By: Lt Col JS Sodhi (Retd), Editor, GSDN
Two contrasting statements by the Donald Trump Administration in just a span of over five years, pretty much explains the tough position Taiwan finds itself in, as China’s war for Taiwan is clearly visible on the horizon.
One, as the Covid-19 pandemic was unleashing its full force and fury globally in 2020 with deaths being reported by the dime and dozen every second, the 45th US President Donald Trump posted on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) on March 17, 2020 terming the Corona virus causing this deadly pandemic as the “Chinese Virus”. China took strong objection to this statement and the relations between the USA and China nose-dived for the balance of Trump’s Presidential tenure that ended in January 2021.
Two, on April 12, 2025, Pete Hegseth, the Defence Secretary of the 47th US President Donald Trump’s administration shocked the world when in a candid statement he admitted that China’s hypersonic missiles could destroy the 11 US Navy aircraft carriers in just 20 minutes. He further added that in every war game conducted in the US Military, the Americans always loose to the Chinese. War games are conducted in all militaries the world over to assess the readiness of military strategies and are designed to simulate real-war scenarios.
No wonder as Donald Trump after getting elected as the US President on November 05, 2024, was briefed on various operational and security aspects of America including the military capabilities of USA’s main adversary China, before being inaugurated as the 47th US President on January 20, 2025, invited the Chinese President Xi Jinping for his inauguration ceremony in Washington D.C. This Presidential invite was amongst the few extended to world leaders known as strong allies of Donald Trump that included the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the Argentinian President Javier Milei amongst the specially selected.
Though Xi Jinping did not attend the inauguration but he sent China’s Vice President Han Zheng for the inauguration. The Presidential invite for Xi Jinping marked a turning point in Donald Trump’s change in attitude towards China in just five years from calling out China as culpable for the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic to inviting the Chinese President for his inauguration.
The US-China tango had just started and as time would reveal, Donald Trump would have a soft attitude towards China as he spared no other nation, apart from Russia, in the pursuit of “Making America Great Again”.
“Making America Great Again” also called MAGA, the slogan that caught the American voter’s fancy in the run-up to the US Presidential elections last year, gave Donald Trump resounding victory in the elections though almost every media house, think-tank and political analyst in the USA had predicted Donald Trump’s defeat to Kamala Harris, the Democrat Presidential nominee. After Donald Trump refused to have his next Presidential Debate with Kamala Harris as the solitary Presidential Debate with her had ended as a disaster for Trump, it was a forgone conclusion that Donald Trump would never return to the White House as America’s President.
But the American voter saw merit in MAGA as it entailed getting back manufacturing to the USA and Trump’s promise on not taking part in any war/conflict in the world, and elected Donald Trump as the USA’s 47th President with a thumping majority.
Within a few weeks of settling down as America’s 47th President, Donald Trump unleashed the Tariff War on April 09, 2025. And each day the world would wake up to new set of tariffs being announced by President Trump. So much so, that within a few weeks, one lost count of what tariffs were imposed on which nation. The media and social media were in a frenzy discussing Trump’s Tariff War.
But two nations remained unfazed – Russia & China. The messaging was clear as events would unravel soon.
China struck back at the USA by imposing tariffs on American imports. The Chinese Embassy in the USA retorted that China was prepared for any war with the USA, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war and that China was ready to fight till the end.
Russia too struck back on August 05, 2025 by calling the American tariffs as ‘neocolonial’ and accused Washington of attempting to maintain its hegemony.
But beneath these strong statements, neither China nor Russia were affected by the US tariffs as Donald Trump had exempted major trading commodities of Russia and China from tariffs.
The bonhomie visible between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin during the Alaska summit in Anchorage on August 15, 2025 and the US President’s statement that he was planning to visit China later this year, brings to fore that there is nothing amiss between the three Superpowers.
The USA, Russia & China have in an unwritten pact decided not to meddle in each other’s domain. The world has been unofficially divided into three regions with each Superpower deciding not to transgress in the other’s domain.
