Deterring China Over Taiwan Requires Options Short of War

Eyck Freymann argues that U.S. strategy has to begin from a broader map of Chinese options than the familiar image of an amphibious assault across the Taiwan Strait. Xi Jinping, in Freymann’s account, is not preparing one move against Taiwan but “a battery of options” usable in crisis and war, alone or in sequence.

The economic stakes are inseparable from the military ones in this argument. Freymann identifies Taiwan’s energy imports, advanced semiconductor production, export-controlled chips, and the possibility that China could gain control over Taiwan’s fabs as pressure points if Beijing can control access to the island without immediately triggering a conventional war.

The conventional scenario remains on the list: Chinese forces attempt to land on Taiwan’s beaches and seize the capital. But Freymann places that alongside blockade, bombardment, cyberattack, decapitation of Taiwan’s civilian leadership, and a set of coercive gray-zone measures designed to remain short of declared war while imposing pressure more intense than today’s status quo.

The gray-zone possibilities are central to his argument. Beijing could use legal claims, customs procedures, and law-enforcement tools — especially the Chinese coast guard — to assert authority over who and what enters or leaves Taiwan. It could mobilize forces on the mainland side of the Strait in a way that might be preparation for invasion or might be coercive theater, forcing Washington and Taipei to guess whether a war is imminent.

Niall Ferguson frames the strategic stakes by noting that, although attention at the time was focused on the Strait of Hormuz, Freymann treats the Taiwan Strait as a more important strategic and economic choke point. Ferguson also emphasizes a distinction running through Freymann’s analysis: the United States appears heavily focused on deterring military attack, while the more likely Chinese options may be coercive measures below the threshold of war.

Freymann’s answer is that deterrence has to cover the whole menu. It is not enough to deter the beach landing if Beijing can achieve its objectives through quarantine, customs control, economic strangulation, or political decapitation. A strategy that works only against the most cinematic scenario leaves other pathways open.

Freymann’s assessment of Taiwan’s defenses is comparatively favorable on the amphibious invasion scenario. He says Taiwan’s readiness for that contingency is “better than most commentators assume,” despite the stark imbalance in size and defense spending. Taiwan’s military budget, he notes, is about one-twentieth of China’s.

The reason is geography and preparation. The Taiwan Strait is, in Freymann’s words, “a nasty body of water,” and there are relatively few beaches on Taiwan suitable for landing a large invading force. Taiwan understands this, has spent decades fortifying those beaches, and in recent years has done so increasingly with covert assistance from the United States.

That does not mean Taiwan is secure. Freymann regards the harder scenarios as those that combine military pressure with economic pressure. Energy is the clearest vulnerability. Taiwan has only about two weeks of gas reserves. It could convert power plants to burn coal or oil, but if imports were sufficiently restricted, he argues, the island would eventually face the lights going out and would have to sue for peace.

Beijing, in Freymann’s telling, is building a stockpiling system precisely to shape this calculation. The point is to show Taiwan that in an economic confrontation, time would not be on Taiwan’s side.

The most difficult version is not necessarily a declared blockade. Freymann focuses on an “indirect control” or “quarantine” scenario: Beijing announces that, as a matter of People’s Republic of China law, anyone traveling to or from Taiwan must first clear customs at a mainland port. Taiwan could not solve that problem by itself. Major logistics and shipping firms — Freymann names FedEx, UPS, Maersk, and MSC — would have little appetite for choosing a fight with the PRC. If they complied, Taipei would have limited recourse.

“This is above Taiwan’s pay grade,” Freymann says. The question would have to be answered by the United States and other partners.

In Freymann’s scenario, China’s coast guard begins asserting sovereignty over Taiwan’s trade, claiming that because Taiwan is part of China, Beijing controls the customs process. His view is that China is trying to design precisely such a move so that Washington is left with three terrible options.

The first is to do nothing, or at least to pretend that the requirement is not an immediate crisis. A ship stopping at a mainland port for paperwork might not look like a casus belli on day one. But Freymann argues that the long-run effect would be to checkmate Taiwan. China could control the modernization of Taiwan’s military. It could begin asserting authority over critical imports needed for advanced semiconductor production, or over export-controlled chips bound for the United States.

That option buys short-term calm at the price of long-term defeat. Freymann describes it as the choice a cynical but self-interested politician might make: kick the can, avoid the crisis, accept that China eventually takes the commanding heights of AI.

The second option is escalation to war. The United States could attack or manufacture a pretext to attack. Freymann does not think an American president would likely prefer that option, but China cannot rule it out.

