The Loneliest Island

In late December 2025, China capped another year of intensifying pressure on Taiwan with a round of large-scale military exercises. Dubbed “Justice Mission 2025,” China launched over a hundred air sorties, deployed amphibious assault ships off Taiwan’s east coast, and fired live rockets into the seas north and southwest of the island. This exercise almost completely encircled Taiwan, significantly disrupting the island’s international and domestic air traffic.

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China has continued to test Taiwan’s defenses on a daily basis. In 2025, it intruded into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (an early warning buffer around the island’s airspace) an average of about 314 times per month, which was an increase of over 22 percent compared with 2024. The Chinese navy, too, maintained at least 190 vessels operating around the island monthly. After a brief and unexplained drop in early 2026, air and naval activities have been escalating again. And in June, Chinese ships inspected nearly 200 vessels passing Taiwan’s east coast—a move that Beijing claimed was part of a special law enforcement and traffic control operation but that outside observers saw as a quasi quarantine, rehearsing China’s ability to control the seas around Taiwan.

Between now and 2028, when Taiwan holds its next presidential election, Beijing is likely to further escalate its pressure. China may use more of these “gray zone” tactics—measures such as air incursions, naval harassment, or information operations that seek to coerce Taiwan but fall short of triggering armed conflict—to influence the election results. Beijing wants to unseat the current Taiwanese president, Lai Ching-te, whom Chinese leaders vehemently oppose because they see him as pro-independence, and hurt Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party in both the November 2026 local elections and the January 2028 national elections. So far, the United States and Taiwan have not reduced China’s ability and willingness to engage in gray-zone operations.

In Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War With China, the scholar of U.S.-Chinese competition Eyck Freymann points out that the problem of deterring China is most acute when it comes to gray-zone tactics. There is less appetite to respond to military exercises or economic sanctions that gradually ratchet up pressure compared with more visible and consequential actions such as a blockade or an invasion of the island. But not responding is dangerous. It allows Beijing to incrementally change the status quo in its favor without incurring major costs—and could make it possible for China to seize Taiwan through coercion alone.

Freymann’s timely and important book offers detailed recommendations for how Washington can promote political and economic deterrence in addition to strengthening military capabilities. He argues that as China changes the status quo in one direction, the United States needs to push back with proportional measures while maintaining its conventional power to ensure it could defeat China in the event of a conflict. But the question underlying Freymann’s proposals—and Washington’s existing Taiwan strategy—is whether U.S. policymakers are truly willing to escalate and bear the costs needed to defend Taiwan.

SALAMI SLICING

China’s leaders are working to increase military readiness. All political and military indications suggest that Chinese leader Xi Jinping is pushing his military to modernize as fast as possible. Xi has likely purged more than 100 senior officials in the People’s Liberation Army since 2022, including two of its top generals, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, in January 2026; many analysts believe Xi got rid of them because he felt they were not pushing hard enough to make the PLA capable of invading Taiwan by 2027.

Freymann outlines the growing array of options Beijing can use to pressure Taiwan. In addition to an outright invasion, China could impose a quarantine, in which it uses customs enforcement as an excuse to control Taiwan’s international trade. It could mobilize its military forces in a coercive show of strength, raising questions in Taipei as to whether Beijing would attack. Or it could blockade the island, basically attempting to starve Taiwan until it caves. There are other means that Freymann doesn’t detail, such as a Chinese missile strike aimed at destroying political and military targets in Taiwan—an idea that Beijing seriously considered in 2008 as a standalone attack to punish Taiwan for a proposed referendum on joining the United Nations.

Gray-zone tactics present Washington and Taipei with a thorny challenge. Some, such as China’s intrusions into Taiwanese airspace and maritime zones, are daily occurrences. Other, more coordinated efforts can be scaled up or down depending on how the United States and Taiwan respond. China has repeatedly launched multiday military exercises around Taiwan, for instance, which Beijing could transition into an actual attack to punish or seize the island. And as China expands its gray-zone tactics, it is improving its ability to quickly ramp up military force against Taiwan, which could outpace the United States’ ability to mobilize support to defend the island.

