វិបត្តិតៃវ៉ាន់ដែលនឹងមកដល់
Use Today’s Calm to Prepare for the Next Perfect Storm
As U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping meet in Washington this week, the Taiwan Strait, the waterway that has long been a flashpoint between the two countries, has seemed remarkably quiet. Chinese fighter jets regularly cross the centerline between Taiwan and the mainland. Chinese warships maneuver to the east of the island. And Beijing uses its coast guard to continually harass ships in the area. Yet for nearly a year, Beijing has avoided the large-scale military exercises that had become a regular feature of its coercion of Taiwan after former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island, in 2022.
That shift stems in large part from renewed optimism in Beijing. Although the Trump administration has not formally changed its policy toward Taiwan, Trump’s statements after his prior meeting with Xi in May undermined Taipei’s confidence in the United States’ commitment to the island. “I’m not looking to have somebody go independent,” he said at the time. “And, you know, we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I'm not looking for that.”
For years, many in Washington and across the Asia-Pacific region assumed that 2027 would be the next potential pivot point for Beijing’s Taiwan policy, because Xi had directed the People’s Liberation Army to be prepared for a cross-strait military confrontation by that date. Yet as 2027 approaches, it appears exceedingly unlikely that Xi is gearing up to employ lethal force any time soon. Xi has been willing to conduct systematic purges of his military high command, in part because he is not worried about a cross-strait crisis in the near future. For now, Xi seems to feel confident that he can effectively manage both Washington and Taipei.
But Xi remains deadly serious about organizing his force for a conflict over Taiwan in the coming years. The next pivotal date will not be 2027, when Xi is expected to begin a fourth term, but 2028, when both the United States and Taiwan will hold presidential elections that will determine the future trajectory of the cross-strait dynamic. In all likelihood, Xi will find himself frustrated by the outcome of Taiwan’s next election, which will make the situation more fraught than it is now. The coming two years are thus a crucial window for Washington to work with Taipei to prepare for what will likely be a far more turbulent period in the Taiwan Strait after 2028.
Rather than let doubts about its support for Taipei deepen, Washington should lean into its relationship with the island. In many ways, Taiwan has refashioned itself into a model partner, both by reorienting its economy toward the United States and away from China and by boosting investments in its own defense. At the very least, Trump should approve the $14 billion arms package that is on his desk, even if that means dividing the sale into smaller tranches to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing.
China will not welcome a series of U.S. arms sales, but historically Beijing has shown far more concern for high-profile gestures of political support for Taiwan, such as Pelosi’s visit, than over the bureaucratic details of U.S. weapons transfers. And leaving arms sales in abeyance carries its own long-term costs. By forgoing this minimum step, the administration will be complicit in Beijing’s bid to establish a veto over U.S. arms sales and, by extension, over the cross-strait dynamic. After 2028, the diplomatic price of such support for Taipei is likely to rise, as an aging Xi may conclude that further delay on Taiwan no longer works in his favor.
SOONER OR LATER
Xi’s optimism is predicated on the hope that the opposition Kuomintang party (KMT) will regain power in 2028 after a dozen years of rule by the Democratic Progressive Party, which the mainland reviles as separatist. Beijing has had no visible engagement with the government since the DPP came to power in 2016—a marked departure from Xi’s approach to the previous administration. In 2015, Xi became the first Chinese leader since Mao Zedong to shake hands with his Taiwanese counterpart, a precedent he must have relished. Yet rather than becoming part and parcel of what Xi and his propagandists call the “new era” for China under his rule, Taiwan has steadily drifted away from the mainland, frustrating his ambitions to begin the political process of annexing the island. Annexation, not a costly and likely catastrophic military invasion, is his ultimate goal.
Xi’s hopes rose in November 2025, when Cheng Li-wun unexpectedly became chair of the KMT. Cheng has advocated a much softer line toward China, emphasizing the common Chineseness of citizens on both sides of the strait and the need for cross-strait dialogue. In April 2026, she traveled to Beijing to meet with Xi just weeks before he hosted Trump. The meeting positioned Xi to depict his Taiwan policy as conciliatory and reasonable, despite his hard-line approach to the ruling party over the past decade. His willingness to receive Cheng signals that she has become the linchpin of his hopes for advancing discussions about Taiwan’s status after 2028. Yet hope is not a strategy, and Cheng’s prospects even for becoming the KMT’s candidate in 2028, let alone for prevailing in the general election, are precarious. Her pro-Beijing views are not widely shared even within her own party. Cheng was a dark-horse candidate who secured the position of the KMT chair with just over 50 percent of the votes, and only 27 percent of the population supports her party.
