Major General Thomas Sherman, Vice Superintendent. Brigadier General Gavin Marks, Commandant of Cadets. Thank you for this invitation to address you today.
This is my first visit to the US Air Force Academy and this spectacular Cadet Chapel.
I’ve recently delivered lectures on the US, China and deterrence over Taiwan at the Army War College in Pennsylvania, at the Naval War College at Newport, the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, at INDOPACOM in Hawaii, and late last year to the National War College in Washington, DC.
So I’m glad I’ve finally made it to the Air Force.
Personally, I’m from a divided family – my father was Army in World War Two, my wife’s father was proudly a navigator with the Royal Australian Air Force.
So my wife is particularly pleased that I am with her team here in Colorado today – with what she still regards as the superior service.
I’m told that there are students at the Academy from all the corners of the world.
Can I thank each of you for your service, but in particular to the US cadets today, as Australia has stood shoulder to shoulder with you as one of your closest allies for more than 100 years.
In fact the Royal Australian Flying Corps and the United States Army Air Service first flew in action together on July 4, 1918, when resupplying US and Australian troops with 100,000 rounds of ammunition, where they successfully broke the Hindenburg Line in the Battle of Hamel.
I understand that most of you are undergraduates, at the beginning of your careers, and that in addition to studying military strategy and history, you are also mastering the critical disciplines of the hard sciences that will shape the technologies of the future and how best to deploy them.
I wish you well in your studies.
I’m also told that the Academy class of 2020 was the first to graduate new officers into the US Space Force, and that the Academy is now the premier institution for training for Space Force.
The development of the US Space Force and its integration into training programs here is critical for the future.
Whereas our core mission of deterrence is an enduring one, the military and non-military means by which we do so is constantly evolving.
Nowhere is this challenge of deterrence greater, or with greater consequence for the United States and its allies, than in the Taiwan Strait.
My purpose here today is to reflect on how collectively we best achieve deterrence over Taiwan.
That is, how to deter China from resorting to unilateral military action to take Taiwan by force.
And as with my previous lectures on this subject at the other US service academies, I do so in my private capacity as a China scholar over the last 50 years, rather than in my public capacity as Australia’s Ambassador to the United States.
The Importance of Taiwan
You might ask the question of why deterrence over Taiwan is important.
Why should we care about Taiwan?
Taiwan lies at the centre of a web of national security considerations for the United States and its allies.
First, maintaining the current status quo over Taiwan complicates any future central power projection from continental Asia into the Pacific.
Second, a failure to deter China over Taiwan would have far- reaching implications for US alliance structures across the Indo- Pacific, thereby undermining the collective strength of the US strategic posture across the wider region.
Third, maintaining the status quo over Taiwan ensures that world- leading semiconductors are readily available for the free world – and semiconductors are fundamental to the future of artificial intelligence and what we now call the fourth industrial revolution.
Fourth, maintaining the status quo also allows for a flourishing democracy for the people on Taiwan, thereby establishing beyond any doubt that liberal democracy too finds its universal home among the Confucian cultures of North-East Asia.
And finally, for their part, surveys show that the vast majority of the people on Taiwan themselves prefer the status quo to any other arrangement and would be prepared to fight for it.
By contrast, the CCP claims Taiwan as its own.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fought a civil war with the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT).
For the CCP, that civil war did not end when the KMT fled China in 1949.
Rather, it continues to this day.
For the CCP, unification with Taiwan is a ‘core interest’ and China says that it will not renounce non-peaceful means to achieve this goal.
China has said publicly that its plan is for the PLA to be capable of resolving the Taiwan issue by force if needed.
This does not mean invasion is imminent or certain. What is certain is that China will continue its “grey zone” campaign against Taiwan to exhaust Taiwan’s defences, to undermine Taiwan’s cyber security and to weaken the resolve of its body politic.
The risk and consequence of a war either by design or by accident - including through an incorrect calculation on deterrence or signalling by either side – would be catastrophic and with far- reaching economic downsides for China, the US and the world.
Like the United States, Australia has a one-China policy.