In each of these scenarios, however, the dynamics that the United States might face would likely be more complicated than what Freymann describes. He draws on the failed Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948, for instance, to showcase how the United States could deal with a Chinese quarantine of Taiwan. Washington tested Soviet willingness to shoot down or collide with U.S. aircraft that were delivering aid to Berlin; Moscow backed down because it did not want to risk nuclear war. Although he recognizes that it would be harder to resupply Taiwan than Berlin, Freymann suggests that the United States should put a similar onus of escalation on China. The United States could airlift advanced weapons to Taiwan, which would force Beijing to risk trying to intercept or shoot down American planes. But Beijing could also force Washington’s hand: because supplying an island as large as Taiwan requires moving goods by sea, China could use its large maritime militia and its fishing fleet to block U.S. vessels. The United States would then be confronted with the choice of forcing its way past Chinese ships (potentially injuring or killing Chinese citizens) or not resupplying the island.

HOW TO PUSH BACK

The key question for U.S. policymakers is how to most effectively deter China from any of these actions. Military deterrence, long the Pentagon’s priority, is the most important foundation of U.S. efforts to oppose Chinese aggression. It requires showing that the United States and its allies could defeat China in a combined air and naval war and deny a Chinese amphibious landing on Taiwan. The United States has long relied on “strategic ambiguity,” in which it keeps Beijing guessing about the depth of the U.S. commitment to Taiwan so that China must assume maximal U.S. intervention. But this policy is increasingly difficult to maintain. “The more the military balance tips in Beijing’s favor,” Freymann notes, “the more Beijing may be tempted to call the bluff” and test Washington’s implicit willingness to defend Taiwan.

Military deterrence is more than just the conventional balance of power. Strategic capabilities, such as nuclear weapons, outer space–based systems, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, also matter. Given China’s rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal, Freymann believes that Washington must modernize its own nuclear weapons and “prepare for potential nuclear brinkmanship over Taiwan.” Chinese military leaders, for their part, have in the past threatened to use nuclear weapons and questioned whether the United States is willing to trade Los Angeles for Taipei. But it is unclear how close to the nuclear brink U.S. leaders may be willing to go in defending Taiwan, especially because many Americans cannot even locate the island on a map.

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Freymann’s most interesting proposals are in the realms of political and economic deterrence. He suggests moving from strategic ambiguity to what he calls “structured ambiguity,” in which the United States recalibrates its policies to push back against China when Beijing uses gray-zone tactics. Structured ambiguity is similar to strategic ambiguity in that it is centered on the United States’ maintaining its one-China policy and refraining from offering explicit security guarantees to Taiwan. But structured ambiguity involves responding to Chinese coercion: the United States would impose proportional costs on China each time it seeks to revise the status quo. If China were to conduct a large-scale military exercise, for example, Washington could deepen military cooperation or strengthen diplomatic ties with Taipei. This echoes a position held by many China hands in the first Trump administration who wanted Washington to show Beijing that there would be a cost to changing the status quo. But U.S. policymakers have generally been reluctant to push back harder because such actions could further escalate tensions.

Strategic ambiguity is increasingly difficult to maintain.

The United States also has a powerful set of economic tools, including sanctions, export controls, investment screening, supply chain diversification, and tariffs, to deter China. In the past, Washington has imposed sanctions on energy, finance, and arms to isolate adversaries such as Iran, North Korea, and Russia. But the size and centrality of China to the global economy would make any attempt to sanction Beijing a much more daunting challenge, one that Freymann calls “the boldest act of economic coercion in world history.”

Freymann and the historian Hugo Bromley, who co-authored two chapters in the book, explain that economic deterrence is unlikely to work against China. Russia’s and China’s support for U.S. sanctions were essential in effectively pressuring Iran and North Korea, respectively, to curb their nuclear programs. Yet many countries, including U.S. allies, might be unwilling to support sanctions on China because the economic and political costs would be too high. Any attempt to force a rapid decoupling could also undermine the U.S. economy itself, which relies on China for many imports.