That means that in 2028, Xi will likely confront either a fourth consecutive DPP administration under current President Lai Ching-te or a more moderate KMT leader who is warier than Cheng of Xi’s embrace. Should Lai secure a second term along with a renewed majority in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, it would devastate Xi’s hope that the KMT offers a viable alternative. After Lai’s victory in the 2024 election, Beijing consoled itself with the fact that he prevailed with just a plurality of the vote and lost control of the legislature to the KMT; it spun the result as a sign that most of Taiwan’s voters did not support Lai’s approach to the mainland. That was not just propaganda but a genuine rationalization for the manifest failure of Beijing’s cross-strait policies. Those shortcomings will be harder to explain away in 2028, especially if voters treat another Lai victory as a rebuke of the KMT’s more conciliatory posture. Xi at that point would be the steward of a stagnant Taiwan policy that has produced no political progress over more than a dozen years.
Xi’s looming dilemma underscores the hollowness of the Chinese Communist Party’s Taiwan strategy. His predecessor, Hu Jintao, tried a softer approach toward the KMT administration of Ma Ying-jeou, but the effort backfired. In 2014, young protesters in the Sunflower Movement occupied Taiwan’s legislature amid widespread opposition to a trade deal meant to deepen cross-strait integration. When the DPP took power in 2016, Xi—who had already demonstrated his comfort with a more muscular national security policy—shifted to coercion without diplomacy, cutting off all visible channels of communication with Taiwan’s political leadership. The goal has been to convince the people of Taiwan that the status quo is unsustainable, that annexation is inevitable, and that they should therefore acquiesce to Beijing’s overtures.
THE COST OF COERCION
Xi is likely to be more impatient about resolving the Taiwan issue in his fourth term; by the end of it, he will be nearly 80. Although he may now feel that time is on his side, he is less likely to feel that way then. And especially if he is frustrated by Taiwan’s 2028 election outcome, he may be tempted to reach for more coercive actions. Xi likely learned from the Pelosi kerfuffle that he can go quite far in threatening the island: China’s over-the-top response in 2022 included firing PLA missiles over Taiwan for the first time since the Taiwan Strait crisis of the 1990s, as well as imposing maritime exclusion zones around the island. Yet it did not provoke a full-blown crisis with the United States or cause tangible repercussions for China. Xi also may have more confidence in his high command after the CCP’s 21st Congress, next year, when he will reshuffle his leadership team. He will presumably finish replacing the dozens of senior officers he has purged during his third term and may reorganize the military’s top ranks altogether.
But Xi would have to go beyond his 2022 response to make Taipei and Washington heed his grievances. This might include a more sustained, punitive, and risky military pressure campaign, even if no shots were fired, such as stopping foreign ships at sea, declaring multiple zones near Taiwan off-limits to international maritime traffic, and seeking to disrupt high-profile U.S. arms deliveries on commercial carriers. That would fall short of the full-blown blockade or quarantine that many in Washington have long feared, but it would send the message that Taiwan remains connected to the outside world only with Beijing’s acquiescence.
Yet in any such scenario, the off-ramp and the endgame are unclear. A Chinese decision to escalate might push Taiwan’s voters toward grudging acceptance of rule by the mainland—but it might just as easily backfire, creating a rally-around-the-flag effect on the island and augmenting anti-Beijing sentiment. That is what happened in the wake of the third Taiwan Strait crisis, in the 1990s, when Beijing’s threats against the DPP before the 2000 election helped the party win its first presidential race.
Xi could, of course, go for a full blockade or quarantine, or even seize one of the islands that Taiwan governs that sit alarmingly close to the mainland. Yet over 14 years in office he has shown that he is neither impulsive nor especially violent in his conduct of foreign policy, preferring steady, incremental pressure over a single decisive blow. Those riskier options could very well fail, undermining the premise that has animated him for decades: to secure his legacy as the leader who set Taiwan on the path toward what Beijing calls “reunification.” A quarantine or blockade would also play in some ways to the strengths of the United States in a crisis, allowing it time to muster a coalition of the willing to impose costs on Beijing.
