Some top U.S. officials believe Taiwan is insufficiently committed to its own defense. During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump dodged the question of whether the U.S. would intervene militarily to defend the island, saying, “Taiwan should pay us for defense.” During his confirmation hearings in March, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby told the Senate that Taiwan should increase its defense spending to 10 percent of GDP, far above current levels. Trump also claimed earlier this month that Chinese President Xi Jinping told him he would not invade during Trump’s presidency.
Last month, Trump administration officials canceled a planned stopover by President Lai in New York during a diplomatic trip (such stops are usually used to discreetly meet with U.S. officials). Defense Department officials also abruptly canceled a meeting with the Taiwanese defense minister in June. “There’s a lot of concern right now about the Trump administration’s support for Taiwan, and general Republican support for Taiwan in this kind of political climate,” David Sacks, a fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told TMD, pointing to the general lack of pushback from congressional Republicans following the canceled meetings.
The White House’s trade policy also seems to conflict with its stated desire for Taiwan to increase its defense commitment. It imposed a 20 percent tariff on all Taiwanese exports earlier this month, with no deal reached yet, and Trump has threatened a further 100 percent tariff on semiconductors, a pillar of Taiwan’s economy.
Some evidence might indicate that the Taiwanese are relatively sanguine about the threat of invasion. Sixty-five percent of Taiwanese citizens think an invasion in the next five years is unlikely, according to a May survey by the Institute for National Defense and Strategic Research; the common sentiment being that China and the Taiwanese are too closely bound economically and culturally for conflict.
But the reality is more complex. “I think people have a hard time understanding from this side of the ocean [that] people in Taiwan have been living with this since 1949,” Shelley Rigger, a political scientist at Davidson College who studies Taiwanese politics, told TMD. “It’s not that people … don’t believe there’s a threat, it’s that they believe that this threat, having been successfully managed for decades, can continue to be successfully managed and avoided.”
For Taiwanese politicians, Rigger argued, the fundamental question is how best to preserve their nation’s sovereignty; not necessarily how best to saber-rattle against China. But it’s also true that the island has made significant efforts in recent months to beef up its defenses. The government has expanded mandatory military service and plans to stockpile food supplies, boost its reserves of medical resources like blood, and construct more bomb shelters. Last week, the government also announced plans to increase defense spending to 3.32 percent of GDP in 2026, a 20 percent rise from current levels.
“There’s this kind of narrative that Taiwan isn’t taking its defense seriously, so why should we take it seriously?” said Sacks. “That’s a flawed narrative, because Taiwan is taking it seriously.”
China is also well aware that a full-scale invasion to conquer Taiwan would be incredibly difficult. It would be one of the largest amphibious operations in history, with the only real comparisons being some of the bloodiest battles of World War II: the invasion of Okinawa by U.S. forces, in which 60,000 men were landed on the first day, and the assault on Normandy during Operation Overlord, which saw 156,000 troops land on D-Day. By contrast, Chinese sea- and air-transport capabilities likely top out at about 20,000 soldiers per trip.
Unlike the Allied sea-borne assaults against militaries that had been battered by years of high-intensity warfare and bombing campaigns, Chinese naval and air forces are unlikely to possess command of the air or seas around Taiwan. American airbases are studded around the Indo-Pacific, including in Japan, and four carrier strike groups patrol the region. Chinese troops attempting to seize beachheads and airfields would have to survive a contested passage across the Taiwan Strait, assailed by missiles, torpedoes, and airstrikes, before even contending with mobilized Taiwanese land forces.
In the event of a conflict, Taiwanese and American troops (presuming U.S. intervention) might also be reinforced by the Japanese, Australian, and British militaries. And this week, the Philippines, Australia, and Canada conducted joint naval drills in the South China Sea.
But even if an all-out invasion would be enormously complex and costly for China, it has other options. Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department, recently ran an extensive series of war games simulating a Chinese blockade of Taiwan. He noted that a blockade could take many forms: a complete quarantine of the island, an attempt to assert control over specific types of shipping or particular ports, or just stepping up not-quite-open-warfare “grey zone” tactics using the Chinese coast guard, as China already does with other nations in the region.
However, both sides—China, as well as Taiwan and its allies—would face major hurdles in any potential conflict. The U.S.—with munitions inventories already stretched by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East—might struggle to supply enough ammunition for a sustained high-intensity conflict. “U.S. munition inventories are just not deep enough to sustain a long conflict” using the best available long-range antiship missiles, Cancian told TMD. “We run out in just a couple of days.” In contrast, China has undertaken a long-term project to build extensive inventories of missiles in preparation for precisely such a naval clash. In short, they would be able to shoot farther and for a longer time period than the U.S. and its allies.
Chinese amphibious lift capacities (i.e., the number of soldiers it can transport across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait) are a significant impediment to any potential invasion. Its military is also inexperienced—China has not fought a war since 1979, when it briefly invaded Vietnam—and Xi has purged dozens of officials from the heights of the People’s Liberation Army command structure in recent months, as part of a corruption crackdown, potentially eroding crucial expertise. “A Taiwan operation would be incredibly, incredibly complex and difficult for China to pull off,” said Sacks.
For those reasons, along with China’s recent economic challenges, an imminent invasion is unlikely. “Domestic economic challenges and the ongoing purge of the senior military leadership in China make significant military action against Taiwan less likely in the near term, barring a major event that the leadership feels they must respond to,” Jessica Chen Weiss, the faculty director of the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, wrote in an email to TMD.
But in the medium term, trends are running in China’s favor. China can expend more focus on Taiwan than the U.S. It’s able to direct most of its financial and operational resources on planning for an invasion of Taiwan, while the U.S. is stretched between a globe-spanning array of military commitments. Just in the brief war between Israel and Iran this summer, the U.S. used more than a quarter of its supply of high-end THAAD missile interceptors aiding in the defense of Israel—and China’s missile arsenal is significantly larger and more advanced than the Islamic Republic’s. “The United States is getting pulled in a lot of different directions, and China, frankly, is not,” Sacks told TMD. “The balance of power is shifting in China’s favor.”
Several U.S. officials have stated that China is aiming to have a military prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027. That doesn’t mean, however, that it would instantly do so. The state of opposing militaries and perceptions of U.S. preparedness to intervene would matter enormously, both Cancian and Sacks stressed to TMD.
Cancian argued that U.S. replenishment of its munitions stocks and Taiwanese investments in not just military hardware, but energy infrastructure and merchant fleets, would send a strong message to China. Taiwan’s recent shutdown of its last nuclear power plant, making it more reliant on energy imports, was concerning, he said. For Beijing’s part, any sustained investment in cheap, limited-range amphibious transport ships could signal preparations to invade. “If they start building lots of those, that’s when many people would get quite nervous,” he said.
That may not be in the next few years, if Xi’s comments to Trump are to be believed. But the Chinese president, who has said before that Taiwan “cannot be passed down from generation to generation,” may simply be biding his time. After all, Trump said that Xi’s assurances were followed by an ominous qualifier: “But I am very patient, and China is very patient.”