Instead, Freymann and Bromley propose planning for what they call “avalanche decoupling,” which would start by decoupling from a small number of critical supply chain items, such as advanced semiconductors and machine tools, and then expand to others gradually. To combat the risk of countries undercutting these efforts by secretly trading with China, they call for allies to set up a new intergovernmental coordinating body to monitor the flow of goods, offer emergency aid, and ensure market access for participating states. Freymann and Bromley acknowledge that economically isolating China would be difficult and avalanche decoupling would be plausible only “under extraordinary political and geopolitical circumstances.” And it would require the United States to foot much of the bill for adjusting to a new, less interdependent economic relationship with China—again, no small feat. But not planning might lead to even more catastrophic costs if the United States is forced to decouple rapidly.

RAISING THE STAKES

Whatever deterrence strategy the United States chooses, Beijing is becoming bolder in retaliating and doling out punishments of its own. Chinese leaders made this very clear in 2025. In April, after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed punitive tariffs, Beijing matched U.S. levies and threatened to limit exports of rare-earth elements to the United States, causing Washington to back down and agree to a lower tariff rate. In November, after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said that Japan might respond militarily if China invaded or blockaded Taiwan, Beijing launched a campaign to impose political, economic, and military costs on Tokyo to try to bully Takaichi into retracting her statement.

Both of these examples represent escalations. In the past, China has imposed similar punishments on Japan: once, for instance, in 2010, after a maritime collision between the two countries’ vessels, and again in 2012, when Tokyo purchased the disputed Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands). Although China’s next moves are not yet clear, U.S. policymakers need to recognize that China is increasingly policing the behavior of Washington and its allies and partners and will punish countries for any statements or actions that authorities in Beijing believe go against China’s interests.

Freymann’s concept of structured ambiguity preserves U.S. flexibility more than alternatives such as strategic clarity, which would bring Taiwan explicitly under the U.S. security umbrella. Structured ambiguity also aims to deter Chinese gray-zone coercion, which strategic ambiguity cannot do because the implicit threat it conveys is focused on dissuading China from a large-scale use of military force such as an invasion.

Beijing is becoming bolder in retaliating and doling out punishments.

But structured ambiguity, like any mode of deterrence, is not a one-off action. As Freymann notes, political and economic deterrence must be backed by credible punishment that can be sustained over time. If the United States pushes back on China’s gray-zone tactics, China will inevitably retaliate. Imposing costs on Beijing could easily lead to an escalation spiral. For this approach to be effective, the United States needs to show that it will not relent even if China matches American pressure at every step.

At present, it is not clear whether the United States is willing to do so. China has given no indication that American pressure would convince it to back down, nor has the United States shown a sustained interest in ratcheting up tensions. Its decision to yield on tariffs when Beijing threatened to cut off supplies of rare earths and critical minerals suggests that Washington is not willing or perhaps not yet ready to bear the costs of a massive escalation. Instead, the second Trump administration believes that U.S. allies and partners should take more responsibility for countering China’s gray-zone coercion of Taiwan. And a small number of U.S. experts and policymakers—including some within the Trump administration—are arguing that the United States should walk away from what the foreign policy scholars Jennifer Kavanaugh and Stephen Wertheim, writing in Foreign Affairs, called an “unwinnable war” against China over Taiwan.

This is the uncomfortable truth about U.S. policy toward Taiwan. Freymann’s analysis is a must-read for policymakers trying to understand the challenge of protecting Taiwan and the options available to the United States. Yet ultimately, Washington needs to choose carefully how to deal with the reality of leaders in Beijing who know they are getting stronger. If the United States wants to defend Taiwan, it cannot overlook the possibility that China could use gray-zone tactics to win without fighting. But whether aggression takes place in piecemeal actions or emerges in a larger crisis, U.S. threats must be backed by both the capability to fight and a willingness to escalate.

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