These more violent options could become more tempting for Xi if a so-called restrainer who is suspicious of traditional U.S. partnerships enters the White House after the 2028 U.S. election. Such a president might be skeptical of U.S. interests in Taiwan, or of reinvigorating the alliances and partnerships that the United States would need to marshal to protect it. Even if a more conventional candidate prevails in 2028, China will likely have learned a great deal from the current war in Iran about the limits of U.S. power and Washington’s political and material ability to persevere. Key U.S. munitions stocks will take years to rebuild, and the conflict with Iran has exposed the vulnerability of U.S. overseas bases and naval logistics. Those problems will persist into the next administration, constraining the ability of the United States to respond to China in a crisis, regardless of what U.S. policymakers might want to do.
A MODEL PARTNER
In the meantime, the United States and Taiwan have an opportunity to toughen up the island while Xi waits to see what the 2028 elections bring. Under the DPP, Taiwan has ended years of complacency about the threat from the mainland. It has stepped up investment in its own defense and pivoted its economy away from China more than almost any other country, including the United States. It has also demonstrated the will, the wherewithal, and now an incipient capacity to confront the challenge before it.
Most notably, after years of procuring U.S. weapons systems that would be useless in a conflict with China, Taiwan has finally gotten serious about defense reform. In May, it passed a supplemental bill appropriating $25 billion for the military. One of the central challenges facing that military now is not just how to acquire new capabilities but how to integrate them into the force. Indeed, the most contested political issue on Taiwan this year was defense reform, particularly appropriations for expanding the domestic drone industry. The KMT held up the legislation before acquiescing ahead of the island’s midterm elections, which will take place in November. Yet the mere fact that this is what the parties are fighting over is itself a hopeful sign of the government’s concern about defense.
The program for toughening Taiwan is not limited to the military. The government is serious about the trickier task of enhancing “whole-of-society resilience,” a delicate balancing act of acclimating the public to the threat from the mainland—and the possibility that it might one day invade or blockade the island—without inducing panic or resignation. Taiwan’s private sector shares many of the same temptations as firms around the world to buy cheaper Chinese goods, but the government is intent on keeping “red” components out of supply chains for government procurement.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s economy is growing at a breathtaking rate, which means that it will have the fiscal space to fund military modernization in the coming years. It also has become far less dependent on China economically. Whereas in 2010 more than 80 percent of Taiwan’s outbound investment went to China, today less than ten percent does. Taiwan’s growth is instead fueled by its world-class semiconductor industry, which has capitalized on the AI boom. With a population of only 23 million, Taiwan has catapulted to become the fourth-largest trading partner of the United States. And it is not just selling its wares there: its leading companies have promised to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. economy. In February, Taiwan became one of the first countries to finalize a trade deal with the Trump administration. Unlike most U.S. trade partners, Taiwan seems genuinely pleased with the outcome, because it narrows the gap between the tariff rate on Taiwan’s goods and the rates on goods from its regional competitors Japan and South Korea.
NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT
Unfortunately, rather than capitalizing on these deepening economic ties and on Taipei’s serious approach to defense, Washington is undermining them. The structural forces all favor a closer relationship, but the diplomacy—which should be the easiest part of getting this right—has become the weakest pillar. Trump’s May visit to Beijing stoked anxiety in Taipei that he would sell out the island’s interests with a grand gesture. Instead, the president was at pains to stay on message for most of the trip, only to fumble in the comfortable setting of a Fox News interview. Trump described arms sales as a bargaining chip he could use with Beijing, unsettling decades of precedent whereby American presidents refused to consult Chinese leaders on the subject. In the days and weeks afterward, top U.S. officials emphasized that policy toward Taiwan had not changed, but the damage had been done.
More seasoned observers of U.S. policy on Taiwan were rattled less by the president’s rhetoric than by his actions, particularly his hesitation in moving forward on the $14 billion arms package. As a practical matter, the deficiencies of the U.S. defense industrial base and procurement process mean that the capabilities in that package would not arrive in Taiwan before the end of Trump’s term, which explains his lack of enthusiasm for it. And even once the materiel arrives, Taiwan will need time to assimilate its capabilities into its force so that it can employ them effectively.
But the long lead times only underscore the need for the administration to make haste now, when it has a willing partner in Taiwan with the fiscal space to make these purchases, and when Xi is waiting to see what 2028 will bring. The next administration may not have such a good opportunity to enhance Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities, and Taiwan will need all the capacity it can muster to deal with an aging and potentially more cantankerous Xi.
If the KMT wins in 2028, it may also lack the DPP’s enthusiasm for defense cooperation with Washington. Meanwhile, Xi is in the midst of a painful renovation of his military high command, which, when finished, could change the calculus in its own way. Thus, the fragile gentleman’s agreement between Trump and Xi could afford the diplomatic space to take advantage of this window without precipitating a crisis.
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