A Perfect Storm for Taiwan in 2026? |
In 2021, U.S. Navy Admiral Philip Davidson, then the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services that Beijing had set a serious goal of controlling Taiwan before 2027. “Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before then,” he warned. “And I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years.”
This prediction, which gained so much attention in Washington that it came to be known as the Davidson Window, quickly spurred action. Within the year, Congress authorized $7.1 billion for the newly created Pacific Deterrence Initiative, designed to boost the United States’ capability to deter Chinese military adventurism, and the policy community scrambled to develop strategies to counter Chinese military threats. The U.S. government offered so much diplomatic, political, economic, and security support to Taiwan that some veteran Taiwan watchers began to remind U.S. policymakers of the importance of reassuring China that the United States doesn’t support Taiwan independence.
In the past few years, however, many observers began to question the Davidson Window. They think China’s military is not ready for such a difficult operation—and for good reasons. An amphibious landing followed by an assault on a mountainous island like Taiwan would be operationally difficult. And China’s military is embroiled in rounds of purges that have ousted numerous senior generals. The costs and consequences of Russia’s war in Ukraine, meanwhile, have demonstrated the difficulty of a takeover and the devastating result of sanctions. China has enough other priorities, the theory goes, that Taiwan is unlikely to be on the agenda today.
But what this theory misses is that the Chinese view on Taiwan changed significantly in 2025. In the past year, China has been highly vocal about the inevitability and indisputability of what it calls its “reunification” with Taiwan. Although skeptics would say China has always made these claims, this time something is different: this time China believes it. The Chinese policy community is increasingly convinced that an effort to assert control of Taiwan will happen, and it could even be imminent if Taiwan does something to provoke Beijing. The fundamental driver of this new assessment is U.S. politics and the perception that U.S. President Donald Trump has little interest in defending Taiwan militarily. Augmenting it is Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s own tenacious pursuit of unification and the decline in popularity of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te. In other words, China sees an opportunity that may not arise again down the road.
There are moments in history when multiple internal and external factors act jointly to promote a certain outcome—when “perfect storms” brew and the seemingly unimaginable starts to take hold. Given the current circumstances, such a perfect storm for Taiwan might be coming sooner than people think.
Although Xi has instructed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be ready to take Taiwan by force by 2027, it is hard to imagine that China would take action that year. The Chinese Communist Party will have its 21st Party Congress in the fall of 2027, and in Chinese politics, the priority during any given party congress year is absolute stability. All decisions are evaluated first and foremost against whether they could cause even the slightest possibility of political uncertainty. The CCP is........