What It Will Take to Deter China in the Taiwan Strait

For half a century, peace has held in the Taiwan Strait. This has been due to a combination of creative diplomacy, military deterrence, and self-restraint on the part of China, Taiwan and the United States. But the factors that kept the peace in previous decades may not continue to do so in the future. The sources of instability are growing in one of the world’s most dangerous hot spots: diplomacy is fraying, deterrence is eroding, and China’s risk tolerance is increasing.

The most significant and destabilizing changes emanate from Beijing. Under President Xi Jinping, China is implementing a persistent and escalating campaign of coercion against Taiwan. Xi’s objective is to normalize threatening behavior and decisively shift the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait. In his ideal scenario, Taiwan accepts the inevitability of China’s rise and the United States’ decline and concludes that its future prosperity rests on ever closer ties to the mainland. If successful, such a strategy would allow China to compel unification without having to resort to a risky, unpredictable invasion or blockade. But even if this coercive campaign ultimately fails, Beijing will nonetheless find itself better positioned to pursue its aims through military force.

China is acting both opportunistically and, from its perspective, defensively. Public polling in Taiwan reveals a remarkable rise in inhabitants of the island identifying primarily as Taiwanese (as opposed to Chinese) and virtually no support for unification. The Taiwanese people, having seen China demolish the “one country, two systems” principle in Hong Kong, are increasingly skeptical of Beijing’s intentions and concerned about where further economic integration leads. China believes that Taiwan is slipping away, maybe permanently, and is attempting to halt this trajectory.

Beijing’s provocative actions to alter the status quo are making the Taiwan Strait more dangerous than ever. The United States needs to recognize that deterrence is weakening and that it must take additional steps to convince Xi that the use of force would be catastrophic. This will require willingness to accept greater friction with Beijing, adapting lessons from the Ukraine conflict to enhance Taiwan’s warfighting capabilities, and signaling Washington’s ability and resolve to intervene militarily on Taiwan’s behalf. There is no doubt that taking these steps, some of which the United States has avoided for decades, will be difficult. Continued drift, however, would be even more dangerous.

BRINKMANSHIP IN BEIJING

Under Xi, China has increasingly emphasized military power to shape cross-strait dynamics. This focus on hard power is pushing Taiwan away and making the prospect of peaceful unification more remote, increasing the likelihood that China will have to use force if it is determined to achieve unification.

Beijing is nonetheless turning to military power because it perceives an asymmetry of interests and risk tolerance with its rivals that it can manipulate to its advantage. China’s leaders have given the People’s Liberation Army wide latitude to conduct provocative military activities because they have calculated that Taiwan cannot risk responding and being perceived as the party triggering an incident. These senior Chinese leaders are also wagering that a more aggressive and unpredictable PLA can induce more caution from U.S. military forces. China’s growing spate of unsafe and unprofessional encounters with U.S. military ships and airplanes and its refusal to discuss guardrails or reopen senior military-to-military communications are critical components of a brinkmanship strategy to cow the United States into reducing military operations in strategic areas near Taiwan that China seeks to dominate.

Beijing has taken a series of steps to flex its military might in order to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. It first normalized incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, the airspace near the island in which Taiwan attempts to identify and control all aircraft. It then increased the number of violations: on any given day for the past three years, it is more likely than not that the Chinese military was operating in Taiwan’s ADIZ. These exercises have increased in sophistication and now include nuclear-capable bombers, fighter jets, antisubmarine warfare platforms, drones, and refueling aircraft. In launching these incursions, China aims to hone its operational capabilities, wear down Taiwan’s military, shrink the warning time if it chooses to initiate hostilities, and potentially disguise the opening salvo of a conflict as a routine exercise.

China is also erasing the de facto center line in the Taiwan Strait, which has served as an important demarcation to physically separate the Chinese and Taiwanese militaries. Both Beijing and Taipei honored the center line for decades, and it proved remarkably resilient even after cross-strait relations began deteriorating in 2016. Following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022, however, Beijing has consistently flouted the center line and even denied that it existed in the first place, increasing the risk of an incident.