This means that while we have a substantial relationship with Taiwan, we do not have formal diplomatic ties with it as we would with an independent state.
We regard Taiwan as an important trading partner.
Maintaining the status quo across the Taiwan Strait is therefore entirely consistent with the one-China policy.
And in Australia’s view, maintaining the status quo also best serves the peace and stability of our wider Indo-Pacific region.
By contrast, a war over Taiwan would destroy pan-regional and strategic stability that has underpinned more than half a century of sustained economic growth for the region and the world.
The Importance of Deterrence
Sustaining the status quo across the Taiwan Strait is nonetheless becoming increasingly problematic in the midst of deepening strategic competition between the US and China across multiple domains of trade, investment, technology, foreign policy, ideology and, of course, national security.
Over the past year, across previous lectures, I have sought to explore different elements of the doctrine of deterrence in an effort to identify core differences between Chinese and US understandings of both the concept, and how it is being applied by both Beijing and Washington in the real world.
First, China’s concept of deterrence, or ‘weishe’ 威慑, is much broader than the western concept of deterrence, as it includes a combination of deterrence, compellence and dissuasion through calculated escalation.
Second, the Chinese concept of ‘effective control’, or youxiao kongzhi 有效控制, represents the conceptual machinery for operationalising the Chinese theory of deterrence.
This is designed to maintain ‘effective control’ by managing escalation seamlessly through the deterrence and compellence phases of a crisis.
Importantly, this so-called controlled escalation also embraces the possibility of limited kinetic activity to force an adversary to stop what they are doing, rather than just preventing them from doing it in the first place.
Third, China’s grey-zone campaign (or what the literature calls “measures short of war”) against Taiwan is teaching China useful lessons as it encounters little by way of cost imposed by the US, allies or Taiwan itself – in other words, the grey zone has become a domain in which allied deterrence has so far failed.
Fourth, the US, its allies and partners must improve their strategy of integrated deterrence across all elements of national power – including the full range of economic, technological, military, foreign policy and ideological tools available to it.
Finally, as part of this, I’ve also argued we need to create a robust architecture of military deterrence anchored in a strategy of denial, that speaks to every echelon of decision-making in Beijing.
In deterring the PLA, we also need to understand that the PLA’s perception of its own capabilities is layered with a combination of both confidence and anxiety.
The PLA is confident in its new-found capabilities.
But equally the PLA are deeply conscious of their lack of successful battle-field experience – the last land war was their unsuccessful border war against Vietnam in 1979.
China also has no post-1949 tradition of naval combat to draw upon.
And even less when it comes to joint operations in actual war- time conditions.
The PLA is therefore a force that is emboldened, yet still brittle, brazen yet insecure, professional but still burdened by its own sorry history of corruption.
The PLA is therefore a formidable but by no means unbeatable force.
The Trump Administration and Deterrence
President Trump and his team have made clear that they intend to focus US defence and deterrence policy on the Indo-Pacific region.
In Secretary Hegseth’s ‘Message to the Force’ issued on only his second day in the job, he outlined his priorities, stating that “we will work with allies and partners to deter aggression in the Indo- Pacific by Communist China…”
Last week, at the US Naval Academy, the Defense Secretary said that he was focused with President Trump on ensuring that the US “was prepared to deter the wars we don’t need to fight”.
He added that “when deterrence fails, other people take opportunity inside that space… re-establishing deterrence is about declaring what you stand for, and then be willing to enforce it”.
The previous week, Secretary Hegseth said in Japan during his first visit abroad that “America is committed to sustaining robust, ready and credible deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, including across the Taiwan Strait”.
Furthermore, the media reported last week that the Defence Department has prepared policy guidance that states that “China is the department’s sole pacing threat, and denial of a Chinese fait accompli to seize Taiwan… is the department’s sole pacing scenario”.
Secretary of State Rubio said in February that “the best way to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is to ensure a robust US military capability to respond decisively”.
And earlier that week, Secretary Rubio had exempted defence aid to Taiwan from the Administration’s ongoing review of US funding.
