On Taiwan and its sovereignty, alarmism has become a hallmark of conflict prediction and analysis. Some of it is well-founded, such as the critical lack of interceptors and exquisite strike munitions available to the United States and its allies, but much of the current fear is the sum of highly specific views on how a war would unfold. The prevailing framing relies on readers accepting that China can pursue multiple strategies at once while Taiwan and its allies merely observe, which drives an unrealistic view of the “China Threat” as potentially overwhelming. A recent example is the claim that warning times of a Chinese attack have been decreasing. In reality, this does not mean that the People’s Liberation Army can make thousands of troops and their logistics appear overnight on the beaches of Northern Taipei; it more likely means the missiles on the ships that China keeps moving ever closer to Taiwan (within range of Taiwanese Hsiung Feng III batteries) have to travel less distance to hit their targets.
This position should be reframed: policy makers should focus on what is possible, and analysts should present causal arguments organized by their commonalities or contrasts with past cases. This is the essence of John Stuart Mill’s method of agreement and disagreement, which identifies common or uncommon variables across like or differing cases. On China, two key factors, both with abundant historical examples, should drive analysis: what does Beijing seek to accomplish, and what can the Chinese military actually do? Crucially, these assessments cannot be made in a void in which each analyst selects the variables that best justify a preferred conclusion. To be credible, an argument must engage the existing body of work, and it should either challenge the conventional wisdom or build upon it; reinventing premises from scratch only propagates confirmation bias.
Taking Beijing at its word, the One China Policy holds that it must bring the “Renegade Province” of Taiwan back into its political sphere. Proponents take this to mean Beijing does not necessarily seek armed conflict and could instead leverage cognitive warfare. This suggests that analysis need not be guided by military considerations alone. But if analysts claim cognitive warfare can make Taiwan accept Beijing as its sole government, they must show why and point to cases that support it. They might argue it sapped Ukraine’s morale or made its allies sluggish; while critics will note that it did not help Russia bring its Special Military Operation to a swift end. Without grounding such theories in historical cases, the conclusion simply becomes whatever premise the author wishes to support.
China’s military also faces constraints that deserve greater attention and can be demonstrated through historical cases. Of course, Beijing can employ many means at once to pursue Taiwanese capitulation, but to argue that individual variables sum into a greater event without testing their interaction is a methodological failure. China can probably mine the waters around Taiwan; but are we then to expect an amphibious assault against those same coastlines? These constraints are not abstract. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has no experience of modern combat and depends on a highly responsive joint-fires solution to survive in contested waters. Are there historical examples of states with no combat experience succeeding, or adapting quickly under pressure? Can we expect China to replicate them, or do specific factors make failure more likely?
Perhaps China will instead blockade Taiwan, through a combination of ships and aircraft. But is it willing to bear the cost of combat operations near the Japanese island of Yonaguni (just 107 kilometers from Taiwan) or the Luzon Strait? It could suppress both, but only by diverting resources from the main effort. Until demonstrated and tested against historical cases, this remains an untested suggestion, not a determination. The PLAN’s force design is also deliberately regional: Beijing has not built it to underwrite global commerce. Even now, it relies on the United States Navy to keep sea lanes open. A blockade would therefore imperil the very freedom of navigation on which China’s export-led economy depends. Nor would it unfold in isolation: should China not expect a counter-blockade, especially in the Straits of Malacca, Luzon, and Miyako? How long could each side endure interdiction? These too are constraints to be assessed, not presumed.
Can China bomb Taiwan into submission? Critics of air power will point to the recent United States’ bombing campaign in Iran as having failed to achieve its stated aims. Proponents could rebut, noting political differences between Taiwan and Iran, or citing Ukraine’s operational strikes (logistical routes 20–300 kilometers from the front) and strategic strikes (oil refineries and military manufacturing beyond) against Russia. Further, is there reason to believe that China will better suppress enemy air defenses than the United States, and if so, which case supports that assumption? Any assessment must present either cases of agreement with the conventional wisdom (that it is difficult, likely slow, and costly) or of disagreement in China’s favor. Simply counting missiles will not help make a prediction. A campaign would also hinge on integrating theater air forces with the mainland-based Rocket Force along a joint solution which China has organized for but never executed under fire. Narrowing the vertical-launch gap may improve the arithmetic of salvos, but that itself is a trap. Throughout the Cold War, analysts mistook inventory and technology for capability through a fixation on “bean-counting.”
