The Mirage of China's Military Edge

If China were to seize control of Taiwan by force, it would be a disaster, not only for Taiwan but also for the United States. A nearly $1 trillion economy would leave the free-market system and be incorporated into China’s state-directed, mercantilist one. A vibrant democracy nurtured and defended by the United States for many years would be snuffed out. American power and influence would be gravely diminished in East Asia, and China would become the region’s dominant power. Other governments there would be pressured to accommodate China’s political, economic, and even territorial demands. Beijing would certainly insist that they kick out U.S. forces. China’s global ambitions, meanwhile, would only grow.

Whether any of this might come to pass, however, hinges on China’s ability to take and hold Taiwan. The high-paced military buildup Beijing has undertaken over the past 30 years has yielded impressive improvements, and China’s interest in expanding its power and influence is obvious. But until China can be confident that an invasion of Taiwan would succeed—a lofty threshold to reach—improving capabilities and clear ambition are not enough reason for Beijing to use force. Military aggression short of a full-scale invasion would be foolhardy: it would not deliver the Chinese Communist Party the political ends it seeks, and it would risk the party’s grip on power.

The reality today is that China is not capable of conquering Taiwan. Nor is it likely to gain this capability any time soon. China’s buildup once threatened to shift the military balance in Beijing’s favor, but trends in military technology now favor Taiwan and the United States, not China. Recognition of China’s threat has motivated not just Taiwan and the United States but also Japan, the Philippines, and other countries both in the region and beyond to act to deter aggression by Beijing. Chinese leaders can still issue threats, run simulated attacks, and violate Taiwan’s maritime borders. For the foreseeable future, China can at any time inflict massive damage on Taiwan with military force. The danger is great enough to constrain Taiwan’s policies, deterring Taipei from declaring independence and compelling it to make the occasional political concession. Yet without the ability to conquer, China is constrained, too, and any rational Chinese government will avoid taking military action in the first place.

This stalemate has persisted for the past three-quarters of a century, since Chiang Kai-shek lost the Chinese Civil War on mainland China and fled to Taiwan. Maintaining it depends, in part, on understanding the current military balance. Alarmist predictions that China is outpacing the United States and will soon be able to win a war for Taiwan can encourage China and discourage combined action by Taiwan and its supporters. These pessimistic readings make it more difficult for Chinese leaders to accept the reality of the stalemate and return to their strategy of biding time when it comes to Taiwan.

Taiwanese, American, Japanese, and Philippine leaders must be confident but not complacent. Deterring the formidable but not superior Chinese military will require resources and commitment. For the United States, this means military modernization programs that put China in a position where it must invest more just to keep up. It means continued forward basing and deployments, regional coordination, and sending a clear message to Beijing that unprovoked aggression against Taiwan will lead to a fight it will not win. The elements of such a strategy are all in place. If they can be sustained, there is every reason to believe that the United States and its partners will preserve the peace.

COMING UP SHORT

Around 1990, Chinese leaders decided that the country was sufficiently wealthy to increase its military spending. The question was what to spend the money on. If Beijing had been single-mindedly focused on “reunification” with Taiwan, it would have put all its defense resources into a short-range amphibious and air assault capability to invade and conquer the main island. This would have included short-range antiaircraft and antisubmarine defenses to protect the invasion force against Taiwanese and American counterattacks until it could defeat the Taiwanese army and occupy the entire territory. China’s People’s Liberation Army would have invested in thousands of landing craft and hundreds of amphibious ships to transport tanks and other vehicles. It would have procured surface-to-air missile systems to shoot down targets in Taiwanese airspace, as well as nonnuclear submarines, antisubmarine mines, and maritime patrol aircraft to take out enemy submarines near the Chinese coast.

But that is not what China did. Instead, it distributed its investments to serve multiple objectives. It built a force that could project modest maritime power globally; help China better defend its maritime borders, where Beijing has long felt vulnerable; and harm Taiwan but not conquer it.

To project power, China built blue-water amphibious ships capable of deploying worldwide—but not enough of them to land the forces necessary to invade Taiwan. It also built large, expensive aircraft carriers, which are useful for diplomatic signaling and shows of force in peacetime but require too much support and defensive protection to be used in a Taiwan invasion. It invested heavily in space capabilities, which are needed for global operations but not a localized conflict. And more recently, it has been expanding its nuclear arsenal. Before this buildup, its arsenal was perfectly adequate for deterring potential American nuclear escalation in a conflict over Taiwan. Yet Beijing now seeks nuclear parity with Moscow and Washington to ensure that China’s interests and demands are taken seriously in every region of the world.