China could unilaterally declare that it controls Taiwan’s territorial waters or airspace.

The Chinese military is now moving in an even more dangerous direction. It is conducting naval operations just outside Taiwan’s contiguous zone, the 24 nautical miles that extend from the island’s coastal baselines. Anywhere from three to eight Chinese naval vessels now routinely operate in the vicinity of this zone. This presence offers China’s military minimal gains in intelligence collection or operational readiness but highlights Taiwan’s—and, by extension, the United States’—inability to prevent the erosion of Taiwanese security.

China may soon also turn to “lawfare,” or the use of law as a gray zone tool of conflict, to further raise tensions in the Taiwan Strait. For example, it could unilaterally declare that it controls Taiwan’s territorial waters or airspace because, in its view, Taiwan is a part of China. This would then serve as a pretext for an even greater provocation, such as sailing ships inside Taiwan’s territorial waters or even flying military aircraft over the island. Doing so would force Taiwan to either ignore a blatant violation of its sovereignty or fire the first shot and risk being labeled as a provocateur. In another potential scenario, Beijing could require civilian vessels heading for Taiwan to submit to Chinese customs control on the grounds that it has jurisdiction over the waters and airspace surrounding Taiwan.

While China is pursuing a strategy of brinkmanship, the United States has been prioritizing the establishment of guardrails and open lines of communication. For Beijing, the U.S. focus on de-escalating tensions serves as evidence that China’s strategy is working. To be sure, Washington should demonstrate to its allies and partners that it seeks to responsibly manage U.S.-Chinese competition and put the onus on Beijing for not responding in kind. But in signaling its discomfort with friction, the United States is providing China with a source of leverage. As Washington seeks stability, Beijing portrays itself as unpredictable in order to create space to further tip the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait in its favor.

Counterintuitively, to forestall the risk of conflict, Washington will need to demonstrate that it is comfortable with greater tension in U.S.-Chinese relations. Xi is shifting the basis for his political legitimacy from providing economic growth to satisfying nationalist demands, and this change demands a more confrontational relationship with Washington. The United States must recognize and match this elevated level of risk tolerance to prevent the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait from tipping further in China’s favor. The objective should be to make clear to Xi that further provocations will set back China’s goal of unification and that seeking forced unification would be enormously costly and ultimately incompatible with Beijing’s other priorities.

SUPPORTING TAIWAN

The war in Ukraine offers lessons for Taiwan and the United States in reinforcing deterrence. Ukrainians have demonstrated that holding off a more powerful foe requires a whole-of-society approach. For Taiwan, the importance of civilian resistance and resilience is hard to overstate. For too long, Taipei focused on the combat capabilities of its active-duty force of less than 200,000 soldiers while neglecting to prepare its 23 million civilians to resist Chinese aggression.

Taipei has begun taking steps to remedy these shortcomings. It has extended mandatory military service from four months to one year, expanded its reserves, and begun to shore up its communications infrastructure. Civil society has also stepped in, with grassroots organizations providing training in conflict preparedness and first aid. But Taiwan remains extremely vulnerable. It relies on imported energy, food supplies, and medical equipment, and it is connected to the outside world by just 15 undersea Internet cables. Its military also does not have enough ammunition for wartime needs, and unlike in Ukraine, resupplying it during a conflict would be nearly impossible.

The United States should conduct a joint study with Taiwan of its munitions, ability to produce weapons during wartime, stockpile of essential goods, energy reserves, and communications infrastructure. They should seek to identify critical gaps and create a road map to address them. The objective should be to understand how long Taiwan could hold out against a Chinese invasion or blockade, to extend that time frame, and to ensure that operational plans accord with that reality.