The third option is economic self-destruction as punishment. Freymann describes it as “the big red button on the Resolute desk” labeled as the economic and financial crisis that ends a presidency. The United States, he says, has the known capability to disable or destroy Taiwan’s chipmaking facilities. It could also impose sanctions or other economic punishments on China. Such a move might teach Beijing a lesson and take a coercive option off the board, but Freymann argues it would also produce an enormous global shock: stock markets, bond markets, and supply chains would all be hit, likely throwing the world into recession.

Freymann’s warning is that Beijing wants to push Washington toward inaction: “China is hoping that they can push us towards that Option A, and every day that goes by that they increase the pressure on Taiwan that we don’t choose, is a little bit closer we get to Option A.”

Ferguson describes Freymann as looking for an “Option D”: something preferable to surrender, destroying the world economy, or escalating directly into war.

The alternative Freymann calls “avalanche decoupling” is a strategy for making economic coercion against China more credible by avoiding the political and market panic that comes with an attempted overnight break.

He draws a lesson from what he calls “liberation day” in April 2025. In Freymann’s account, the Trump administration put tariffs above 100%, effectively threatening to shut down all trade with China overnight. He says the move initially looked bold but backfired badly: the stock market panicked, the bond market panicked, and industry leaders warned the White House that production would shut down and the country would enter recession. Within days, Freymann says, President Trump found a reason to reverse the tariffs and did not reinstate them.

For Freymann, that episode revealed to China and the rest of the world that the United States does not actually have the option of hard, across-the-board decoupling. If that is unavailable, the only viable alternative is to decouple gradually and deliberately.

Avalanche decoupling is designed to start small, with predictable momentum. The metaphor matters: an avalanche does not create chaos on day one, but it can be triggered at a time and place of one’s choosing, then gather force through incentives and market behavior. Freymann’s version would begin with low tariffs or restrictions that ratchet upward predictably, with no fixed end date.

He also wants the process made more credible by moving authority away from presidential improvisation. Rather than “setting tariffs by tweet,” Congress would legislate the schedule. The purpose is to tell firms and investors that a particular supply chain is leaving China and that the signal will not be reversed by the next political gust.

Freymann gives examples of sectors where this could begin: critical inputs for medicine, legacy chips, and drone parts. The goal is not necessarily to bring all production to the United States. The private sector could find the safest and best location, whether in the United States, Vietnam, or elsewhere. The strategic point is that production leaves China in a way markets can plan around.

The timing problem is acute. Ferguson notes that a Taiwan crisis could arrive before a gradual decoupling plan has become policy, and possibly even soon. From Xi Jinping’s point of view, Ferguson argues, the United States may look heavily committed in the Persian Gulf and depleted in some categories of precision missiles after seven or eight weeks of conflict there. Freymann accepts the risk and treats it as the reason to start immediately, not as an argument for across-the-board decoupling. He proposes a proof of concept: take the most critical 1% of U.S.-China trade, roughly $5 billion to $7 billion a year, and begin moving it out of China through the next defense budget.

Drone inputs are his example of a category where continued dependence is “crazy,” but abrupt cessation would mean the United States could not make drones. A legislated effort to move that supply chain would show Beijing that Washington has a calibrated response. If China creates a crisis, the United States could expand the program from 1% to 10%, 30%, or 60%, or accelerate the avalanche.

The deterrent value lies in credibility and gradation. Beijing would see that Washington has something between doing nothing and detonating the global economy.

The allied problem runs through both parts of Freymann’s strategy. Avalanche decoupling is difficult if U.S. allies do not cooperate. Freymann’s broader military proposal, which Ferguson describes as an Asian version of NATO, also depends on allied buy-in. Yet Ferguson notes that allies are looking at the United States with “rather jaundiced eyes” after recent American behavior.

Eyck Freymann accepts the criticism. “We haven’t done ourselves any favors in the way that we’ve treated our allies over the last year,” he says, adding that relations with European allies in particular may get worse.

But he distinguishes between peacetime distrust and crisis alignment. If deterrence fails or Taiwan brings the United States to the brink of rupture with China, Freymann thinks the crisis could clarify interests for Washington and its allies. He allows the darker possibility: the architecture that sustained international order, prosperity, and American power for 80 years could come apart. But he also sees a chance that the United States and its allies rediscover aligned vital interests under pressure.