The President’s National Security Adviser, has been no less clear. After he was nominated to the position, NSA Waltz said that the US must “finally focus strategic attention where it should be – countering the greater threat from China”.
He said that the new Administration “should increase defence spending and revitalise the defence industrial base to make sure its armed forces are clearly capable of denying a Chinese attack on Taiwan… by doing so, the US can end ongoing conflicts and restore deterrence, stability and peace”.
Deterrence of China over Taiwan, therefore, is a cornerstone of the Trump Administration’s China Strategy.
China’s Strategy towards Taiwan – Deterring Taipei
For China, deterrence in relation to Taiwan is seen as a coercive political tool.
China in its own worldview is seeking to deter Taiwan from drifting away from the motherland, politically, economically and culturally.
Instead, it seeks a Taiwan that is deeply integrated with China under the One Country, Two Systems formula that it has applied to Hong Kong.
And it seeks to ensure that outcome by military means if other means fail.
China therefore opposes any political contact by other countries with Taiwan’s leadership.
That is why it opposes other countries negotiating trade agreements with Taiwan.
And why it opposes other countries having any military engagement with Taiwan.
China over the last decade has also been ramping up the full spectrum of its coercion against the Taiwanese government, corporations and people.
China’s goal is to wear Taiwan down, bit by bit, sector by sector, and ensure that the Taiwanese people feel there is no credible alternative but to submit to China’s demand for unification.
China’s political, economic and military tactics are nonetheless carefully calibrated to stay below the threshold of open conflict.
It seeks to gradually create a “new normal”, both within Taiwan and with other countries in their engagement with Taiwan, that creates strategic conditions in support of China’s unification ambition.
Its tactics are inspired in part by Sun Tzu’s principle of “subduing the enemy without fighting”.
Nonetheless, China will continue to push its political and military tactics to the edge of conflict, while not at this stage at least crossing that line.
We see this in, for example, China’s decision to now send the same type of reconnaissance balloons over Taiwan as you saw here over Montana in 2023.
Or its decision to fire missiles over Taiwan’s main island for the first time in 2022.
Or in its military exercises around Taiwan just last week.
Where China judges it can maintain ‘effective control’ of the situation without running the risk of open conflict, the record demonstrates that Beijing will continue to push hard.
This is not surprising, because Chinese military strategy falls within a wider CCP ideological framework of Marxist-Leninism where the role of the Party is always to accelerate otherwise gradual change.
China’s leaders are Leninists. As Vladimir Lenin himself said, in his less than poetic phrase, “when you probe with a bayonet, if you find mush, you push; if you find steel, you withdraw”.
So while China since 2022 may have routinely crossed the median line in its air sorties against Taipei, and despite all the waves of PLA Air Force, PLA Navy and Chinese Coast Guard drills around Taiwan, China has not, at least according to the public record, ever intruded within Taiwan’s 12 nautical mile territorial limit.
At this stage it appears that Beijing believes that crossing over Taiwan’s well-defined territorial limits would be a bridge too far, because they assess that if they did so, they could not be confident of escalation control.
Nonetheless, the net effect of China’s overall grey zone campaign is to create uncertainty in the minds of Taiwan’s leaders, to soften Taiwanese public opinion, while also creating a new normal for China from which they could quickly escalate in the future, with Chinese vessels and aircraft routinely operating closer and closer to Taiwan’s main island.
Political and Diplomatic Deterrence
China’s political strategy for victory over Taiwan requires that the Taiwanese people conclude they have no other option but to submit to Beijing’s preferences.
For China, it is essential therefore that the Taiwanese feel alone.
To this end, China has long had a robust strategy of political and diplomatic deterrence of the US, its allies and partners, aimed at decoupling them from Taiwan to the greatest extent possible.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) recently found that in 2024, 48 per cent – that is, almost half – of China’s official statements objecting to other countries interactions with Taiwan focused on foreign governments violating China’s definition of the ‘one-China principle’.
This is a charge China usually levels against any action by other states that suggests that Taiwan has a distinct political personality.
