Taiwan’s path to victory is unclear

Like few other countries, Taiwan faces a legitimate existential crisis. Beijing’s position that Taiwan must submit to absorption by the People’s Republic of China, even by force if necessary, is insistent and uncompromising. There is zero doubt this would result in the destruction of Taiwan’s democratic political system and liberal political culture. The Chinese government has already signaled that it would “re-educate” Taiwan and severely punish alleged “separatists” if it got its hands on the island. Even knowing that Taiwan’s people were watching, Beijing dismantled civil liberties and imposed harsh penalties for minor acts of dissent in Hong Kong. China backs its bad intentions with sobering capabilities, the results of a massive military buildup and increasingly sophisticated practice runs for a blockade or invasion. Taiwan’s problem is how to emerge from this predicament with a victory – with victory defined as an end to the threat of compulsory annexation by the PRC without Taiwan needing to sacrifice its freedoms or de facto sovereignty. The question is whether a path to victory exists. There are several possibilities. None is particularly promising. 1. Taiwan’s own efforts to deter the PRC Taiwan has made significant self-strengthening efforts, especially in recent years. Taipei has increased defense spending to about 3% of GDP this year, and President Lai Ching-te says it will rise to 5% by 2030. In 2025, the government reversed the trend of shrinking mandatory military service for young men by raising the commitment period from four months to one year. Training has improved with more opportunities to practice useful military skills, more realistic exercises and instruction in the operation of modern weapons such as drones and man-portable missiles. The government is implementing civil defense training to create a more robust whole-of-society response to a potential war. Despite these efforts, China’s military capabilities decisively overmatch Taiwan’s. An aphorism of military thought is that a successful attacker usually needs at least a three to one numerical advantage. China easily fulfills this requirement with active duty forces ten times larger than those of Taiwan, a 5,000 to 1,000 advantage in tanks, a 1,900 to 300 advantage in combat aircraft, and a navy larger than Taiwan’s by a factor of seven. The Chinese Coast Guard has ten times the number of large (over 1,000 tons) ships as its Taiwan counterpart, and the Chinese vessels are generally larger and better armed. China builds millions of drones per year; Taiwan hopes to increase production of drones to 1.2 million by 2030. China can also target Taiwan with thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles. The gap will only get larger. In the category of naval vessels, central to either a blockade or invasion attempt, China adds about 30 new vessels annually, Taiwan about three. Taiwan’s self-strengthening ensures that an attack would be costly to the PRC. Nevertheless, because of China’s huge advantages in numbers of platforms, weapons and troops, Taiwan probably could not by itself defeat a PRC blockade or an invasion attempt in which Beijing was willing to tolerate heavy losses. Therefore, there is no visible prospect of Taiwan’s war defense preparations intimidating Beijing into calling off its standing threat to use force to compel unification. 2. US military intervention Deterrence against China is much more robust, of course, if we factor in the strong likelihood of US military intervention in Taiwan’s defense. Note, however, that Beijing’s threat to use force against Taiwan goes back decades to a time when US forces enjoyed overwhelming superiority over the PLA in a cross-Strait war scenario. There is no reason the expect the Chinese to give up this threat now that the opposing forces are more evenly matched. Indeed, Beijing seems to be signaling that stronger gestures of US support for Taiwan will move China closer to opting for a military solution. After the visit of then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in 2022, the PLA began routinely crossing the Taiwan Strait median line while Chinese military and Coast Guard exercises became more frequent, more operationally realistic and geographically wider-ranging. Moreover, the durability of US support for Taiwan is in question. Previous US President Joe Biden said publicly four times he would send US forces to defend Taiwan if necessary. In contrast, current US President Donald Trump has said he would respond to a Chinese invasion attempt with economic sanctions, while opining on several occasions that Taiwan is indefensible. Trump has shown that a US president can talk about abandoning Taiwan without being forced to recant by either Congress or the US public. Retired Admiral Dennis Blair, former commander of US military forces in the Pacific, argues with authority in a recent Foreign Affairs article that US efforts are “reversing China’s relative military gains” and that eventually “Chinese leaders will recognize that conquering Taiwan is unrealistic.” Blair’s assessment, however, may be overly optimistic. He assumes the US still has an abundant arsenal of precision munitions, which was questionable even before the Iran war. He believes the Chinese expect that the American navy would retaliate by blocking China’s energy imports and freezing China out of the dollar-based international financial system. That is uncertain, and doesn’t account for China’s own ability to respond by inflicting pain on the US homefront through counter-responses such as all-out cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure and a cutoff of rare earth elements and other vital supplies to the US. Blair seems not to account for the additional seaborne lift capacity the PLA could call in by requisitioning China’s large fleet of civilian ferries. Finally, part of Blair’s plan for the defense of Taiwan involves US attacks against ports along the Chinese coast. But a US president is unlikely to take that step in the face of threats by Beijing to use nuclear weapons if the Americans bomb the Chinese homeland. Even in the calm of peacetime, PRC officials and scholars have opined that China’s “no first use” policy doesn’t not preclude nuclear retaliation against conventional strikes on Chinese territory. There seems little reason to hope that US support for Taiwan will cause Beijing to acknowledge that the threat to forcibly annex Taiwan is “unrealistic.” 