To bolster its maritime defenses, China developed long-range missile systems and submarines, supported by surveillance systems, to engage U.S. air and naval forces in Japan, Guam, and the western Pacific. Today, its air-independent propulsion submarines can remain underwater for about two weeks, and its nuclear submarines for months, enabling them to attack American battle groups thousands of miles from China’s coast. Its medium- and long-range missiles can strike fixed targets ashore and surface ships at sea. These investments in submarines and missiles gave China an advantage because it costs much more for the United States to defend against them than it does for China to produce them. China also built formidable air and missile defenses to protect its forces and bases in the military districts along its coasts. Beijing’s strategy in this case was to overcome an enemy’s offensive advantage with quantity, amassing a thick belt of radars and missile batteries. Finally, China has developed and deployed space- and ground-based long-range reconnaissance systems (used to find and track American battle groups) and sophisticated electronic warfare systems. All this would be useful in a potential invasion of Taiwan—Chinese systems could target the American forces that would come to Taiwan’s aid—but the capabilities are designed primarily to protect China’s maritime frontiers.

On the whole, China’s military buildup is not as dazzling as it may appear. The People’s Liberation Army in 1990 had virtually no maritime power-projection capability, so although it is advancing at a rapid pace, in absolute terms it is now roughly comparable to those of France, Japan, or the United Kingdom. And despite the recent emphasis on maritime capabilities, the PLA is still dominated by the army and led by officers with education and experience in ground operations. In my conversations with Chinese army generals since 1999, many have shown breathtaking ignorance of the basics of maritime warfare. Long-range antiship missile systems are not even operated by the navy or integrated with other naval forces, which will hamper their effectiveness in combat. Meanwhile, massive corruption has not only wasted some of China’s military investment but also undermined the combat leadership skills of senior PLA figures. An aptitude for bribery and displays of personal loyalty do not transfer to mastery of maritime operations. Finally, and most important, China’s military buildup alarmed Taiwan, the United States, Japan, and the Philippines. All four have responded with military buildups and tighter cooperation.

This is not to say China’s military buildup has not produced weapons systems that would eventually be valuable in conquering Taiwan; it has. And in the meantime, it has deterred the Taiwanese government from declaring independence and raised the military cost of U.S. intervention on Taiwan’s behalf, thereby undermining Taiwanese confidence in the likelihood of American support in the event of conflict. But China’s large submarine and surface combatant fleet, modest numbers of amphibious ships and aircraft carriers, arsenal of medium- and long-range missiles, dense air and missile defenses, and worldwide surveillance and electronic warfare systems do not add up to the capability to take and hold Taiwan. The most important shortfall, as a December 2025 Pentagon report highlighted, is amphibious lift—the ships and aircraft needed to transport vehicles and troops in sufficient quantities to invade the main island. China’s navy does not have enough guns to soften up landing areas and neutralize defending support forces ashore, either. Its air force cannot fill the gap with precision airstrikes. And the PLA’s large-scale exercises do not emphasize improvisational skills among lower-level commanders; the ability to take initiative is often decisive in amphibious assaults that never go according to plan.

American war games confirm that, although the new systems the PLA has fielded in recent years have cut into Taiwanese and American advantages, they have not overcome them. China, in these simulations, has been able to inflict increasing levels of damage on Taiwanese and American military forces and on Taiwan itself, but not to seize and hold the large, strongly defended island. A few well-publicized war games conducted by American civilian think tanks using unclassified data resulted in Chinese victories. These results occur when the United States is slow to respond to an attack and when the game models give too much weight to China’s superior numbers of long-range missiles and do not account for various countermeasures that can render these Chinese systems ineffective. These models simply cannot replicate decisive maritime battles that involve an invasion and engage large naval forces. In more sophisticated simulations of a Taiwan invasion that the Department of Defense held in the past decade, played with all the highly classified systems from both sides, China was consistently thwarted in achieving its objective of conquering the island.

NO GOOD OPTIONS

Chinese forces could successfully conduct offensive operations against Taiwan short of a full invasion. The trouble for China is that these limited military options, even if initially successful, would not achieve its goal of reunification. In fact, they would make reunification more difficult for Beijing to achieve—and undermine the party’s authority at home.

