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Taiwan's Defense Push Aimed at Washington, Not Beijing, Analyst Says

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At a Taipei Security Dialogue panel, Stanford fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro said Taiwan's defense buildup mainly reassures the US, while China stays unmoved.

Taiwan's expanding military preparations may be speaking more loudly to Washington than to Beijing, a US security scholar told a panel in Taipei yesterday, arguing that Taipei should split its message and target each capital differently. Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, made the assessment during the Taipei Security Dialogue.

The panel examined what Taiwan can learn from the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Mastro said she was struck by Taiwan's higher defense budget, its shift toward asymmetric weapons and its work to ready the wider public for a possible war. But she questioned who is actually watching those moves and changing their behavior in response.

When she pressed senior Chinese officials and analysts on whether Taiwan's stronger defenses were making Beijing think twice, Mastro said the replies came down to indifference. Their attitude, she recounted, was essentially that they had no clear read on it, were not tracking it closely, and did not consider it relevant to their planning.

The real recipient of Taiwan's signaling, she said, is the United States. By demonstrating it can hold out on its own, Taiwan is chiefly telling Washington that it is serious about its own survival. Mastro called that a sound approach, because it eases American doubts about Taipei's willingness to fight. Even so, she said Taiwan needs a distinct playbook if it wants its arsenal to weigh on Chinese decision-making.

Mastro was blunt about the limits of self-reliance. "There's no situation under which Taiwan can defend itself without direct US military intervention," she said. Rather than treating that as a reason to stop, she urged Taipei to explain its new capabilities to Beijing far more clearly, so the same investments both draw the US closer and give China pause.

Signals to Beijing and Washington

Chen Ping-Kuei, a professor in the Department of Diplomacy at National Chengchi University, backed Mastro's reading. He said the broad public sense is that Taiwan has gotten its point across to the US, while the deterrent message meant for Beijing has largely failed to land.

Chen pointed to US weapons transfers as a central marker of American commitment. In his view, the political weight of each sale often counts for more than how large the package happens to be. He warned that the process itself carries meaning: if Washington ever started clearing proposed arms deals with Beijing beforehand, it would tell Taipei something deeply alarming about where it stands.

That concern is not hypothetical. Chen was responding to unease sparked after US President Donald Trump acknowledged raising the subject of arms sales to Taiwan with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their meeting in Beijing in mid-May. Consulting China on such sales cuts against one of the "six assurances," a long-standing US pledge not to coordinate arms decisions with Beijing.

Trump appeared to wave off the commitment. Asked about it after the meeting, he said he was not going to refuse to discuss the matter simply because of a document signed back in 1982.

Keeping Taiwan running under pressure

Wolfgang Muller, a senior research fellow at the German Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies, widened the discussion beyond hardware and messaging. He argued that Taiwan must be able to keep functioning if China tries to cut it off from the outside world.

Such isolation would not necessarily take the form of a declared blockade, Muller said. Simply raising the perceived danger could be enough to change how shipping firms, insurers, suppliers and repair providers behave, choking off the island without a shot. "Do not ask only how China would invade Taiwan. Ask also how China could make an invasion unnecessary," he said.

Muller advised against chasing full self-sufficiency. Instead, he said, Taiwan should figure out exactly how long its essential services could keep going if outside supplies stopped arriving. He also called on planners to map the weak points where infrastructure systems depend on one another, and to stockpile hard-to-source items in advance, naming transformers, medicine, chemicals, communications gear and machine parts.

The goal, he said, is resilience rather than invincibility. "Taiwan cannot make its critical infrastructure invulnerable, but it can make failure more temporary," Muller said, adding a phrase that framed endurance as a weapon in itself: "Recovery capacity is combat power."

Taiwan defense, Oriana Skylar Mastro, Taipei Security Dialogue, US arms sales Taiwan, China deterrence, six assurances, Trump Xi Jinping, asymmetric warfare

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