3. Taiwan’s democratic political system Taiwan government officials and others have argued that democracy protects Taiwan. “Our best defensive weaponry is not submarines, PAC-3 or anti-submarine aircraft but, rather, our democracy,” then-President Chen Shui-bian argued in a 2007 interview. “In it lies the key to our survival.” There are two aspects to this argument. First, Taiwan’s forces might fight relatively better than their authoritarian enemies. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, authors of the 2002 book Democracies at War, contend that democracies usually (historically, 80 percent of the time) win the wars they fight because legitimacy and popular consent result in more motivated and effective military performance. Second, other democracies will defend Taiwan. The logic is that any win by the authoritarian bloc of countries over the democratic bloc makes all the remaining democracies less secure. Lai, for example, has pushed this argument, as he did during a May 2026 speech: “No democracy can afford to stand on the sidelines in the face of expanding authoritarianism. Only when democracies around the world stand together in unity can we build a more resilient line of defense for the free world.” The democracy-as-protection argument, however, is unpersuasive. Even if Taiwan’s forces fight better man-for-man, that advantage is overwhelmed by the PLA’s massive numerical superiority. And PRC troops are not without their own kind of motivation, based on hatred of “separatists” and pride in fulfilling China’s unification aspiration. The other democratic governments wish Taiwan well and increasingly call on China not to molest Taiwan. They could be counted on to make strong statements and perhaps levy temporary economic sanctions if China attacked Taiwan. Very few, however – probably only the US and Japan – would send substantial military assistance to Taiwan. Overall, then, the additional deterrence effect on China afforded by Taiwan’s membership in the fellowship of democracies is minor. 4. Taiwan’s importance to the international economy A cross-Strait war would substantially disrupt shipping traffic into and out of the ports on China’s east coast, including Shanghai, the world’s busiest container port. The possibility of an economic downturn, with the consequent high risk of domestic turmoil inside China, is therefore a major disincentive against the PRC starting a war over Taiwan. A particular vulnerability is that China, along with the rest of the world, relies on semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan. A cross-Strait war would obviously halt the delivery of chips. Hence the argument that Taiwan’s crucially important fabs represent a “silicon shield” that both prevent a Chinese attack and guarantee US military intervention. In the 1980s, some observers argued that since Hong Kong under British administration was a goose that laid golden eggs for China, Beijing would renew Britain’s lease over the New Territories when it expired in 1997. Instead, however, Beijing prioritized nationalism over economics, taking Hong Kong back and undermining its profitability by imposing a more PRC-like political and legal system. Beijing is not likely to call off the threat to use force against Taiwan just because war would be economically too costly. For the ruling regime, the political cost of admitting failure to achieve unification would be even greater. In the meantime, China is investing hundreds of billions of dollars to negate the “shield” by building up an alternative domestic semiconductor industry, including design and manufacturing. China will likely be the dominant global supplier of legacy semiconductors (not the most advanced, but more widely used) in the next few years. At the same time, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick argues that the danger of a cross-Strait war creates an unacceptable vulnerability for the US and global economies and that the solution is to transfer 40 percent of Taiwan’s chip production to the US. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has now committed to investing $265 billion into its new US-based fabs. The intention is not to make Taiwan more secure, but rather to make Taiwan’s security matter less to the US, reducing the US motivation to intervene in a cross-Strait war. 5. China’s domestic situation We can imagine possible conditions in China that might remove the threat of war against Taiwan. One is social turmoil, such as occurred during the most intense years of the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese foreign policy was only semi-functional. Another possibility is dramatically reduced economic strength, either due to sudden collapse or long-term deterioration. This could erode the government’s confidence in its ability to successfully prosecute a war, or sap public support for overseas adventurism. A change in the regime could cause a re-evaluation of major foreign policies. An ideal development would be the PRC government deciding to redefine its Taiwan narrative, so that the CCP’s prestige and legitimacy no longer depended on promising to force Taiwan into formal unification with the PRC. None of these developments, however, is visible on the horizon. Social turmoil is a wildcard. There are many discontented people in China, but the state has formidable tools to quell civil unrest. China’s economy is slowing to a more modest growth rate. But even if it fails to escape from the “middle income trap,” China still enjoys global economic centrality and unmatched manufacturing capability – including military-related production. Benevolently redefining the PRC-Taiwan relationship would require years of de-programming the Chinese public. Even a radical change of regime from Chinese Communist Party-led Leninism to a liberal democracy wouldn’t necessarily undo the Mainland’s aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Democracies such as Japan and South Korea (not to mention the US and Denmark) continue to have disputes about ownership over territory. So, much of Taiwan’s international existence involves “kicking the can down the road.” Unfortunately, the situation farther down the road does not look better. Taiwan is left hoping for a yet-to-be-discovered global development that will ease the pressure, but one over which Taiwan will have little if any control. Denny Roy is a senior research fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He can be reached at royd@EastWestCenter.org