On the Asian NATO idea, Freymann backs away from an all-or-nothing institutional demand. Even without a formal NATO equivalent in Asia, the United States should do more with Japan, and perhaps more with Japan and Australia on a trilateral basis. That means bringing allies into planning conversations, treating them as trusted partners, respecting their views, conducting more exercises, and improving interoperability. Whether the result is eventually called Asian NATO is, in his view, less important than the working-level integration.

The economic side is broader than formal alliances. Ferguson observes that recent U.S. tariffs appear to have reduced Chinese exports to the United States while increasing Chinese exports elsewhere. Freymann responds with a claim he attributes generally to economists who have analyzed the issue: in his telling, the United States is still importing the same amount from China, but with labels saying “Made in Vietnam,” “Made in Mexico,” “Made in Brazil,” or “Made in the European Union.”

Arbitrage, Freymann says, is a fact of life in every economic war between great powers. If the United States declares that it will not buy from China but will buy favorably from elsewhere, actors will have incentives to lie about origin. That is why, in a Taiwan crisis, he argues the United States would need to work with as much of the world as possible to see into supply chains. Otherwise, it would remain dependent on China and vulnerable to sabotage, coercion, or worse.

For decades, Ferguson says, the Taiwan issue seemed remote, managed through habits formed since the 1970s and through a complex of agreements and communiqués that kept Taiwan “on the back burner.” In recent years, he says, it has moved to the front of the stove.

Eyck Freymann begins by rejecting the idea that the gray zone is a future condition. “We are already in the gray zone,” he says, “and the gray is getting darker.” This process began before Xi Jinping, but Freymann treats Xi as unusually consequential because of ambition, personality, and what he describes as Xi’s belief that he is a grand historical agent of China’s “neo-imperial restoration.”

Xi wants national rejuvenation, and Freymann says Xi believes achieving what Beijing calls “reunification” with Taiwan is necessary to that project. Freymann adds an important caveat: Taiwan has never been unified with the People’s Republic of China, so “reunification” is not strictly accurate. But he says that is the story Xi tells, and that it is fundamental to his identity.

Freymann sees 2026 as risky but hopes that if a crisis is avoided that year, the risk may dip in 2027. His reasoning is domestic Chinese politics. As Xi approaches the next National Party Congress and a fourth term, Freymann expects him to be occupied with personnel work: filling the People’s Liberation Army with loyalists, reshuffling the Central Committee, and likely ensuring potential successors are eliminated.

The year he identifies as most dangerous is 2028. Three elections converge: Taiwan, the Philippines, and the United States. In Freymann’s view, Xi may then be maximally confident and secure at home while American politics are highly volatile.

1. 2026
   Freymann sees crisis risk as real and argues the United States should begin building economic options immediately.
2. 2027
   He expects risk may dip if 2026 passes without crisis, because Xi Jinping would be consumed by personnel politics ahead of a fourth term.
3. 2028
   Freymann identifies this as the most dangerous year, with elections in Taiwan, the Philippines, and the United States.

“If I were him,” Freymann says of Xi, “that’s when I would push.”

The risk is not only that leaders miscalculate each other’s military or economic options. Ferguson also points to the possibility that both American and Chinese publics may be more hawkish than policymakers assume. He cites a poll he saw in which nearly half of American voters — including 51% of Republicans — said that if China imposed a blockade on Taiwan, they would support the U.S. Navy trying to break it even at the risk of war with China. He also refers to polling he says he saw in The Economist suggesting a more hawkish mood in China.

Eyck Freymann acknowledges the risk of sleepwalking toward conflict, but he warns against treating public opinion through abstract hypotheticals. As a historian, he says he cannot think of a case in which an American president wanted to lead the country to war and the American people said no. Historically, even when the public has to be misled, it can be brought along.

The more important question, for Freymann, is not what Americans say in response to a hypothetical blockade. History does not present nations with hypotheticals; it presents choices in contexts. The relevant issue is whether, when a crisis comes, American leaders explain the stakes, the sacrifices they are willing to make, the sacrifices they believe the country should accept, and the possible futures on the other side.

Freymann argues that U.S. leaders have “basically punted” on that political communication for 50 years. They may soon be forced to make the case suddenly. He lists the substance of that case: why Taiwan matters to the United States; why losing control of the AI revolution if China takes Taiwan’s fabs would be disastrous for Americans’ children and future; why the collapse of the alliance structure would mean not merely a setback in the Western Pacific but the end of American power globally, with implications even for the Western Hemisphere.

The strategic argument is therefore also a political one. Deterrence requires not only military plans and economic instruments but a public explanation of what is at stake before a crisis forces decisions under pressure.