The first loser of this unofficial pact between the three Superpowers will be Taiwan as the next major war the world is going to witness is China’s war on Taiwan.
On February 03, 2023, William Burns, the Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), USA officially tasked with gathering, processing and analysing national security information from around the world, said in a statement that USA and China will go to war over Taiwan in 2027.
And this year, on May 31, 2025, Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary warned that China is actively training to invade Taiwan.
In March 2025, the American Portrait Survey found that 59.6% Taiwanese citizens do not consider the United States trustworthy. The Brookings Institution Report released on April 25, 2025 noted that 60.9% of the Taiwanese disagreed with the statement that “Taiwan is safer than before with Trump as President”.
The Taiwanese are absolutely correct. On July 27, 2025, Donald Trump’s administration denied permission to Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te to stop in New York enroute to Central America after Beijing raised objections with Washington about the visit.
Incidentally, in 2023 the Joe Biden administration had allowed the then-Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to stop in New York on her way to Belize and Guatemala in South America.
Reminiscences of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis
Perhaps the reason behind the Donald Trump administration not allowing the Taiwanese President for the stopover in New York was The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis which began in a rather unmilitary background when President Lee Teng-hui, the then President of Taiwan during whose currency as the Taiwanese President, the martial law ended and Taiwan became a democracy, decided to accept an invitation in 1995 from his alma mater, the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA, to deliver a speech on “Taiwan’s Democratisation Experience”.
China vehemently opposed USA giving a visa to President Lee Teng-hui as by that time USA in accordance with the One China principle was diplomatically recognising China and not Taiwan.
However, the US Congress passed a concurrent resolution, allowing the issuance of visa to President Lee Teng-hui and the Taiwanese President visited USA on June 09-10, 1995 to deliver the speech. China was infuriated and branded the Taiwanese president as a traitor attempting to “split China”.
Jiang Zemin, the Third Paramount Leader of China, extremely furious and angry over the Taiwanese President’s visit to USA, ordered the mobilisation of PLA and directed PLA to conduct missiles tests on July 07, 1995. The missile tests began on July 21, 1995 and lasted a few days with the sole aim of intimidating Taiwan.
Live ammunition military exercises were conducted by China from August 15-25, 1995, followed by naval amphibious assault exercises. USA immediately responded to China’s military overtures by sending two aircraft carrier groups in the vicinity of Taiwan – the USS McClusky and USS Nimitz in December 1995. On March 08, 1996 US President Bill Clinton announced that the Carrier Strike Group 5, would deploy in international waters near Taiwan. However, undeterred by all these American naval deployments, China continued its live ammunition firing exercises.
On March 11, 1996 USA despatched its Carrier Strike Group 7 from the Persian Gulf to the international waters near Taiwan. With two US Navy Carrier Strike Groups stationed near Taiwan, China had no option and the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis ended on March 23, 1996 in a whimper with no combat taking place between China and Taiwan.
But militarily China has expanded manifold since 1996. Being the global leader today in 57 out of the 64 critical technologies that exist today and boasting of the world’s biggest navy apart from the distinction of being the only military in the world to have declared its capacity and capability to fight any war in the world in all six domains of modern warfare – land, sea, air, cyber, electromagnetic spectrum and space in 2014, America knows that militarily the odds favour China exponentially.
The statement of Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary on April 12, 2025 mentioned earlier in the article, needs no over-emphasis.
In the event of China attacking Taiwan, the island nation will have no ally to bank upon as clearly the military support of the USA is no longer assured. The other littoral nations of the South China Sea be it Japan, South Korea or the Philippines have very small militaries to assist Taiwan in the face of the Chinese aggression.
G3: An idea whose time has come
After China became the world’s third biggest economy in 2007, American intelligence agencies started sensing that China was slowly becoming assertive. Going by the current rate of the economic progress that China was experiencing, it was clear that in a couple of years China would become the world’s second biggest economy, which it eventually did in 2010.