While warning times emphasize constant alarmism, some constants remain. Can the Chinese military mass a force capable of invading Taiwan, or its outlying islands, undetected and overnight? If not, open-source analysis should establish how long it would take; if the answer is anything over two weeks, then we have identified a clear and almost immovable constraint (analysts should obviously be encouraged to reassess assumptions over time). Further, are there historical example of island hoping campaigns or amphibious assaults? If so, it should anchor further analysis unless key differences are identified which would make the case an improper example. Moreover, it is often hinted that warfare has changed so much that historical examples may no longer apply. If this is an accepted analytical premise there must be a clear explanation which highlights divergences from historical examples across multiple variables. Simply citing the number of casualties inflicted by drones in Ukraine will not do, because it ignores crucial factors: would NATO suppress Russian air defenses and hit supply lines with drones, or with F-35s? Is Ukraine using drones because they are cheaper and better than the F-35, or because it has none? Of course there are nuances, but only proper analysis which seeks to reconcile multiple variables and test interaction effects can reveal this.
This strikes at the core of the issue. The problem is not data but method. Aggregating an ever-greater mass of untested variables and assumptions will not predict anything. It will merely regurgitate the user’s assumptions. As artificial intelligence enters the analytical process, methodology will only become more important. Absent a proper method for building transparent causal argument which supports a falsifiable theory, analysts will keep reinventing the wheel under models that appear rigorous but rest on conclusions that can never be tested. This applies to the most basic question of all: is China seeking a long war or a short one? The two are not interchangeable and cannot be treated as an assumed binary. If Beijing plans a short, sharp campaign, what happens when it becomes long? If it prepares for a protracted conflict, what happens to its export-led economy? Each scenario carries its own constraints, and only proper assessment can chart a path forward. Here again, studies of the Soviet Union’s own preparations for a long war describe how authoritarian war economies plan for, and endure, conflicts of sharply differing duration (the work is already out there; engage with it).
Much of today’s Taiwan analysis exists within its own bubble and consistently seeks to reinvent notions with clear historical precedent while offering little reason for doing so. Proper methodology saves not only money and time. It also preserves the sanity and focuses of the policy makers facing the growing number of “novel” and seemingly unconstrained “threats.” Most of all, one wishes today’s analysts remembered the lessons of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union seemed unconstrained and poised to surpass the United States.
Those lessons matter precisely because they are so often ignored. As Paul Dibb has argued, Western assessments of the Soviet Union were misleading because the USSR was an exceedingly difficult intelligence target, breeding a persistent fear that Soviet growth was outstripping the United States and that Moscow was winning. Analysts also failed to contextualize Soviet economic performance, mistaking aggregate figures for strength while overlooking the immense depth of structural issues. Post-Cold War documents revealed that what looked like relentless ambition was in fact a security dilemma rooted in deep insecurity (paranoia is not foresight). Even George F. Kennan’s containment strategy was misread. Its aim was never to entirely stifle Soviet growth but to deter war while internal pressures matured, a misreading Beijing arguably repeats today (do Western business leaders want anything other than market penetration?). The same habits now distort assessments of China, compounded by an orientalism that imputes near-mystical patience to Beijing: how often have we heard some variation of “Washington plays chess while Beijing plays Go”? The familiar Cold War tendencies are all here, and analysts continue to make the same mistakes: mirror imaging, conformity to conventional wisdom, technological obsession, and a fixation on counting things. To avoid these errors, researchers must ground claims in historical cases rather than reinvent a perpetually unconstrained threat. Counting missiles did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it could not explain it either.
Alexandru Filip is a Research Fellow with the Dupuy Institute, based out of Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. His research focus is strategic and security studies, with a current emphasis on China’s military development. He has published pieces on capability analysis and policy recommendations in venues such as Real Clear Defense, The Centre for International Maritime Security, The Center for Maritime Strategy, The National Interest, and Merion West.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