Consider air and missile strikes. With its present capabilities, China can strike a variety of targets in Taiwan, and Taiwanese defenses can only partially blunt the attacks. The most likely targets would be military bases. Yet the damage would be limited because Taiwan has buried many of its important military sites and developed plans to disperse and conceal mobile systems such as aircraft, missile launchers, and armored vehicles. Strikes against critical infrastructure, industrial sites, or government facilities are also possible. But they would damage property and kill or injure the citizens that China claims as its own, encouraging international opposition to China’s actions and hardening Taiwanese determination not to surrender. American campaigns against Serbia in 1999 and Iran this year have shown the limits of relying on airstrikes to bring about rapid capitulation to political demands.

It is also within China’s power to impose a sea and air blockade; Taiwan alone cannot prevent it from doing so. Yet blockades come with complications that undercut their coercive power. There is no legal justification for a blockade that stops neutral merchant vessels with nonmilitary cargoes, and such a blockade invites international retaliation. When shipping is threatened, insurance rates increase, but the Taiwanese economy has the capacity to adjust. The United States and other countries in the region friendly to Taiwan would most likely help it lift a sea blockade by organizing a convoy system. These countries would send their own naval forces to escort and protect merchant vessels, following a northern route that could run largely through Japanese territorial waters and a southern route through Philippine territorial waters. China could announce an air blockade, but the only way to enforce it would be to shoot down airliners. Countries that have done so—such as Russia in its downing of a passenger jet flying over Ukraine in 2014—have paid a heavy price in international condemnation.

Another option would be to seize outlying Taiwanese islands. Taiwan administers and defends scores of islands, including some that are close to the Chinese coast, a large cluster in the Penghu archipelago off the Taiwanese coast, and several in the South China Sea. Taiwan cannot prevent the PLA from occupying some of the islands, but none is vital to the Taiwanese economy. Nor does Chinese occupation affect Taiwan’s defense of the main island.

A news report on Chinese military drills around Taiwan, Beijing, December 2025 Tingshu Wang / Reuters

A final option would be to decapitate Taiwan’s leadership and then bring about a coup. China actively courts and rewards friendly politicians and citizens in Taiwan and undoubtedly has recruited agents among them. If these agents, with the assistance of Chinese special forces, could capture or assassinate elected Taiwanese leaders, it might be possible for China-friendly politicians to subvert Taiwan’s legal succession mechanisms and take power. This would be an extremely high-risk gamble for China. Success would depend on its ability to neutralize Taiwan’s security forces, both military and police—a difficult feat.

Any of these operations would almost certainly draw a strong global response. In addition to diplomatic censure, many countries would likely introduce sanctions and suspend trade and investment. China is especially vulnerable in the energy sector; the country imports a large portion of its energy, much of it by sea, and the United States could quite easily block China-bound oil and liquefied natural gas from passing through the Strait of Malacca. Sanctions that curtail China’s access to the international financial system and to commodity markets could set back the country’s growth, too. Beyond economic punishment, Chinese military aggression would provoke a rapid military response. Washington’s current limitations on military assistance to Taiwan would end. The United States would quickly supply weapons and munitions to the Taiwanese military and deploy reinforcements to Japan, the Philippines, and probably Taiwan itself.

The only favorable outcome for China from any gambit against Taiwan would be Taipei’s capitulation to Beijing’s political demands. But the chances of any concession—much less Taiwan’s agreement to become a province of China—are slim. The populations of countries under attack tend to become angry, patriotic, and supportive of their governments’ efforts to stand up to the aggressor, and the Taiwanese public would likely be no different. Encouraged by worldwide condemnation of and economic pressure on China, military reinforcements from the United States, and the support of Japan and the Philippines, Taiwan would most likely defy China.

Some analysts cast doubt on whether Taiwan would fight back if it came under attack. They point out that Taiwan’s military budgets have been inadequate for years, its reserve forces are poorly trained, and its civil defense measures have atrophied. They contend that many citizens do not think Taiwan has an effective deterrent against China other than Washington’s ambiguous security guarantee. In their view, if deterrence failed, Taiwan would surrender.

