US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan.
In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new landing platform utility (LPU) Shuiqiao or “Water Bridge” barges, forming a mobile pier for invasion forces.
With long 200-meter heavy ramps, these barges could allow the PLA Navy’s 13 large amphibious assault ships (or scores of large passenger and vehicle ferries) to surmount Taiwan’s many rough coastal obstacles, to exponentially increase the number of invasion points for embarking multiple waves of 100,000 troops plus armor, avoiding costly port capture battles.
Starting in earnest in 2017 and now in their 8th year, PLA daily military coercion exercises around Taiwan, with four large-scale exercises, have reached a point where PLA aircrews and sailors likely to conduct blockade or invasion operations have received significant exposure to the Taiwan theater of operations.
For example, in three years PLA Air Force sorties around Taiwan have nearly doubled, from 2,799 for all of 2022, to 5,107 for all of 2024 according to Taiwan Ministry of National Defense figures compiled in the March 18 issue of Taiwan’s CommonWealth Magazine.
When you add a daily presence around Taiwan of about 10 PLA Navy warships and Coast Guard ships, regular crossings over Taiwan by PLA surveillance balloons, and five years of attacking Taiwan’s undersea communications cables, it is understandable that in a Feb. 13, 2025, speech in Hawaii, US Indo-Pacific Command Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo said that the PLA’s “aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now are not exercises, as they call them. They are rehearsals.”
While it has long been assessed that CCP leader Xi Jinping (習近平) has demanded that the PLA be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, Xi and the PLA are also preparing for the many wars that will follow the conquest of Taiwan.
Despite being their largest export customer, the CCP’s long term intimidation campaign to force Australia and New Zealand to diminish their strategic relations with the United States entered a military coercive phase with the Feb. 7 to March 7, 2025, circumnavigation of Australia by three PLA Navy warships which included a Type 055 cruiser.
Look for future coercion to include PLA Navy aircraft carriers and the building of military bases in the South Pacific to isolate Australia and New Zealand, protect PLA use of “research” bases in Antarctica and to secure sea lanes to Latin America.
China continues to invest in the nuclear weapons power of its proxies. North Korea’s new 3-meter diameter Hwasong-19 and its 22-wheel Chinese-design inspired transporter erector launcher (TEL) is now the world’s largest mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and Chinese engineering support likely pervades the 7,000 ton nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) revealed on March 7, 2025, by Pyongyang.
North Korea’s new 4,000 to 5,000 ton vertical-launched missile equipped destroyer revealed in late December 2024 looks like the China State Shipbuilding Corporation’s Tiger Shark export destroyer, a future squadron of which will likely escort North Korean SSBNs in a protected “bastion,” that could also protect PLA Navy and Russian SSBNs.
The prospect of combined China-Russia-Iran-North Korea nuclear coercion and warfare was previewed on March 14, 2025, when China engineered a summit in Beijing with deputy foreign ministers from Iran and Russia, all to defy the Trump Administration’s mounting pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Similar joint coercion summits could precede a China-Russia assault/invasion of Taiwan, a China-assisted North Korean nuclear coercive exercise against Japan, South Korea, or the United States — or a China-assisted Iran nuclear strike against Israel.
Thus, the United States and its allies are very fortunate that Trump, elected to a second term in November 2024, is focused on improving the economic and international strategic position of the United States while also addressing the military-strategic challenge posed by China, now much greater than when he left office in 2021.
To meet this challenge Trump is developing incentive and deterrence strategies aimed at dangerous dictatorships.
Trump’s Jan. 29, 2025, executive order for “The Iron Dome for America” ends decades of US debate over strategic missile defense and commands the building of a national missile defense for the US, to include space-based missile defenses, and an order to, “Increase and accelerate the provision of United States missile defense capabilities to allies and partners.”
This revives former US president Ronald Reagan’s vision of curbing offensive nuclear missile growth with defensive missile systems, and underscores Trump’s Feb. 14, 2024, offer to China and Russia to reduce nuclear weapons and even cut military budgets in half, saying, “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many.”
