When China’s military launched its “Justice Mission 2025” exercises last December, simulating a blockade of Taiwan’s major ports and air routes, hundreds of civilian flights between Taiwan and its outlying islands were disrupted. For thousands of stranded passengers, the drills offered a brief, unsettling glimpse of what a real crisis might feel like.

They also exposed a question few in Washington want to confront: What happens to the hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians living in Taiwan—including roughly 11,000 Americans—when the next crisis isn’t a drill?

When China’s military launched its “Justice Mission 2025” exercises last December, simulating a blockade of Taiwan’s major ports and air routes, hundreds of civilian flights between Taiwan and its outlying islands were disrupted. For thousands of stranded passengers, the drills offered a brief, unsettling glimpse of what a real crisis might feel like.

This article is adapted from Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China, Eyck Freymann, Oxford University Press, 432pp., $29.99, April 2026

They also exposed a question few in Washington want to confront: What happens to the hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians living in Taiwan—including roughly 11,000 Americans—when the next crisis isn’t a drill?

The honest answer is that no one knows—because no one has a plan.

The question matters because the most likely path to a Taiwan crisis is not a sudden invasion, but a slow-rolling, gray-zone escalation over the course of weeks or months. There would be time for Taipei, Washington, and others to act, but every action taken by the U.S. president, including the decision about whether to evacuate U.S. civilians, would itself become a signal in the escalation spiral.

Simply put: A crisis over Taiwan might not begin with the first shot. It could begin with the first flight out.

In a grim sense, the presence of foreign civilians in Taiwan is one of the strongest deterrents against a Chinese surprise attack. As of April 2023, Taiwan was home to more than 800,000 foreign residents representing 164 countries, plus an unknown number of Chinese nationals. Some 700,000 of these foreigners come from Southeast Asia, but there are also substantial communities of Americans, British, Canadians, French, Germans, Indians, Japanese, Singaporeans, and South Koreans, among others.

If Chinese strikes killed or injured large numbers of these civilians or made it impossible for them to be safely evacuated, Beijing would risk drawing their home countries into the conflict. For that reason, it would likely prefer to pressure foreign governments into pulling their people out of Taiwan before it made any military move.

But extracting those populations would be an enormous undertaking—and one the United States and its allies are strikingly unprepared for. A noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO) from Taiwan would dwarf anything the United States and its allies have ever attempted.

The Defense Department’s joint publication on NEOs lays out an elaborate doctrine for how the process is generally supposed to work, involving coordination between the State Department and the Pentagon, agreements with host countries, and staged phases of evacuation. None of this has been adapted for a Taiwan scenario. In 2023, the House Armed........

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