On the menu today: This is the last Morning Jolt until next year — Friday, January 2, to be specific. The Chinese Navy is currently running its largest live-fire exercise ever, surrounding the island nation of Taiwan and simulating a blockade. President Trump assures us that nothing worries him and that he has “a great relationship with President Xi.” Meanwhile, our support for the Japanese government standing up against Chinese aggression is intermittent at best, and announcements of arms sales to Taiwan are not the same as actual delivery of weapons to Taiwan. Read on.
Troubling Times in Taiwan
The fact that the ships of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (yes, that’s the official name) have moved into positions to surround Taiwan, and are firing live rounds at imaginary targets, seems like the sort of thing that should get more attention than it is getting from a U.S. news cycle sleepwalking through the tail end of the holiday season.
China fired rockets into waters off Taiwan on Tuesday, showcased new assault ships and dismissed prospects of U.S. and allied intervention to block any future attack by Beijing to take control of the island in its most extensive war games to date.
As part of drills rehearsing a blockade, China’s Eastern Theatre Command conducted 10 hours of live-fire exercises, launching rockets into waters to the north and south of the democratically governed island.
Chinese naval and air force units also simulated strikes on maritime and aerial targets and carried out anti-submarine drills around the island, while state media released images touting Beijing’s technological and military superiority and its ability to take Taiwan by force if necessary.
The Chinese military unilaterally declared seven live-fire zones in the seas surrounding Taiwan, scheduled to remain in force until the evening.
Yes, it is just a “drill” that simulates the positioning of ships to enforce a blockade of the independent island nation. But almost every night, groups of Chinese military planes enter Taiwan’s air defense identification zone or cross the center line within the Taiwan Strait, deliberate provocations and probing missions that force Taiwanese military to scramble its own jets to prepare to intercept.
From May to November 2024, the number of planes involved in these flights increased by 300 percent. During this Chinese naval operation, the Chinese sent 130 warplanes and drones during the 24-hour period to “harass” Taiwan, with 90 of them crossing the Taiwan Strait’s median line and flying into Taiwanese airspace, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.
The whole point of constantly running “drills” that simulate aggressive and invasive military action is to get the opposition used to seeing it, and believing it is nothing more than another drill — until one day it isn’t.
Two days before Christmas, the Pentagon released its annual report to Congress on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China.” The report’s conclusions are grim, but unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the region:
The PLA continues to make steady progress toward its 2027 goals, whereby the PLA must be able to achieve “strategic decisive victory” over Taiwan, “strategic counterbalance” against the United States in the nuclear and other strategic domains, and “strategic deterrence and control” against other regional countries. In other words, China expects to be able to fight and win a war on Taiwan by the end of 2027.
In pursuit of these goals, the PLA continues to refine multiple military options to force Taiwan unification by brute force. Those options include, most dangerously, an amphibious invasion, firepower strike, and possibly a maritime blockade. Over 2024, the PLA tested essential components of these options, including through exercises to strike sea and land targets, strike U.S. forces in the Pacific, and block access to key ports. PLA strikes could potentially range up to 1500-2000 nautical miles from China. In sufficient volume, these strikes could seriously challenge and disrupt U.S. presence in or around a conflict in the Asia-Pacific region.
Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Zhang Xiaogang explicitly stated that the purpose of these exercises is to deter countries like the U.S. and its Pacific allies from intervening the day a Chinese blockade of Taiwan becomes real:
This exercise is a serious warning to the “Taiwan independence” separatist forces and external interference, and is a legitimate and necessary measure to safeguard national sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity. Recently, external forces have frequently crossed the line on the Taiwan issue, attempting to embolden the “Taiwan independence” separatist forces, exacerbate cross-strait confrontation, seriously damage China’s sovereignty and security, and severely undermine peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. The Lai Ching-te administration’s bottomless pandering to and reliance on external forces, arrogantly pursuing “independence” and provoking others, has become the root cause of disrupting the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and escalating tensions.
“Taiwan independence” is incompatible with peace across the Taiwan Strait. External forces that condone and support “Taiwan independence” will only bring disaster upon themselves and suffer the consequences. We urge relevant countries to abandon their illusions of “using Taiwan to contain China,” stop stirring up trouble on the Taiwan issue, and refrain from challenging China’s determination and will to safeguard its core interests. We solemnly warn the DPP authorities that their attempts to seek independence through external forces are doomed to failure, and that resisting reunification by force is a dead end.
When Chinese military officials say “external forces,” they mean us.
Yesterday, in Mar-a-Lago, President Trump held a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and he was asked about the Chinese exercises surrounding Taiwan:
Q: Mr. President, on China. So, China has been doing naval exercises basically to test encircling Taiwan. Can you explain to us what your knowledge is of that? What do you think about that? Have you had any discussions with China about that?
President Trump: Well, I have a great relationship with President Xi and he hasn’t told me anything about it. I certainly have seen it, but he hasn’t told me anything about it. And I don’t believe he’s going to be doing it.
Q: Does it worry you?
President Trump: No, nothing worries me, nothing.
Q: But you said where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right?
