What happens if China moves on Taiwan?: Explicit deterrence

The grid coordinate

TSMC fabricates over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Every chip inside the phones, servers, weapons systems, and AI processors reshaping every industry comes from a handful of fabs in Hsinchu, within range of Chinese ballistic missiles. That is not a metaphor. It is an engineering fact with a grid coordinate.

We have war-gamed this. The scenarios where deterrence held shared one feature: Beijing believed, before the first missile, that the US would fight. Not might. Would. Every scenario where ambiguity left room for doubt, China tested the doubt.

Strategic ambiguity made sense in 1979, when China’s navy could not cross the Strait and Taiwan’s semiconductor industry did not exist. The PLA Navy has grown to the world’s largest fleet by hull count. The 2022 exercises crossed the median line for the first time, fired missiles over the island. Xi watches the correlation of forces like a poker player watching pot odds, especially as China’s domestic economic problems make nationalist mobilization more attractive.

Our prescription: a clear declaratory policy, accelerated weapons deliveries, hardened basing in the Western Pacific, allied integration with Japan and Australia, and domestic semiconductor production at scale. The CHIPS Act was a start.

The accommodation realists flinch at the cost. Two carriers and thousands dead. But the cost of losing Taiwan without fighting is worse. Every treaty ally from Seoul to Tallinn recalculates. The trade architecture fractures along lines that will not repair.

Where we concede ground: A declaratory commitment constrains options against limited provocations like a blockade.

What would change our mind: China verifiably decommissioning amphibious assault ships and pulling missile batteries back for three years.

Read the full synthesis: What happens if China moves on Taiwan?