The war in Ukraine also contains important lessons about the weapons that would be most effective during a conflict over Taiwan. Taipei has now witnessed the efficacy of many smaller, cheaper platforms, and will need to aggressively develop or acquire drones and mobile antiship and air defense missiles. Given the speed of modern warfare and the fact that China would seek to cut off Taiwan’s communications infrastructure at the outset of a conflict, Taiwan will also need to decentralize command and control, empowering lower-level military leaders to make operational decisions.

Washington must convince Beijing that it is willing and able to directly intervene on Taiwan’s behalf.

U.S. training of Taiwan’s military should also be as ambitious and comprehensive, if not more so, as its assistance to Ukraine’s armed forces from 2014 to 2022. This will mean inviting Taiwan to rotate more and larger units through U.S. facilities for training, including Taiwan’s military in multilateral exercises, and sending senior U.S. flag officers with relevant portfolios to visit the island. These last two methods of assistance constitute steps that the United States has largely eschewed with Taiwan for decades.

But the Ukraine analogy only goes so far. Indirect support may have been enough to prevent the Russian military from capturing most of Ukraine, but it would be unlikely to prevent China from gaining control of Taiwan. Instead, the United States must convince leaders in Beijing that it is willing and able to directly intervene on Taiwan’s behalf. The Department of Defense should make this clear to the PLA by prioritizing the capabilities most relevant for a conflict with China, including resilient command-and-control systems, stealth bombers, submarines, long-range missiles, and autonomous systems. The United States will also need to take steps to urgently restore its ailing defense industrial base. One way to do so would be to award multiyear contracts for munitions that would be critical in a fight over Taiwan.

Washington must also do more to leverage its strong network of alliances in the Indo-Pacific, which are its most notable advantage over Beijing. China might soon believe that it could fend off U.S. military power in the region, but contending with Australia, Japan, and potentially other countries as well would be a different matter. Preparing for a conflict in the Taiwan Strait should thus become a major priority for U.S. alliance relationships, in particular the U.S.-Japanese alliance and should drive force posture and bilateral operational planning and exercises.

BOLSTERING DETERRENCE

A full-blown conflict in the Taiwan Strait is neither imminent nor inevitable. Although the Chinese military is rapidly modernizing and preparing for a conflict over Taiwan, it is not yet ready or willing to go to war with the United States. The PLA is still several years away from achieving the capability to take Taiwan by force (assuming U.S. intervention), and Russia’s struggles in Ukraine have likely induced some short-term caution in Beijing. China’s increasingly aggressive maneuvers near U.S. and Taiwanese ships and aircraft should therefore not be seen as attempts to provide a pretext for escalation. Instead, they are designed to establish new norms to govern China’s claimed waters and to prompt the U.S. military to surrender the global commons inside the first island chain, which stretches from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. The United States cannot give in to this bullying, and should continue to operate where international law allows.

Although the United States should accept more risk to bolster deterrence and Taiwan’s defensive capabilities, it should avoid symbolic steps that accomplish neither of these goals. High-level U.S. officials should visit Taiwan when there is a compelling reason for doing so—but these visits should be the exception rather than the rule. Renaming Taiwan’s office in the United States, which a bill introduced in Congress in May would do, would not accomplish anything for U.S. interests. Most important, while some are calling for the United States to walk away from its “one China” policy, doing so is more likely to trigger a crisis than to head one off. Policymakers in Washington should continue to make clear that the United States opposes unilateral changes to the status quo, including from Taipei.

This is a demanding agenda. Avoiding war between the United States and China is relatively easy; doing so while also protecting the substantial U.S. interests at stake in the Taiwan Strait will be incredibly difficult. It will require the United States, Taiwan, and other partners to approach cross-strait dynamics with the same seriousness and conviction that China does. If they fail to do so, Taiwan—a close U.S. partner, an economy that plays a vital role in global supply chains, and a vibrant democracy located at a critical juncture in the Indo-Pacific—will be left to China’s whims. As Taiwan and China continue to drift apart, Beijing’s options for unification are shrinking. The United States and its partners must convince China that using force is not a solution.