President Trump: Yeah.
Q: So if you’re in [Inaudible] — if you’re doing naval exercises and air exercises —
President Trump: Well, they’ve been doing naval exercises for 20 years in that area. Now, people take it a little bit differently, but in fact, larger than they’re doing right now. So we’ll see, but they’ve been — they’ve been doing that for 20, 25 years. Yeah.
When President Trump says he has “a great relationship with President Xi,” it may reflect that the topic of Taiwan never came up in their in-person meeting in early November, according to Trump. The two leaders also spoke by phone in late November; here is how the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs characterized the call:
President Xi outlined China’s principled position on the Taiwan question. He underscored that Taiwan’s return to China is an integral part of the post-war international order. China and the U.S. fought shoulder to shoulder against fascism and militarism. Given what is going on, it is even more important for us to jointly safeguard the victory of WWII.
President Trump noted that President Xi is a great leader. I very much enjoyed our meeting in Busan, and fully share your comments about the China-U.S. relationship.
Trump’s Truth Social post about the call did not mention Taiwan.
Trump’s “great relationship with President Xi” probably also reflects the fact that the U.S. government has made a lot of concessions in the past year, including on the issue of Chinese students in American universities and on the continued operation of TikTok on U.S. soil, despite an unenforced federal ban and a new deal that ensures the underlying algorithm will still be owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.
On December 3, the Financial Times reported that the Trump administration had “halted plans to impose sanctions on China’s Ministry of State Security over a massive cyber espionage campaign in order to avoid derailing the trade truce presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping struck in October.”
A keystone of the administration’s foreign policy is that it wants America’s allies to do more to defend themselves. Japan has increased its defense spending for twelve straight years and is on track to reach its 2 percent of GDP defense spending target two years ahead of schedule. (Keep in mind, Japan has the fourth- or fifth-largest economy in the world, depending upon who’s doing the calculations, so a percentage point of Japan’s $4.2 trillion GDP is considerably larger than a percentage point of GDP for almost any other country.)
Still, Japan’s efforts don’t seem to be generating much appreciation in the administration.
On November 7, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi responded to a question about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “If they use warships and that is accompanied with the use of force then, however you think about it, that could be a ‘survival-threatening situation.’ The government would judge how to respond based on all the information on the actual situation in specific individual cases,” she said.
To American ears, that sounds like a mundane statement, but the Chinese government and its state-run media reacted as if Takaichi had threatened to travel to Beijing and punch Xi in the nose. Chinese fighter jets’ brinkmanship toward Japan grew; in November, Japan’s Defense Ministry said that Chinese military fighter jets twice locked their radar on Japanese military aircraft over international waters southeast of Okinawa.
The more modest good news is that after two weeks of Chinese saber-rattling, U.S. Ambassador to Japan George Glass finally said, “I just want to say directly from the president and from myself and from the embassy for the prime minister, we have her back.”
The bad news is that’s just about all the Trump administration said about the ongoing dispute. On December 6, the Financial Times reported that Shigeo Yamada, Japan’s ambassador in Washington, has “asked the Trump administration to step up its public support for Tokyo.”
The better news is that on December 11, the U.S. finally joined Japan in sending a clearer message to Beijing through actions instead of words:
U.S. strategic bombers joined a fleet of Japanese fighter jets in a joint military exercise meant to demonstrate their military cooperation around Japan’s airspace, defense officials said Thursday, as tensions with China escalate.
The exercise showcasing joint Japanese-U.S. air power came a day after Chinese and Russian bombers flew together around western Japan, prompting Tokyo to scramble fighter jets, though there was no airspace violation. . . .
Two U.S. B-52 strategic bombers and three Japanese F-35 stealth fighter jets and three F-15 jets conducted their joint flight drills near Japan’s western airspace, above the waters between the country and South Korea, officials said.
Earlier this month, the U.S. also approved the largest-ever arms sale to Taiwan, $11 billion:
The sale covers eight items: the Taiwan Tactical Network and Team Awareness Kit; AH-1W helicopter spare and repair parts and related equipment; M109A7 self-propelled howitzers; the additional procurement of high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) and related equipment; the additional procurement of tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided (TOW) missiles; antiarmor UAV missile systems for the army; the Javelin missile system and related equipment; and Harpoon missile repair follow-on support and related equipment for the navy.
However, those of us who have been watching this issue for a long time know that the announcement of an arms sale and the actual delivery and deployment of those weapons can be years apart. As of November, the U.S. still hasn’t delivered $21.5 billion worth of weapons, parts, and ammunition, including F-16 Block 70/72 aircraft, AGM-154C Joint Standoff Weapons (JSOWs), and MK 48 torpedoes.
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t go to war with the army you have paid for; you go to war with the army that has actually been delivered and deployed.
The world, meanwhile, has chosen its side. The Taliban has had an easier time getting recognized as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan than the government of Taiwan has had in getting recognized as an independent nation.
ADDENDUM: Our John Puri: “In the year since the fire that destroyed 13,000 homes across Los Angeles County, precisely one house has been fully rebuilt and certified for occupancy.”