As part of the deterrence stakes, China will always say that the political foundation of its diplomatic relations with other states is adherence to China’s definition of the ‘one-China principle’.
China objects vociferously to any perception that Taiwan could have any level of separate agency within the international system.
To that end, China’s criticisms have increasingly focused on any country questioning China’s application of United Nations Resolution 2758, which passed China’s UN seat from Taipei to Beijing in 1971.
That resolution was actually silent on the question of Taiwan’s international political status.
But in recent years, Beijing has increasingly inserted into its international agreements language that conflates its definition of its one-China principle with UN Resolution 2758, thereby arguing that the one-China principle is grounded in international law, rather than simply being an articulation of China’s national positions.
This is important because if this interpretation is accepted, it means that in any future military action against Taiwan, Beijing will then seek to rely on a series of UN resolutions, arguing that Taiwan is purely an internal affair, and that any outside military interference is therefore unlawful.
More broadly, China also seeks to deter individuals in Taiwan and elsewhere by circumscribing the bounds of debate on Taiwan, and raising the costs for overstepping it.
Just ten days ago, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office launched a new section on its website to allow the public to report on “Taiwan independence enforcers and accomplices”.
This built on regulations that China passed in July last year, which encouraged China’s courts and law enforcement agencies to apply the death penalty for “Taiwan independence advocates”.
And all this falls within the PRC’s anti-secession law passed in 2005 which threatens the use of military force if Taiwan declares independence, takes actions tantamount to independence, or more critically for our current purposes, “if the possibilities for a peaceful reunification are completely exhausted”.
And under this law it is Beijing that determines what is meant by “peacefully exhausted”.
Economic Deterrence
In addition to political and diplomatic deterrence, Beijing’s strategy for isolating Taiwan also involves economic deterrence.
Small countries like Lithuania have already felt the brunt of this when China cut all imports from the country in response to a perceived transgression on the status of the Taiwanese representative office in Vilnius.
In recent years, airlines in both my country and yours, including Qantas, American Airlines, Delta and United, have all yielded to China’s demands that they change the way they refer to Taiwan in their public information.
Taiwan’s cities are now listed by those airlines as being within a province of China.
In Australia, we also suffered some $20 billion of trade sanctions from Beijing because we had the temerity to call for an independent international investigation into the origins of Covid- 19.
China’s message is clear: they are willing to impose economic costs in pursuit of Beijing’s political and foreign policy ambitions – most particularly Taiwan.
For Taiwan itself, China consistently revokes, at key political and geopolitical moments, the tariff-free status of Taiwanese exports.
Or it imposes anti-dumping investigations and tariffs against Taiwanese companies.
Targets often include Taiwanese fruit exports like pineapples and pomelos.
The political targets of such measures are usually electoral constituencies that either support the governing DPP, or who would otherwise be in the political middle ground.
The economic message from Beijing is clear: Taiwan needs China, and there are costs to be imposed by Beijing if Taipei continues to stray from the path of unification.
Chinese Military Deterrence
It is in the military sphere, however, that we focus our primary attention when considering deterrence over Taiwan.
What do China’s doctrinal statements and military literature say about how it will deter Taiwan, the US and its allies?
Dr David Finkelstein at the DC-based Centre for Naval Analyses has looked at these questions.
Finkelstein argues that the essence of military competition between the US Joint Force (including its allies) and the PLA is a competition between two operational visions, each of which has its own deterrent component.
For its vision, the US Joint Force seeks to ensure that it can continue to deploy, move, and strike at will over great distances, anywhere in the region, in defence of US national interests, as well as those of US allies and partners, as has been the case for decades – and in the case of Taiwan, to deny China military dominance of the Taiwan Strait that would be necessary to execute an invasion.
For its part, the PLA’s counter-vision is to ensure that no foreign military – especially that of the United States – can operate in China’s vicinity with impunity, and that no military can engage the PLA or intervene in its operations in China’s vicinity without confronting great operational risk.
Against those objectives, both armed forces are continually adjusting their warfighting doctrines, adapting their force postures in the region, and improving their logistical, technological and command, control and communications and intelligent systems.
