Over the past several years, few topics in international relations have gotten more attention than a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And for good reason: China has never given up its claim to the island; it is in the middle of one of the largest military buildups in history; it conducts regular incursions into Taiwan’s airspace and maritime zones; and its president, Xi Jinping, has directed his military leadership to develop the capacity to conquer Taiwan by 2027 should he give the order to do so, according to senior U.S. government officials. For anyone skeptical that such an attack could take place in the twenty-first century, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a sharp reminder that major war over territory is not a thing of the past. Russian President Vladimir Putin seized what he thought was an opportunity to take back what he considered a wayward territory that was slipping away. Sooner or later, Xi could very well try to do the same.
Other factors have also contributed to growing anxiety about Taiwan’s future. Few doubt that China would try to use force to seize Taiwan militarily if it felt all other options to prevent permanent separation had been exhausted, but Beijing’s strong preference would be to take it over peacefully—with the island’s economy, technology, and human capital still intact. To achieve that goal, China is using a combination of relentless propaganda, infiltration, and military pressure to undercut U.S. support for Taiwan and to persuade Taiwan’s residents that they have little choice but to accept a political accommodation that recognizes Taiwan as part of China’s sovereign territory.
The past two months have produced growing concerns that Beijing is making progress on this front. Taiwan’s politicians have inflamed partisan divisions with rhetoric accusing one another of undermining Taiwan’s security, Taiwan’s ruling party pushed a failed “recall” of opposition members that deeply divided the population, and President Lai Ching-te’s popularity is collapsing. Taiwan’s dealings with the United States, meanwhile, have become trickier. The Trump administration has refused Lai’s routine transit through the United States, postponed efforts to reach a trade deal with Taiwan, halted some planned arms deliveries, and expressed harsh criticism about Taiwan’s defense spending. Washington has also loosened high-tech export controls on China, which suggests that President Donald Trump puts a higher priority on reaching a trade deal and improving relations with Beijing than on steadfast support for Taiwan. The pessimism about Taiwan’s future was best exemplified in August, when an article by a former Trump administration official went viral in Taiwan. It was called “How Taiwan Lost Trump.”
Concerns about Taiwan’s future are understandable—but they are also overblown. Unlike many other U.S. partners that are worried about their futures, Taiwan has valuable cards to play. It is far less divided internally than its rough-and-tumble politics might suggest, and its democracy and civil society are robust. It is also home to the world’s most advanced technologies, and its economy remains strong and resilient. Precisely because of those strengths, the island is finally making progress on the defense reforms and increased expenditures that will reduce its vulnerabilities to China even if U.S. support diminishes. If Taiwan plays those cards right, it can continue to prosper—and thwart Chinese military or political designs.
Prickly Situation
No one should underestimate the military threat Beijing poses to Taiwan, and few in Taiwan do. Especially since the summer of 2022, when then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, China has been establishing what experts call a “new normal” in the Taiwan Strait. This has included more frequent air and naval crossings over the centerline of the strait, multiple live-fire encirclement exercises to simulate a blockade scenario, unprecedented missile tests over the island, and regular intrusions of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. Meanwhile, and in large part to deter the United States from getting directly involved in a conflict over Taiwan, Beijing has acquired more hypersonic and antiship missiles as well as ballistic missiles, doubled its nuclear weapons inventory over the past five years, and dramatically increased the size and capability of its navy.
But Taiwan has not been standing still. Over the past several years, Taiwan’s political and military leadership has agreed to an asymmetric defensive strategy and aligned the Taiwanese military’s doctrine, force structure, and spending decisions around it. Largely gone are the days of overinvesting in expensive, high-end military capabilities to confront Chinese forces at the centerline of the Taiwan Strait. Now, Taiwan is concentrating resources on making the island the equivalent of a porcupine—prickly to touch and impossible to swallow. Taiwan’s defense innovations are also being turbocharged by lessons drawn from Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. This includes launching a whole-of-society resilience campaign, simulating realistic scenarios of Chinese military attacks in defense training, expanding public participation in civil defense, and simulating responses to cyberattacks and gray-zone threats. In 2022, Taiwan formed the All-Out Defense Mobilization Agency to better integrate reserve forces for defense. Taiwan’s defense leaders also are training and empowering field commanders to take initiative rather than wait for centralized directives.
