taiwan. But it is time for us to acknowledge that the war has begun and to expand our horizon, because Taiwan is just the beginning.
The relationship governing U.S.–PRC–Taiwan agreements and understandings has been codified over the years by a series of diplomatic instruments that collectively are known as “the three communiques” and “the six assurances.” A detailed discussion of that just now is outside the scope of this analysis, but consistent with this parlance and shorthand, one might conclude that the actual situation we are in could be described as the War of Two Denials. Beijing is at war, but denies much of what it is doing to prosecute that war. The U.S. is preparing for war, denying that China is several steps ahead of us in what it already has achieved through non-kinetic means.
While no one saw it at the time, Midway was the beginning of the end of Japanese domination in the Pacific. The question we face today is: How far will we let China advance in its ongoing war for the Indo-Pacific, as we “prepare” for war over Taiwan? Or will the Trump administration convince the world that this is a “Midway moment,” reverse the trends we’re on, and ultimately prevail.