Therefore, within its own operational doctrine, what is China currently doing to advance its vision of military deterrence?
The RAND Corporation found that the clearest menu of Chinese deterrence actions comes from the 2015 version of the Science of Military Strategy (SMS), the flagship publication produced by the PLA’s Academy of Military Sciences (AMS).
The 2015 SMS listed eight key Chinese deterrence actions. These were (in ascending order):
• To ‘create a climate of war’ (yingzao zhanzheng qifen, 营造战争⽓氛)
• To ‘display advanced weapons’ (zhanshi xianjin wuqi, 展示先进武器)
• To ‘hold military exercises’ (juxing junshi zixi, 举⾏军事渍
• To ‘adjust military deployments’ (tiaozheng junshi bushu, 调整军事部署)
• To ‘increase combat readiness’ (tisheng zhanbei dengji, 提升战备等级)
• To ‘implement information attack’ (shishi xinxi gongji, 實施信息攻擊)
• To ‘restrict military operations’ (xianzhixing junshi xingdong, 限制性军事⾏动), and
• To ‘warn of a military strike’ (jingchengxing junshi daji, 警承性军事打击)
At one level it could be agreed that China has already moved through the first four of these eight sets of deterrence actions, albeit with limited impact on real-world policy and behaviour by the US and Taiwan.
The predisposition to move up the Chinese scale of deterrence is therefore likely to become more attractive to the Chinese leadership.
RAND’s analysis of these eight key sets of deterrence actions also reveals a number of additional elements of the PLA’s overall deterrent posture.
Mobilising, moving or exercising military forces is the most common form of deterrence action referenced across Chinese military texts.
These include military exercises, weapons tests, and adjustments to its military posture.
Increasing military readiness, too, can be a useful way to calibrate the intensity of deterrence.
This means increasing combat readiness, conducting patrols, having leaders make statements of resolve, undertaking visits to key facilities, and raising the weapon alert status.
These actions are intended to signal increasing preparations for war through demonstrating both capability and resolve.
At a certain point in Chinese military doctrine, however, if an adversary has not backed down, then conducting demonstration attacks, warning strikes or limited offensive operations are embraced as signalling heightened capability and resolve.
While China may intend for these individual actions to be small in scope, in reality they represent an offensive use of force within their own perception of an overall deterrence framework.
It is here that the risk of retaliatory escalation is greatest.
As I have noted in previous addresses, Xi Jinping has suggested he may be personally attracted to this path.
On the 70th anniversary of China’s intervention into the Korean War, Xi said “it is necessary to speak to invaders in the language they know; that is, use war to prevent war, and use a military victory to win peace and respect”.
Another more aggressive set of options intended to serve China’s deterrence purposes is to degrade an adversary’s capabilities and/or operational space.
This would include cyberattacks and establishing no-fly or no-sail zones.
Beyond the military effects, the deeper purpose of such actions would be to create psychological pressure as well as limiting the adversary’s warfighting capability.
Beyond these military actions, China as noted above has a broad view of deterrence, and considers non-military actions to fall within it, including the political, economic and public opinion vectors referred to above.
Where, then, does this leave us as we compare Western and Chinese conceptions of deterrence?
Disturbingly, we see that there are clear differences in the two sides’ conceptual approaches to deterrence.
First and foremost, doctrinally, the PLA does not recognise the risk of escalation in a crisis.
The PLA’s deep theoretical embrace of the notion of maintaining ‘effective control’ risks overconfidence, a desire to please the party leadership, and straight-out hubris.
A second difference is a signalling one: the PLA conflates deterrence actions with actual preparations for war.
In other words, during a crisis the PLA could undertake actions that are intended to look like preparations for war in order to deter the US on Taiwan.
But in reality these are likely to be perceived by the US and Taiwan (particularly in an environment of “use it or lose it”) as a signal of real-world intention by the PLA to launch military operations imminently.
Potentially, this is deeply destabilising.
Third, certain deterrence actions considered by the PLA to be de- escalatory, could in fact be highly escalatory in the perception of others.