Incentives for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to curb his potential for greater aggression in Europe are part of Trump’s immediate effort to halt Russia’s war in Ukraine.
This could become a difficult process, as seen in the public Feb. 28 White House argument between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Alternating US denial and resumption of some forms of military assistance, and the potential for Russian delay and deception tactics, mean that any agreement could be tenuous at best.
However, a successful and enforced ceasefire should reduce the need for greater military aid to Ukraine. It also should help the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to begin in earnest its rearmament to deter a threat of greater Russian aggression. This was underscored by Trump’s Jan. 7, 2025, press conference call for NATO members to raise their defense spending from 2 percent to 5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — which is yielding early results in Germany.
Trump’s immediate dispatch of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to convince Panama to end control of its ports by Hong Kong’s CCP-compliant Hutchison Whampoa (which has security forces in Panama), greatly increases the assurance that the US can timely transfer its naval and ground forces from the Atlantic Ocean area to meet military challenges in the Pacific Ocean, such as a CCP-PLA attack against Taiwan.
Trump Administration opposition to Chinese aggression or coercion against Taiwan was emphasized in a March 19, 2025, radio interview by Secretary Rubio, who said, “We believe that the status of Taiwan should not be changed by force or by extortion or compelled in any way. That’s the policy of the United States; that remains the policy of the United States. That’s been the policy of President Trump, and that will continue to be his policy. And when he makes policy decisions, he means them.”
In his March 4, 2025, Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing, US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby stated, “Losing Taiwan, Taiwan’s fall would be a disaster for American interests.”
Colby, however, caused consternation and push back in Taipei by his May 11, 2024, op-ed in the Taipei Times suggesting Taiwan’s “spending 5 percent of its GDP on defense should be the floor for Taiwan. Indeed, if its security and autonomy are at stake, why not spend 10 percent?,” a suggestion later adopted by candidate Donald Trump in an Oct. 11, 2024, speech.
Increasing defense spending as a percentage of GDP is certainly an impressive metric, and as necessary as it is for Taipei to do so, it can also suggest to its partners other metrics that better engage American military resources to obtain decisive near-term military capabilities which reduce the risk of war by deterring the CCP.
For example, Taiwan’s partners would surely be impressed if it purchased or co-produced 6,000 precision guided cruise missiles, and likely would not complain if they could be had cheaply.
A new US company, Mach Industries, is developing a cruise missile to meet a US Army requirement for a 180-mile (290 kilometer) vertical-launched subsonic speed cruise missile with the precision guidance capability of a Hellfire anti-tank missile.
But Mach’s greatest asset is their volume production cost goal, reported to be US$100,000, meaning for the price of six Lockheed-Martin F-35B short take-off 5th generation fighters (about US$110 million each), 6,000 cruise missiles could target the ramps and load bearing cables of scores of PLA invasion barges, hundreds of invasion ferries, and the landing zones for PLA Airborne and Air Assault forces.
To address production delays that affect other US weapons sales, Washington should consider approval for transferring production of critical weapons to Taiwan, to include the aforementioned cruise missiles, and production for 1,000 kilometer range Lockheed-Martin Precision Strike (PrSM) ballistic missile.
Cheap weapon solutions might also include laser-guided air-to-air missiles to target large numbers of PLA Air Force unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that cost a fraction of the dominant Raytheon AIM-9X anti-aircraft missile — and new unmanned fighter jets, long-range/long endurance UAVs to better assist missile targeting, and larger unmanned surface combat ships to break PLA naval blockades.
It should matter to Taipei that in Washington there is a broad consensus that Taiwan must dramatically increase its military spending, but it should also matter in Washington if there are opportunities to help Taiwan obtain decisive near-term capabilities, especially if they can be had for less cost.
Richard D. Fisher, Jr. is a senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
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