World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century

Alperovitch and Graff make clear how gravely they view Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s threat to Taiwan by beginning with a carefully drawn description of a hypothetical Chinese invasion of the island in the days immediately following the 2028 U.S. presidential election. A full-blown second Cold War is already underway, the authors believe, and Taiwan is as imminent a flash point as Berlin was before the Soviet construction of a wall through the city imposed a degree of stability. To avoid a globally catastrophic war or a bloodless Chinese seizure of Taiwan, Washington should be organizing its foreign policy through the narrow lens of how every decision affects its ability to deter Beijing, subordinating choices regarding Iran, North Korea, Russia, and everything else to this goal. In contrast to the Soviet Union and Berlin, neither of which were particularly important to the U.S. economy during the Cold War, China is embedded in the global economy and interdependent with the United States, and Taiwan dominates global semiconductor production, making American technological innovation and trade policy central weapons this time around. The U.S. strategy, according to the authors, should be “delay, delay, and delay,” buying time to strengthen Washington’s Asian alliances, to weaken China’s diplomatic position, and to allow Taiwan to build up its own military strength.