One disturbing example of this arose during a US-China think- tank nuclear dialogue: the China side said that Chinese military planners thought Chinese strikes against US space-based assets would be de-escalatory.
Chinese planners thought that because the US depended so heavily on those space-based assets for conventional and nuclear operations, the US would back down if they were destroyed.
US participants had to tell the Chinese dialogue partners that the opposite would be true: that such strikes could well be considered a prelude to a nuclear attack on the US homeland and could therefore warrant a US nuclear retaliation.
The Chinese were reportedly incredulous.
China’s Rehearsals for War
Just last week, China conducted two days of large-scale exercises around Taiwan.
China called those exercises ‘Strait Thunder 2025A’.
The drills were conducted by China’s Eastern Theater Command (ETC) and exercised China’s joint operations capability.
They involved the PLA Army, Navy, Air Force and Rocket Force, as well as China’s Coastguard.
The drills surrounded Taiwan. They reportedly involved:
• establishing no-sail and no-fly zones;
• long-range missile fires;
• propaganda videos of missiles destroying Taiwan’s cities;
• displaying advanced weaponry in the form of H-6K bomber aircraft with YJ-21 anti-ship missiles; and
• an aircraft carrier situated to Taiwan’s east rehearsing a blockade.
You will recognise various of these elements from the eight key Chinese deterrence actions that we discussed.
This is the PLA putting theory into practice.
The PLA Eastern Theatre Command said that its drills were a “powerful deterrent” (qiangyouli de weishe, 强有⼒的威慑) to Taiwan independence separatist forces”.
The Eastern Theatre Command said it sought to demonstrate “comprehensive control” (quanmian kongzhi, 全⾯控制) – in other words, to give effect to the doctrine of “effective control”.
The PLA said it was “focused on identification and verification, warning, expulsion and detention to test… area regulation and control, joint blockade and control and precision strikes”.
The PLA said its drills involved precision strikes on simulated targets of key ports and energy facilities.
Furthermore, the propaganda video that the Eastern Theatre Command produced said that China would “control energy corridors, disrupt supply routes [and] block clandestine routes to dock”.
What was China trying to tell Taiwan and the United States and its allies through these exercises?
Part of the story was China registering its displeasure at recent Taiwanese and US actions.
Taiwan President Lai recently described China as a ‘hostile foreign force’ as part of a legislative debate on the passage of new counter-subversion laws.
As for the US, during the first weeks of the Trump Administration, the State Department had modified the way it described its one-China policy, warranting a full scale public fusillade from the Chinese propaganda apparatus.
China would most likely have conducted Joint Exercise Strike Thunder 2025-A in the absence of these actions.
China nonetheless used them as its political rationale for rehearsing its growing capability sets through last week’s exercises.
So what did these drills tell us about what China would do in practice against Taiwan and against any intervention by the United States in the event of a real crisis?
First, the drills indicate that China believes it is increasingly able to impose a blockade around Taiwanese assets.
Chinese media reported that China’s coastguard conducted law enforcement patrols including “inspection and capture, interception and detention operations”.
The PLA worked to prevent ships from leaving Taiwan.
In other words, that China believed it was capable of enforcing a blockade.
Second, the drills also sought to demonstrate how China could repel any intervention by the United States.
Missiles fired from China’s mainland into the sea showed that China believed it could hold US warships at risk.
The Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong’s operations to Taiwan’s east – in other words, between Taiwan and the US – appeared to demonstrate how China would seek to gain air superiority around Taiwan’s maritime periphery and prevent reinforcements arriving.
Sorties in the Taiwan Strait by the PLA Air Force were also intended to demonstrate a similar strategy of area denial.
Third, the recent drills also involved psychological operations. The PLA ran a campaign called ‘Closing In’ (bijin, 逼近).
It also ran a coordinated social media campaign against Taiwan’s president, William Lai, depicting him as a “parasite” dragging Taiwan into war.
The attacks against Lai have been more aggressive than China’s attacks against his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen.
Taiwan meanwhile said that China had engaged in disinformation by seeding media reporting that a ship that had been carrying natural gas was unable to leave port.