Taiwan is retiring legacy systems, such as Cold War–era fighter jets and tanks, and instead deploying a variety of modern capabilities, such as HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems and NASAMS 3 air defense systems, which have been effective in Ukraine. American companies and Taiwanese entities also are pursuing novel new partnerships to marry American defense innovation with Taiwan’s world-class advanced manufacturing. Joint arms production is rapidly expanding. Advanced defense technology firms are working with Taiwan to expand the island’s access to cutting-edge capabilities, such as loitering munitions, sea mines, unmanned aerial systems, unmanned surface vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and electronic warfare and communications equipment. There also is consensus across Taiwan’s political spectrum to increase defense spending: Lai has pledged to lift defense spending to more than three percent of GDP next year and more than five percent by 2030.
Concerns about Taiwan’s future are understandable—but they are also overblown.
Taiwan must follow up on these pledges, and further reforms are needed, with more urgency, to consolidate its defense preparedness. But it is moving in the right direction.
The United States and its partners also have taken steps to thwart China’s military designs on Taiwan. In recent years, Washington has, for the first time, provided military aid to Taiwan by drawing directly from existing U.S. weapons stockpiles—a method previously reserved for urgent support to allies in active conflict. And it has authorized Taiwan for foreign military financing, which provides grants and loans so Taiwan can purchase American-made defense equipment. The United States and its partners—including Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam—are also advancing a “dispersal strategy” across the Pacific to support power projection from multiple sites, and the United States is pre-positioning munitions and other asymmetric capabilities at bases across the region to augment deterrence. Many of these regional partners are also building up their own advanced force projection capabilities and working more closely with Taipei on upholding freedom of navigation and maritime security.
Finally, for all Beijing’s formidable and growing military strength, it still confronts important internal challenges. Many of China’s top military officials have been purged during Xi’s third term on charges of corruption or disloyalty. As Jonathan Czin and John Culver have written in Foreign Affairs, Xi does not have the military he wants and does not seem to trust that the military he has would deliver on his directives.
A New Equilibrium
Taiwan is also better prepared for a Chinese infiltration campaign than many realize—including those in Beijing. China is devoting considerable resources to influence public opinion in Taiwan, including through cyberattacks, propaganda, acquisitions of Taiwanese media companies, and the use of social media platforms such as TikTok—all of which are designed to co-opt Taiwan residents with sympathies toward Beijing to promote eventual unification. China’s goal is to induce the people of Taiwan to conclude that resistance is futile and thus consent to unification. But there is little evidence that these efforts are working.
The reason is simple. Very few people in Taiwan are susceptible to Chinese propaganda. Even as they are divided along partisan lines, Taiwan’s public is unified and consistent in its strong opposition to communism and its desire to protect Taiwan’s sovereignty and democratic norms. In fact, the more aggressive Beijing has become toward Taiwan, the more Beijing has repelled rather than attracted the people of Taiwan. As Lev Nachman and Wei-Ting Yen wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Many of Beijing’s efforts to scare Taiwanese citizens invoke more cringe than panic.”
According to recent public opinion polls, over 90 percent of people in Taiwan feel either “Taiwanese” (63 percent) or “both Taiwanese and Chinese” (30 percent) as opposed to less than five percent who feel “Chinese.” The vast majority support upholding the cross-strait status quo, compared with less than eight percent who want unification with China “as soon as possible” (two percent) or even eventually (six percent), leaving Beijing little to work with. There is no doubt that Chinese efforts at infiltration combined with military pressure—such as cyberattacks or a naval blockade under the guise of customs enforcement—would be a major challenge to Taiwan, but such measures could just as easily foment hostility toward Beijing as weaken Taiwanese resolve.
The degree of polarization in Taiwanese politics can also be exaggerated. There are examples of troubling rhetoric, including Lai’s recent reference to hammering “impurities” out of Taiwan’s political system and an opposition politician’s comparison of some of Lai’s actions to “those of Nazi Germany.” But take a step back and Taiwan’s politics appear rather consensual on the big issues. None of Taiwan’s three main political parties—Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party, the opposition Kuomintang, and Taiwan People’s Party—support unification with Beijing. All are pro-democracy and anticommunist, all want to maintain ties with the United States, and none support immediate independence. The main distinction among the parties is over how best to preserve the cross-strait status quo, not whether to do so. The three parties agree on virtually all domestic issues, with the exceptions of nuclear energy and the death penalty. On most issues, their differences are more about personalities than ideology.
