EXPERT INTERVIEWS — Last week, the Taiwan Strait landed back on the front pages for two very different reasons: China held a two-day, large-scale military exercise off the coast of Taiwan, simulating both an invasion and a naval blockade of the island. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported on what it said were the contents of a Pentagon memo suggesting a robust U.S. military commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese incursion.
In public comments made after the Post report, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the U.S. would ensure “robust, ready and credible deterrence” across the Taiwan Strait, and he called China an “aggressive and coercive” presence in the region.
China’s war games, meanwhile, included long-range live-fire drills that marked an escalation of such exercises and drew condemnation from G-7 nations over what they called “provocative” and “destabilizing” drills.
Questions about China’s intentions vis-a-vis Taiwan, its military capacity to act against the island, and the potential U.S. response are hardly new, but they are being asked again lately, given statements and actions from Beijing as well as rapid shifts in U.S. foreign policy.
Does the Trump administration's pivot away from strong support for Ukraine suggest that something similar may happen in terms of its support for Taiwan? Or is it more likely that the opposite is true – that as some U.S. officials have said, the U.S. should be focused more on resisting a China threat than any threats from Moscow?
Those are among the questions we put to two experts – Isaac Stone Fish, CEO and founder of Strategy Risks, and a long-time expert on China; and Lonnie Henley, a former intelligence officer and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Excerpts from the two interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: Could you put in perspective what we've seen with the recent China exercises in the waters and the skies near Taiwan?
Stone Fish: Drills are not unusual until they are. What Beijing has been doing steadily for the last several years is both raising the temperature around Taiwan, but also decreasing the steps it would have to take to mount an invasion. And so when you're doing drills and when you can try to normalize increased military presence around the island, it should therefore be easier to transform a drill into an attack.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to say when something like that might happen and whether or not that's Beijing's plan. But it's certainly a possibility and something that folks have to keep in mind.
The Cipher Brief: If Xi Jinping chooses the military option for reunification, as he calls it, with Taiwan, 2026 has been mentioned often as some kind of target date. Is that still the operative calendar, to the extent we can know it?
Stone Fish: Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan not when the military or China is ready, but when he thinks it makes the right sense for him. And that'll be tomorrow or in two weeks or in 2027 or in 2034 – or never. These things are devilishly difficult to predict.
The Cipher Brief: What might move the calendar up, if you will, from Beijing's standpoint?
Stone Fish: One of the things we do at Strategy Risks is track indications of a potential invasion. And some of these are prosaic, but important. Weather makes a very big deal when you're trying to launch an aquatic invasion, for example. So does domestic Chinese politics, which are very hard to read at the high level.
In terms of external dynamics, our view is that the more the U.S. shows support for Taiwan, the less likely China is to invade. And people misuse the word “provocative.” When then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan several years ago, I think that trip was the opposite of provocative because it showed U.S. resolve. It should make it less likely for China to invade, because the question that Beijing needs to answer about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is less some question of Chinese readiness and more whether the United States and Japan get involved in this war. It's a radically different war if it's just China versus Taiwan, or China versus South Korea, Japan, Philippines, and the United States.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s go to a view from Taipei, and this question about whether the U.S. gets involved. There’s an argument that says, there are a lot of people in Trump's national security world whose whole point about Ukraine is that we need to get out of there, because China is what matters and defending Taiwan matters. And then there are others who say, No, the U.S. just threw the Ukrainians under the bus to make deals with Vladimir Putin. And so what's to stop him from making deals with Xi Jinping that have the same impact in Taipei?
Stone Fish: With the caveat – again – that predictions are incredibly difficult, my view is the base case that the U.S. and China might make a deal. China doesn't necessarily believe the deal, so it pushes on Taiwan. Maybe it seizes Kinmen or Matsu. Maybe there's a massive cyber attack. Maybe more cables get severed. The U.S. doesn't respond forcefully, and China decides to invade and does so without much U.S. pushback, in say 2028. Japan gets involved, the Philippines perhaps get involved and the U.S. joins the war later.