Yet I have been visiting Taiwan since 2002 and have seen more cause for optimism. The Taiwanese armed forces have serious defensive plans that are backed by impressive capabilities. They carry out exercises to test these plans under realistic conditions, and they will defend their country. Elected politicians have been raising Taiwan’s defense budget substantially, from roughly $10 billion in 2015 to $18 billion in 2025. Taiwanese defense planning is now based on the assumption that Taiwan must hold off a Chinese attack for several weeks until American forces can arrive in numbers. The government has extended the term of conscription for military service in Taiwan from four months to a year, and civil defense planning and drills have been incorporated into Taiwan’s annual defense exercises. It would be reckless of China to count on quick Taiwanese capitulation.

And if Taiwan does not make concessions after a Chinese military operation, Beijing’s remaining choices are risky. It could back down: stop the air and missile strikes, pause its amphibious operations against outlying islands, or withdraw the blockade. China would of course cover its retreat with a barrage of propaganda telling its population that it had taught Taiwan a lesson and set back Taiwanese independence, that China can endure international sanctions, that reunification will happen someday. Yet these claims would ring hollow, and much of the Chinese public would see the military action as reckless and unsuccessful. Their support for the party would weaken.

The other option for China would be to escalate. It could strike more targets in Taiwan, invade another outlying island, or enforce a blockade by engaging U.S. and other forces deployed to circumvent it. As long as Taiwan did not capitulate, however, China would continually face the same choice of retreat or escalation. With each escalation, China would find it harder to back down. Eventually, China would have to decide whether to invade. Only by that point, the political and military risks would be even higher than before. International diplomatic and economic penalties against China would have risen, as would the expectations of the Chinese public. There would have been time for Taiwan to mobilize its forces and deploy planned defenses, for the United States to deploy forces to bases in Japan and operating locations in the Philippines, and for the Japanese and Philippine armed forces to prepare their own defenses. American forces might well have deployed onto Taiwan itself. What was previously a difficult military operation for the PLA would become virtually impossible.

SHOCK, NOT AWE

As an alternative to a time-consuming escalation sequence with a high likelihood of failure, China might consider a surprise attack on Taiwan. Its objective would be to secure control of the main island quickly, before American help could arrive, thus deterring the United States from what would be a challenging counterinvasion. China would be betting, too, that it could withstand international economic sanctions for as long as they are in place.

Yet a surprise invasion runs significant risks of its own. To preserve the element of surprise, an invasion force and its support must be smaller in scale than a full mobilization of the Chinese military. If China used a routine PLA exercise around Taiwan as cover, it would still need to use a smaller force to maintain the deception that it was planning an exercise, not an invasion. As Russia learned in 2022, ahead of its attack on Ukraine, large-scale military preparations are difficult to hide. Chinese planners could not be sure that China’s communications networks had not been penetrated by Taiwanese or American intelligence services, as were Russia’s. Even if communications were secure, the movement of major forces, logistic preparations, and measures such as clearing airspace and establishing security zones would be detectable. Intelligence analysts can distinguish peacetime force buildups from invasion preparations. A few days of warning would provide plenty of time for the Taiwanese armed forces to move troops and set obstacles on the beaches and landing fields it has long been preparing to defend. The United States, too, would have more than enough notice to arm and deploy its substantial naval and air forces in the region and strengthen the defenses of its bases before the invasion could begin.

Once the attack got underway, China would face additional disadvantages. A surprise attack would forfeit the option of a preinvasion campaign to establish air and sea superiority and to degrade coastal defenses. The invasion force would therefore need to fight its way across the Taiwan Strait, and whatever forces landed would face dug-in and well-supplied defenses at their full strength. Most preparations for follow-on attack waves would also need to be delayed until the first attack was launched. This means that the assembly and loading of units for later attacks would be slower and conducted under fire. In amphibious and airborne operations, the first attack simply establishes a beachhead. It is the subsequent reinforcements that break out to secure territory, including ports and airfields, and then to defeat counterattacking forces and occupy the area. Anything that reduces the speed or size of follow-on forces jeopardizes the success of the invasion. Ultimately, China would have no guarantee that the element of surprise would give its smaller and more slowly mobilized forces enough of an advantage to take Taiwan.

LOSING GROUND

The military balance is only growing less favorable to China, further diminishing the prospect of a successful military operation against Taiwan. The United States is gaining combat experience and developing and deploying new generations of maritime, air, and weapons systems that take advantage of PLA vulnerabilities. Taiwan is making improvements in its defenses, inspired by Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. Japan and the Philippines are stepping up their own security measures in response to Chinese aggression.