As China’s economic rise would increase, so would its military prowess. On June 01, 2008, C. Fred Bergsten, the noted American economist in an article in Foreign Affairs proposed a grouping of three nations/organisations which at that time were economically & militarily powerful – the USA, European Union and China. Though, no name was mentioned for the proposed grouping.
Russia was not included in this grouping as the erstwhile USSR had broken up into 15 nations in 1991 and in the intervening period till 2008, Russia, the biggest nation to emerge after the breakup of the USSR, was not seen as the successor of the erstwhile USSR as the claimant to the Superpower status. However, exactly two months after the article had been published, Russia invaded Georgia on August 01, 2008 and thereby started Russia’s accession as a Superpower and with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia had firmly established herself as a Superpower.
The three Superpowers of the contemporary times seem to have informally constituted the G3 or the Group of Three, wherein no Superpower is at crossroads with the other two. The Russian-Chinese strong friendship is well known and after Donald Trump has been inaugurated as America’s 47th President, the US too isn’t at crossroads with Russia & China. Thus, the formal date for the informal G3 grouping can be assumed as January 20, 2025, the day of inauguration of Donald Trump’s second Presidency.
The world is now in a precarious position where all the three Superpowers have their own domains of operations and influence and will not interfere in the domains of the other two.
A case in point is India. After President Barack Obama announced the East Asia Strategy also known as the Pivot to Asia strategy on December 21, 2011, the relations between the USA and India grew closer. In the Indo-Pacific region, only two countries ie the USA and India are in a position to check the growing aggressiveness of China, if the two nations combine militarily. As the Indian-American friendship was deepening, so were the Chinese concerns of India’s rise increasing.
But with the way President Trump has called out India since his inauguration in January this year, the US-Indian strategic partnership to counter China is over. In his 100-minute speech on January 20, 2025, President Trump praised Pakistan but did not mention India even once.
During the February 12-13, 2025 visit of Prime Minster Narendra Modi to the USA, when the topic of persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh was broached upon, Trump left it onto India to handle. Ideally, the US President words in calling out Bangladesh for the persecution of Hindus since August 05, 2024 would have had great weight, but it didn’t happen this way.
On July 30, 2025, Donald Trump called India a “dead economy” and on August 27, 2025, India had been tariffed the maximum in the world with 50% tariffs imposed.
Clearly, the US has stepped back from the American-Indian strategic friendship that has been so solidly built in the last 14 years. And with Trump having three and half years in office left, it is unlikely that the US-Indian partnership will come back to the pre-January 2025 levels.
And this is exactly what China wanted. China is set to wage the war on Taiwan in 2027. With the strong Indian-American strategic friendship that existed till January this year, China knew that it is no position to counter the two-front war scenario with Taiwan on its eastern borders and India on its western borders.
Now, with the US weaning away from India, China is confident that its western borders will be safe when it attacks Taiwan in 2027 as India doesn’t have an aggressive defence policy, and the Indo-American strategic relationship is over.
USA has offered Taiwan on a platter to China. The US-China tango that is no longer under wraps any more, is sure trouble for Taiwan. Russia will be a mute spectator when China invades Taiwan in 2027 as the depth of Russian-Chinese partnership has increased exponentially after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General cautioned the world on June 25, 2025 about the massive Chinese military buildup and potential for Taiwan invasion. Last year, Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command on October 28, 2024 stated that China is conducting the largest military buildup in world history.
Lyndon B Johnson’s quote “Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose” holds a deep meaning for Taiwan in specific and the World in general, as the fall of Taiwan will be disaster for democracy and rules-based world order.
After Taiwan, the next big military target for China will be the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh for which China will wage the two-front war jointly with Pakistan on India any time after 2030.
Taiwan has to be protected at all costs.
About the Author
Lt Col JS Sodhi (Retd) is the Founder-Editor, Global Strategic & Defence News and has authored the book “China’s War Clouds: The Great Chinese Checkmate”. He tweets at @JassiSodhi24.