Again, it’s hard to know how much history is a guide, but it took the U.S. several years to get into World War I and World War II as well. And I think we'll probably sit out the beginning of World War III until there's a new leader in the White House. I don't think President Trump wants to be a wartime president. He is arguably more anti-war than any U.S. president we've had since [Jimmy] Carter. If Beijing is trying to figure out what's the right time to invade, it's a pretty good one for them, unfortunately.
The Cipher Brief: The Washington Post reported on a Pentagon memo — they called it an “interim internal guidance memo” — which had been signed by the defense secretary, that called for the U.S. military to prioritize deterring a Chinese takeover of Taiwan. Your thoughts about that?
Stone Fish: I hope that's accurate and I hope that is what the U.S. government does. As we all know, war is a political decision, it's not a military decision. And the decision about whether or not to go to war with China if China invades Taiwan, frankly, probably depends on both President Trump and who he's listening to in that period.
It's very important for the U.S. DoD to prioritize deterring a Chinese invasion and weakening Chinese war-fighting capabilities, and working to stop U.S. companies supporting the PLA, which still happens with brazen regularity. Besides that, it is a question for President Trump.
The Cipher Brief: Since I asked you what might move the calendar forward, for a Chinese decision to actually invade, what might push it in the other direction? What might lower the flames a little?
Stone Fish: The honest answer to that question depends on relations between Xi Jinping and the other members of the Standing Committee, and the two vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. And we don't have access to that information. I would be surprised if anyone outside of a few hundred people in China has that access. I certainly hope our government does, but I do not know.
Japanese resolve is incredibly important. Japan has arguably a lot more to lose from Taiwan going to the mainland, because of the nearness between Taiwan and Ishigaki and Okinawa and other Japanese islands. Filipino resolve, I think, would help, if not just to distract from Taiwan and focus attention on the Philippines. And then a grand deal between China and the United States, that didn't involve the U.S. reducing its support.
The Cipher Brief: Can you help us understand the Chinese exercises that just happened?
Henley: You've got to consider them from two different perspectives. One is the long-term effort to build military capabilities to attack and conquer Taiwan if need be. And the other is political signaling to the leadership of Taiwan, to the United States and to other regional actors. The annual exercises near Taiwan for the last several years are the same kind of events that would be happening if there were conflict. These are things that the PLA forces train for on a regular basis.
The fact that they're doing these things is not unusual. The fact that they're doing them in the immediate vicinity of Taiwan, and with a lot of attendant public statements about how these are intended to force the Taiwan separatist forces to back down — that's a political event.
The one thing that is new since Nancy Pelosi's visit in 2022 is explicit reference to a blockade of Taiwan. They didn't talk about this in their public statements to justify their actions regarding Taiwan before. A blockade has always been part of the Chinese military preparations. It's a new part of Chinese political signaling in the last couple of years.
In order to invade Taiwan, China must seize control of the air and sea around Taiwan and control the information space. That requires keeping enemy forces out of the area. They also must stop the flow of material into Taiwan to help Taiwan defend itself. They've got to enforce a blockade. They might start off doing it, as they have publicly signaled, with a naval picket line to stop ships from coming through, along the lines of the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Royal Navy and Napoleonic Wars off the coast of France. This is the kind of thing that the U.S. Navy is confident that they could quickly defeat and penetrate quickly. That's not what would be decisive in terms of maintaining a blockade on Taiwan. What would be decisive, and what was also discussed in regard to the recent exercises, is firepower strikes on facilities in Taiwan and on ships trying to maneuver towards those facilities.
So the kind of blockade they've been exercising has been very useful for symbolic purposes. If there were an actual war, that kind of blockade might be happening in the first few days until U.S. forces engaged heavily. That component would not be decisive. What would be decisive is China's ability to seal Taiwan's ports and keep anybody out of them.
The Cipher Brief: Is China's recent military buildup actively building up the capacity to do that?
Henley: I think they're focusing on all components of a potential conflict. There are those who say that China would never actually invade Taiwan, to which I respond, they are continuing to build things that they need to invade Taiwan, and practice things they need to do so. Western observers may think that China would never invade; China doesn't seem to think that. China seems to think that invasion is certainly one of their options and, many would argue, their primary option for how to actually defeat Taiwan. The blockade has a disadvantage of being a long, slow process, whereas an invasion has the potential to be a quick, decisive action if they can pull it off.