The war with Iran has demonstrated several of Washington’s advantages. U.S. Navy battle groups were operating within range of Iranian missiles, and both China and Russia were attempting to track American ships and pass the information to Iran, yet in the nearly six weeks of fighting before the April 8 cease-fire, no long-range missile struck an American ship. Beijing must now be wondering how effective its own missile systems would be against American warships. American military commanders and forces have also gained further experience in conducting complex, long-range air and maritime attacks; many Chinese senior commanders, meanwhile, have little operational experience, especially after Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s recent purges of military leadership. What is more, contrary to the fears expressed by some analysts, the war with Iran has not cost the United States too many of the precision weapons it would need to defend Taiwan. As of this writing, U.S. forces have used only a small portion of their antiship missile inventory against Iranian ships, and U.S. submarines fired just a single torpedo. Although they used larger numbers of surface-to-air missiles, an adequate supply to defend Guam and U.S. battle groups remains.

Military trends were favoring Washington before the war in Iran, too. The United States was not idle during the early years of China’s buildup. New and more capable fighter jets, airborne command-and-control units, and maritime patrol fleets replaced earlier models. New generations of antiaircraft missiles and long-range reconnaissance drones were sent to the Pacific. Submarines were deployed to Guam, where U.S. bases have been extended and fortified. More recently, the United States’ military buildup has been explicitly designed to take advantage of Chinese vulnerabilities. The shift began around 2016, when the Department of Defense first publicly described China as a serious threat. It accelerated in 2019, when the first Trump administration withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, allowing the United States to develop missiles that could strike targets in the South China Sea and eastern China from naval ships and from launch sites in Japan and the Philippines.

The Department of Defense has pursued modernization programs that are reversing China’s relative military gains. Procurement has reflected the priorities highlighted in the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy, which included faster and more effective long-range weapons and missile defense; improved space and cyberspace capabilities; more flexible forward deployment locations and expeditionary bases and better-defended forward bases and logistics supply lines; and ongoing improvement of autonomous vehicles and what is known as C4ISR: command, control, communications, and computers, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. The U.S. military has rapidly improved its long-range ground attack missile systems, expanded its presence in the Philippines and the Ryukyu Island chain, reinforced its submarine fleet’s substantial advantage over China’s antisubmarine systems, and developed more resilient space systems, such as jam-resistant GPS III satellites. All these capabilities are specifically designed to counter China’s improved military in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.

A military exercise in Taichung, Taiwan, June 2026 Angie Teo / Reuters

Recent U.S. investments are also taking advantage of developments in military technology that favor the United States and Taiwan. One is long-range hypersonic missiles. Both China and the United States are deploying these missiles, which cannot be intercepted by current missile defense systems and can strike fixed targets—airfields, command centers, naval bases, radars, space control centers, and weapons. The entire military infrastructure in southeast China that would support an invasion of Taiwan is therefore at risk. Beijing has deployed capable air-defense systems around these locations, but American ground-launched hypersonic missiles already in the Pacific (and air- and sea-based versions that will soon be deployed) can overcome them. The American systems could swiftly neutralize the seven Chinese fortified reefs in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea or destroy the piers in ports along the coast of southern China from which Chinese invasion forces would be loaded to invade Taiwan. Even without hypersonic missiles, the United States and Israel neutralized most of Iran’s air defenses, which are based on the same Russian technology as China’s, in a few hours using electronic, cyber, and direct attacks. The addition of hypersonic missiles to the American attack capability creates an advantage that will persist for at least a decade until new generations of air defenses—which the United States also has a lead in developing—can be deployed.

The geography of a conflict over Taiwan gives the United States an additional advantage. Long-range strikes against moving targets, ashore and at sea, are more difficult than those against fixed targets. Tracking is complicated, and the technology used to guide missiles to their targets is vulnerable to countermeasures. The American ships and mobile ground systems that China would need to neutralize if it were to invade Taiwan are spread across thousands of miles—from Guam to the Ryukyu Islands, from Kyushu to Luzon. The most important Chinese mobile targets that the United States would attack are the few dozen amphibious invasion forces crossing the less than 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait and maneuvering along a few hundred miles of the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan. This concentration would make American long-range reconnaissance and strike systems far more effective than the Chinese systems trying to cover a much larger area.

