Even as the crisis in the Middle East demands America’s urgent attention, Washington cannot afford an escalating crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
America’s Taiwan problem is becoming steadily more difficult to handle. Cross-strait tensions are growing more antagonistic each week. The United States’ internal divisions on China policy persist, despite a broad consensus that the threat from Beijing must be confronted. Now, another crisis has erupted elsewhere in the world—drawing precious attention away from the island at a time of great risk. As America’s strategic bandwidth is stretched thin, Washington must find a way to manage risks in the Taiwan Strait to avoid being overwhelmed.
America Has Long Sent Mixed Signals on Taiwan
For quite some time, Washington has sent mixed signals on Taiwan. At the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the Chinese threat “real and possibly imminent.” At the same time, however, President Donald Trump has opted for a low profile after the call with Xi Jinping, perhaps because of a deliberate cost-benefit assessment. Notably, Taiwan has not become a bargaining chip in Trump’s conversations with Xi—a likely source of relief to the small island.
Yet the swing between high-profile posturing and quiet restraint may lead Beijing to believe—particularly in its more paranoid moments—that Washington is deliberately testing its red lines on Taiwan, which it sees as a non-negotiable core interest. Unpredictability from America could invite misjudgment from China, a step that would be in neither country’s strategic agendas.
Meanwhile, as tensions rise in the Taiwan Strait, a more proactive Taiwanese president, Lai Ching-te, is increasingly viewed by supporters and critics alike as the next Chen Shui-bian. Chen, the president of Taiwan from 2000 to 2008, achieved international notoriety for promoting Taiwanese independence—proposing “one country on each side” of the Taiwan Strait. This approach was popular in Taipei, but it enraged Beijing and pushed the Strait toward heightened tensions. Chen’s approach drew a rare public rebuke from former President George W. Bush during a joint appearance with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. At the time, America was deeply embroiled in the global war on terror, and it sought to prevent the Asia-Pacific from becoming another source of friction.
This episode illustrates that when Washington is forced to respond to simultaneous global crises, escalated tensions across the Taiwan Strait become a liability for the United States—one that could even result in Washington sidelining Taipei, with ominous implications.
Can the United States Handle Multiple Crises at Once?
Today, the Israel-Iran conflict is once again stretching America’s strategic bandwidth. The deployment of multiple carrier strike groups in the region reveals the inescapable need for the United States to maintain its air and naval presence in and around the Middle East. Although Trump has rhetorically left room for military flexibility, and a shaky ceasefire is reportedly in effect, the situation remains far from settled.
No one knows how long the Middle East will continue to preoccupy Washington. This means a potential conflict could spiral in East Asia that would once again put Washington on the back foot over whether to surge military forces into the Taiwan Strait.
If left unaddressed, such challenges could severely constrain America’s strategic flexibility and hamper its broader diplomatic and economic agenda. As defense analyst Brandon Weichert recently pointed out in these pages, Trump has made it abundantly clear that he is not interested in going to war with China over Taiwan and that his preference lies in prioritizing foreign commerce over confrontation. The United States cannot—and should not—allow tensions in the Taiwan Strait to escalate unchecked.
Of course, this does not mean abandoning the island altogether. Beijing’s ambition is still an existential threat, and deterrence is still indispensable. Washington must lead with clarity, build with purpose, and avoid wars not of its own choosing. This means sending consistent signals to Beijing that America is not interested in conflict—all while quietly pushing Taiwan to strengthen defensive resilience from the ground up, a step that the island should have long ago taken for itself. It also means urging Lai to dial back pro-independence rhetoric before the risks inherent in doing so spiral out of control.
Taiwan Needs Guns—but It Needs a Plan, Too
Foreign arms purchases are indispensable for Taiwan’s defense, but they alone cannot make the island defensible. What Taiwan truly needs is a military that can mobilize, communicate, and survive the first wave of a Chinese assault. In short, Taiwan needs to be prepared in a wide range of areas: military recruitment and morale, organizational structure, societal mobilization, battlefield medical care, and wartime energy security. Some of this can be helped along through discreet but substantive US assistance.
Persistent pressure from the United States has led Taiwan to make progress in some of these areas. Under Washington’s guidance, Taipei has restored conscription, tightened its reserve training, and established a dedicated mobilization agency. However, training remains extremely unscientific, frontline units face severe manpower shortfalls, and the overall force is shrinking due to a persistent failure to meet recruitment targets. As the recent wars in Ukraine and Afghanistan have highlighted, a military that lacks equipment is far better off than one that lacks capability. Institutional and cultural reform is essential.
One rare bright spot is battlefield medicine. America’s 2025 NDAA supported trauma care, and Taiwan is now applying US battlefield experience in Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) training across military, police, and civil defense units, for wartime scenarios.
Beyond that, however, the island’s social mobilization infrastructure, from wartime logistics to food distribution, remains outdated. Many of Taiwan’s contingency plans date to the Cold War era, when the People’s Liberation Army bore little resemblance to the modern fighting force it has become today. Alarm bells are ringing, but progress has been painfully slow.
The island also lacks a coherent operational doctrine and has yet to convince its people and military of how it would respond with resolve under real pressure. A recent trilateral war game hosted by retired American, Japanese, and Taiwanese General Staff Chiefs revealed the island’s troubling vacillation of coordinated response to a simulated full-scale PLA invasion. Even after losing key outlying islands, when asked whether Taiwan would attempt to retake them, the answer was a hesitant “no.” This starkly reflected the military’s lack of a coherent rules of engagement (ROE) and contingency planning framework, raising serious concerns about the unpredictable cost of potential US involvement.
While US-Taiwan military exchanges exist, the broader defense relationship lacks institutionalization. Symbolic gestures often take precedence. This might jeopardise America’s strategic interests in the long run, as it fails to entitle the island to assume greater responsibility. Washington must take the lead in formalizing and routinizing these quiet efforts.
America Must Manage China’s Perceptions—and Taiwan’s
Cooling tensions cannot be Washington’s job alone. Taipei must also manage risk. However, Lai, even in recent speeches, has consistently escalated his rhetoric and portrayed economic and cultural exchanges between Beijing and Taipei, such as those involving Taiwanese businesses and youth, as threats to national identity and sovereignty. The United States should neither endorse nor echo such maximalist rhetoric. Doing so only validates Beijing’s accusation that Taipei is using America to bolster its position—hampering America’s flexibility in managing the cross-Strait situation.
Most importantly, even as the United States continues to deepen its economic and security cooperation with Taiwan behind the scenes, Washington should urge Taipei to avoid flashy language. For instance, it should pressure the Lai administration to stop declaring that “US-Taiwan relations are at their best in history,” which annoys Beijing and deviates from Washington’s actual intent.
Conversely, the United States should make it clear that its core interest is maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. The best way to help Taiwan while preserving US interests is to urge Taipei to recognize the gravity of the situation and embark on serious defense preparations without being dragged into a quagmire.
Taiwan’s fall to a Chinese invasion would be a catastrophe for the United States, and it must do all that it can to prevent it. But neither can Taiwan remain a source of endless anxiety for US policymakers. Washington’s focus must be on making the island as defensible as possible—raising the costs of an invasion for Beijing—while exercising effective diplomacy to defuse tensions and maintain stable relations. This is how peace is preserved.
About the Author: Kevin Ting-chen Sun
Kevin Ting-Chen Sun is a senior legislative policy advisor in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan. He currently works with legislator Ching-hui Chen and previously advised former Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee Chair Charles I-hsin Chen. He is also a licensed attorney and a non-resident research fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-America Studies in Washington, DC.
Image: Shutterstock / kazu8.
