China has never renounced force against Taiwan, the military balance is shifting toward a window that closes by 2027, and Washington's forty-five-year policy of deliberate vagueness is under more pressure than at any point since normalization.
Imagine you are the most valuable factory on earth. You sit on an island one hundred miles from a military that has promised to take it back, in a country that has never declared independence, protected by a superpower that has never said whether it would fight. You manufacture 90 percent of the world's most advanced chips — the ones powering the AI revolution. You cannot be moved. You cannot be replicated in less than five years. In every war game ever run, you are destroyed in the opening salvo of the war fought to save you.
CSIS ran the simulation twenty-four times. The consistent finding was not who won. It was that winning looked indistinguishable from losing. Two aircraft carriers on the Pacific floor. Nine hundred aircraft destroyed. Japan's bases in Okinawa devastated. TSMC's fabs inoperable in every scenario. The global economy cratered. And that was the version where the invasion failed.
The camp built the arrangement and still defends it. Beijing cannot invade because it does not know if America fights. Taipei cannot declare independence because it does not know if America backs it. Three actors, three uncertainties, zero wars for forty-five years. The question is whether ambiguity survives a China whose economic challenges make nationalist mobilization more attractive.
The camp found their thesis in the CSIS scenarios that never fired — the ones where Beijing believed the US would fight. Make the cost unambiguous and Xi folds. The ran the cost ledger and found that a war destroying the thing it defends is not defense. It is ritual sacrifice in strategic language.
And — the twenty-three million people everyone else discusses as though they were a chip factory — would like a word about their own future.
The PLA is expected to reach full invasion capability by 2027. If that date passes without a crisis, someone claims vindication. If it does not, the argument about who saw it first will be the least interesting thing happening in the Western Pacific.
Where do you stand?
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