Taiwan said that was false.
Is Chinese Deterrence Working against Taiwan?
Is any of China’s deterrence strategy and doctrine actually working?
Is China successfully deterring Taiwan? Or the United States?
In recent years, the military scales have begun tipping more in Beijing’s direction across the Taiwan Straits.
But it is in the grey-zone in particular that China has succeeded in its campaign without incurring real costs.
China has nullified the concept of a median line in the Taiwan Strait.
China has normalised a high tempo of military coercion around the island.
China has also been able to rehearse a blockade of the island with impunity.
Once China has shifted the status quo, it’s very difficult to restore it.
We should also look to the South China Sea for further example of how China over time seeks to create a new normal on the ground by gradually changing its tactics.
Following a stand-off in 2012, China was able to seize the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.
It now restricts access by Filipino fishermen and has reinforced its claims by drawing straight baselines around the shoal.
All these measures are in the grey-zone. All are measures short of war.
And China has succeeded in each without any real penalty.
However, while China has been succeeding in the grey-zone, we must recognise that against Beijing’s over-riding objective of undermining Taiwan’s domestic political resolve, it does not appear to be succeeding at all.
Taiwanese public opinion remains strong.
Although within Taiwanese domestic politics, the KMT has become a more compliant instrument of China’s strategy against
the DPP government’s efforts to significantly increase Taiwan’s defence outlays.
And in doing so, a more divided Taiwanese polity will be seen in Beijing as a political success.
As for the United States, the second critical political target of China’s own deterrence strategy over Taiwan, based on authoritative statements to date, neither Democrat nor Republican Administrations have budged one inch.
For the US, the centrality attached to deterring Chinese military action over Taiwan to change the status quo remains unchanged.
This has been underlined once again as recently as yesterday in the joint statement by G7 foreign ministers.
Conclusion
So how do we best assess the overall state of deterrence over the Taiwan Straits as of 2025?
Against any objective measure, in the 75 years since the beginning of the People’s Republic in 1949, US deterrence of China over Taiwan has worked.
No Chinese political leader (including Mao) has been prepared so far to risk military action.
The risk posed by the US military has simply been too great.
And this was the case during all three Taiwan Straits crises during the last century.
But the overall fabric of US and allies deterrence is now under considerable pressure:
• in terms of China’s overall growth in military capabilities to execute a military assault;
• most particularly in China’s grey-zone campaign that is creating a series of ‘new normals’ across the Taiwan Strait and without China’s government or the PLA paying any explicit costs for doing so; and
• in Taiwan’s increasingly divided domestic polity and its increasingly contested international operating space.
In other words, China’s efforts at deterring Taiwan, the US and its allies may now be having some success in adjusting the strategic dial more in Beijing’s favour.
The core failure, however, in China’s overall strategy is its continued capacity to alienate Taiwanese public opinion.
And this is where the Taiwan question becomes dangerous indeed.
As China’s overall deterrence efforts through its own form of political, economic and military escalation continues, Beijing begins to reach its own self-perceived limits.
Or to use Lenin’s unfortunate analogy once again, where China’s bayonet no longer encounters softness, but instead encounters steel.
Does China withdraw the bayonet at that point?
Or do they continue to push, at which point escalation control is potentially lost?
And how will China calibrate its military strategy against its political strategy if at the next Taiwanese presidential elections (now less than three years away), the Taiwanese people once again say no to China’s pressure campaign by returning the DPP to the presidency?
By that stage, Xi Jinping will be 75 and he would be approaching 80 if he deferred the Taiwan question for yet another Taiwanese political term.
We are indeed living in the dangerous decade.
The decade in which many of you in this great gathering place will be entering active duty.
And that is why it’s imperative for us all to double down on effective deterrence.
Politically, economically and most importantly, militarily.
Including all the instruments of policy through our combined and integrated statecraft.
And by dealing with the present ‘deterrence-free’ domain that is called the grey-zone.
Because only deterrence will preserve the peace.
And because a general war is simply too catastrophic to contemplate.