The Biden administration is trying to bolster Taiwan’s defense capabilities and international standing, hoping to delay or prevent the need for American military intervention. In Taiwan, China’s military provocations have bolstered political support for the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, who has sought to forge ties with countries increasingly wary of China. Such posturing, in turn, ignites more tensions. “Would the United States court death for Taiwan?” Teng Jianqun, a former Chinese navy captain, said in a recent interview on Chinese television.
Under the right conditions, others suggest, the People’s Liberation Army could prevail if it did. Some advisers and former officers in China argue that the United States no longer has the will to send forces if a war were to break out over Taiwan. The United States’ failures with the Covid-19 pandemic and its political upheavals have reinforced such views. Xi, hold the view that American power has faltered. When the Pentagon organized a war game in October 2020, an American “blue team” struggled against new Chinese weaponry in a simulated battle over Taiwan.Ĭhina now acts with increasing confidence, in part because many officials, including Mr. Until recently, the United States believed it could hold Chinese territorial ambitions in check, but the military superiority it long held may not be enough. Yet even if the recent flights into Taiwan’s self-declared air identification zone are intended merely as political pressure, not a prelude to war, China’s financial, political and military ascendancy has made preserving the island’s security a gravely complex endeavor. Xi said Saturday in Beijing that Taiwan independence “was a grave lurking threat to national rejuvenation.” China wanted peaceful unification, he said, but added: “Nobody should underestimate the staunch determination, firm will and powerful ability of the Chinese people to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”įew believe a war is imminent or foreordained, in part because the economic and diplomatic aftershocks would be staggering for China. Xi, who has set the stage to rule for a third term starting in 2022, could feel compelled to conquer Taiwan to crown his era in power.
“The Taiwan issue has ceased to be a sort of narrow, boutique issue, and it’s become a central theater - if not the central drama - in U.S.-China strategic competition,” said Evan Medeiros, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council.Ĭhina’s ambitious leader, Xi Jinping, now presides over what is arguably the country’s most potent military in history. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to call his counterpart in Beijing to assure otherwise. Those concerns, which could have been misread, prompted Gen. At one particularly tense moment, in October 2020, American intelligence reports detailed how Chinese leaders had become worried that President Trump was preparing an attack.