Technological trends in ground defense also favor Taiwan. Over the last three years, Ukraine has developed devastating new tactics for defending home territory. Drones have made it suicidal for attacking ground forces to operate in large formations. The determined, innovative, and fast-adapting Ukrainian defenders have held back numerically superior Russian forces. Ukrainian drones have also proved effective in a confined maritime area against surface ships, forcing Russia’s Black Sea Fleet back to its base.

Employing methods like Ukraine’s, Taiwanese maritime and ground forces would have an advantage defending the island. Chinese amphibious ships that must come close to shore to offload landing craft and helicopters would be extremely vulnerable to drone and short-range missile attacks. Any units of a Chinese assault force that made it ashore would also be vulnerable to Taiwanese drone-equipped defenses reinforced by dug-in and concealed artillery. They would struggle to break out from beachheads to capture Taiwanese cities and ports. Taiwan is preparing to mount a drone-centric defense: its focus is shifting from traditional platforms—ships, aircraft, and tanks—to expanding its arsenal of drones and missiles. In November 2025, the Taiwanese government proposed an eight-year, $40 billion special defense budget for these weapons. Even if the main opposition party succeeds in reducing the size of this budget, the additional spending and industrial production will still provide the Taiwanese army with a much greater defensive capability than it already has. As Ukraine has demonstrated, a numerically inferior force employing these weapons systems can halt an invader. And as Iran has demonstrated in its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, an inferior military can also keep a larger and more powerful air and maritime force from operating freely near its shore.

Recent moves by Japan and the Philippines are further undercutting China’s ability to invade Taiwan successfully. Alarmed by Chinese aggression, Japan’s leaders have been strengthening their country’s security policies. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said late last year that a Chinese military operation against Taiwan would be a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan. Over the past decade, Japan has increased its defense budget, purchased counterstrike weapons with a range that includes eastern China, and deployed air and sea fortifications in the Ryukyu Islands that are strong enough to prevent Chinese air and naval forces from breaking out into the Pacific. Philippine leaders, too, have grown wary of China under the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., who was elected in 2022. The Philippines has challenged China’s incursions into contested waters in the South China Sea, and in 2022 it authorized upgrades to the military facilities the United States operates on its territory under the two countries’ 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. Washington allocated roughly $100 million for the projects.

STAY THE COURSE

For at least the next decade, favorable trends in hypersonic weapons, drone systems, electronic warfare, and cyberwarfare put the United States and its allies and partners in a strong position to deter China from an attack on Taiwan. China would need much greater military expenditures to overcome these advantages. Yet these positive trends are not self-sustaining. The technology of warfare does not stand still, and maintaining deterrence will require investment in innovation, particularly in space operations and artificial intelligence systems. Taiwan, the United States, Japan, and the Philippines must continue to commit resources, engage in effective military planning and exercises, and respond to China’s aggressive actions. When China fortifies another reef in the South China Sea, the United States must deploy more hypersonic missiles to the Philippines’ Palawan Island. When China closes air and sea space around Taiwan for weapons demonstrations, the United States, Japan, and the Philippines must counter with their own live-fire exercises. When China protests the passage of American naval ships through the Taiwan Strait, the United States must send more ships through.

As long as Taiwan and its defenders stay on their current paths, the gap between China’s aspirations and its ability to realize them will only increase in the coming years. Beijing’s public rhetoric will continue to highlight its determination to accomplish the historic mission of taking Taiwan, but Chinese leaders will recognize that conquering Taiwan is unrealistic in the near term. They will understand that it is dangerous to base the government’s legitimacy on a goal it cannot achieve. There will still be competition between authoritarian China, with its state-directed economy and aggressive mercantilism, and the democratic United States, Japan, Philippines, and Taiwan, as well as their other allies and partners, with their market-based economies and commitment to the international economic system. But it will be a primarily economic and ideological contest, not a military one.

Keeping the competition stable and peaceful requires that both Beijing and Washington change the way they perceive and talk about the military balance. China must acknowledge the high risks and low probability of success of an attack on Taiwan, and tone down its nationalistic boasts of military prowess and exaggerated claims of American weakness. The United States must continue to devote attention and resources to maintaining its military edge and display confidence in its abilities rather than give credence to alarmist and hyperbolic warnings of imminent defeat. If all sides recognize the military reality, they can avoid outright conflict—and even preserve the possibility of cooperation that benefits them all.

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