Another thing that's been in the news is this new class of landing craft that basically is a floating pier that goes close to shore and anchors itself into the sea bottom and throws off bridge ramps in both directions. You can string several of them together to make an anchored pier that's a thousand meters out into the water. That's almost essential for a Taiwan invasion, because you can't get very much on the beach by conventional landing processes. The beaches along the west coast of Taiwan are very unsuitable for amphibious landing for the most part. This is one of many things that they've been working on to get forces across the beach and get material to support those forces in combat. They're a sign that the PLA is continuing to build the capabilities it needs, if it's ever called upon to invade.
The Cipher Brief: You mentioned how critical the U.S. response would be. Can you break down where the U.S. is in regards to Taiwan, and what Taiwan might be wanting from the U.S.?
Henley: It's no secret that getting U.S. forces ready for a potential conflict over Taiwan is a high U.S. military priority. We've been saying that publicly for many years now.
As for the mixed signals on Taiwan, we have for a long time tried to maintain a balancing act. We don't want China to ever decide that capturing Taiwan would be easy, so we want to do everything we can to deter China both in terms of our highly visible military capabilities that seek to make it impossible for them to win, and the demonstration of political will that we would in fact be there if China ever attempted an invasion of Taiwan. On the other hand, there is a longstanding concern that Taiwan would drag us into a conflict we don't want; it could be unwise actions on Taiwan's side that lead China to decide that it must attack.
There's a policy that's been much derided lately, but it still is in effect: strategic ambiguity. We don't want Taiwan to be confident that we would defend them, because then they might do something unwise. We don't want China to doubt that we would defend Taiwan because then they might do something that we prefer they not do. So we're trying to maintain a stable situation in the Taiwan Strait, and trying to vigorously deter China, without encouraging Taiwan to act in a way that would not be in our interest.
Then you have the parallel question: would we actually decide to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack? The last president was very clear on that. The current president has been less clear about the relative balance of relations with China versus relations with Taiwan. It doesn't seem to have risen to the top of this president's concerns; he's still focused on other issues like global tariffs, the Middle East, Ukraine.
I don't know whether there is some deal that China could offer President Trump that would lead him to decide not to defend Taiwan. I have no idea. That highlights how much influence one person has on that decision. If we manage things well, we'll never find out, because we'll never come to the point where there is a conflict.
That leads to another point that I emphasize frequently, which is that the most important aspect of preventing a conflict is not the pain that we could inflict on China. Deterrence through the threat of harm is as great as it can be already. The Chinese are already very well aware that a war with the United States over Taiwan would be devastating to China economically, politically, diplomatically, and would seriously endanger the Communist Party's grip on power. The Chinese are as deterred as they can be by the fact that a war over Taiwan would be devastatingly expensive to China.
They might do it anyway, if they decide they must and that a war is the only way they can ever regain control of Taiwan.
My advice to [U.S.] policymakers would be to continue to build the military force we need to win that conflict, continue to emphasize that the costs are simply unbearable to the Chinese, but reassure them that war is not their best or only option, and that they should pursue other means.
There are those who believe that once China is capable, they will inevitably attack. I'm not one of those. There's a very good possibility of continuing to avoid this war indefinitely. It's also a very good possibility that we could bring about this war within six months.
The Cipher Brief: What will you be looking for in the next few months, year or so?
Henley: [China] seems to think that things are going its way around the world, as the U.S. voluntarily steps back from global leadership and undermines its own array of military alliances that have been the backbone of American national security since the end of the Second World War. As the U.S. withdraws from the global trade system, that can only benefit China. So I think the Chinese see everything moving in their direction at the moment, which reinforces their confidence that in the long run they can get everything they want, including Taiwan, just because China becomes richer and stronger and more influential in the world system.
Given that China's views are relatively stable, then the thing to watch for is U.S. actions and U.S. statements. Are we going to do things and say things that cause Chinese leaders to question that conclusion, that cause Chinese leaders to believe that peaceful means cannot succeed, that war is the only possible route to reunification with Taiwan? So, the things I'm watching are not on the Chinese side, they're on the American.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