Compared with Taiwan’s past and other advanced democracies today, Taiwan’s politics are rather tame. Far from descending into deepening partisan divisions, Taiwan may be moving toward a new political equilibrium. Leaders of all three major parties acknowledge that they will need to compromise to move forward a special defense budget, which they all view as critical for Taiwan’s security. There also appears to be a cross-partisan consensus that now is not a time to test global tolerance for Taiwan’s independence but rather a moment to show Taiwan as a contributor to regional stability.
A Winning Hand
Given the stakes for Taiwan, which are nothing short of existential, complacency is not an option. To sustain its way of life in the face of China’s rapidly expanding national power, Taiwan’s leaders will need to act with urgency and shared purpose to shore up vulnerabilities. A path remains open for them to do so.
First and most important, Taiwan’s leaders will need to adequately resource their national defense and resilience. This will require compromise among leaders who prioritize raising compensation for career soldiers and extending the service of conscripts and those who favor fielding new military capabilities. Taiwan also will need to make additional investments in mobile strike weapons, such as mobile rocket launchers, man-portable air defense missiles, and air defense systems. Small, expendable unmanned systems and mines could add a critical layer of defense while redundant communication networks and hardened cybersecurity infrastructure will bolster resilience. Pre-positioning munitions, as well as stockpiles of energy, medical, and food supplies, also could help disabuse Chinese leaders of the notion that Taiwan can be taken quickly and cheaply. All these steps are not only critical to Taiwan’s ability to defend itself but also will help shield Taiwan from U.S. criticism that it is not pulling its own weight.
Taiwan also has an advantage that virtually every other American partner could only wish for: its economic strength, which can serve as the foundation for national security. By producing roughly 95 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips, Taiwan’s companies enjoy a monopoly position in the world economy. With the AI revolution taking off, Taiwan’s centrality to global markets will only grow. This gives Taiwan the fiscal space to steadily increase defense spending and present it as a win for Trump.
Given the existential stakes for Taiwan, complacency is not an option.
It also means leading companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company can make investments in the United States that the Trump administration wants without compromising its competitive position. Even with major investments in plants in Germany, Japan, and the United States, TSMC’s facilities in Taiwan still produce between 80 and 90 percent of the company’s total chip output. There simply is no alternative anywhere in the world to the leading-edge chips that Taiwan’s top companies produce. This means the United States will have an abiding interest in Taiwan’s security for many years to come, even if the traditional democratic underpinnings of the U.S.-Taiwanese relationship continue to weaken under Trump’s transactional presidency.
TSMC’s dominance of the global chip market creates a position of strength for Taiwan that other countries can only envy. When word got out that the Trump administration was thinking of demanding part ownership of technology companies that take U.S. subsidies (as it did for Intel), TSMC made clear it would rather forgo the subsidies than dilute its ownership—and Trump backed down. When the time comes to finalize a U.S.-Taiwanese trade and tariff deal, TSMC’s investments in the United States will provide leverage to Taiwan.
In short, by increasing defense spending, investing in the United States, and making a case that Taiwan is a steady partner in sustaining peace and stability in a key global hotspot, Taiwan has strong cards to play in managing relations with Trump. None of this, of course, provides a foolproof hedge against the risk of Trump making concessions on Taiwan in exchange for a trade deal or a better relationship with Xi. Successive Chinese leaders have sought and failed to get American leaders to take such a deal. Xi almost certainly will try to do so with Trump when they meet as planned this fall. He could ask Trump for commitments to reduce arms sales to Taiwan or to make clear officially that the United States opposes Taiwan’s independence and supports eventual unification—and Trump might be tempted to do so to get the deal he covets.
But even in this scenario, Taiwan still retains significant agency and ample resources to shape its own future. Taiwan faces serious threats from China, growing uncertainty from Washington, and internal divisions. But there is every reason to believe that its leaders and people are well placed, if they make the right choices, to ensure it continues to not just survive but thrive.
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