As the world watches the war in Ukraine reshape the global order, the United States and its allies are seizing the moment to extract hard-earned lessons on the art of managing great power rivalry, crisis, and conflict. Arguably, the United States has adeptly employed its diplomatic, informational, military, and economic instruments of national power to keep its population safe and out of the conflict, while helping Ukraine impose severe costs on Russia. Diplomatically, it has built a coalition of partners to simultaneously seek a peaceful solution and cast opprobrium on Russian actions through international institutions like the United Nations. Informationally, it took the unprecedented step of releasing intelligence on Russian activities to deprive Moscow the element of surprise or the means to conduct false flag operations. It has also promoted an effective discourse portraying Russia’s action as threatening to the international order. Militarily, it has delivered one of the few recent successes in training and equipping a foreign military. Finally, economically, it has led the organization and implementation of severely damaging sanctions on Russia.
The apparent success of these efforts has generated much discussion about lessons to be learned. However, overly optimistic analyses risk obscuring the applicability of these policies to future conflicts. This is particularly important as the foreign policy community draws parallels between Ukraine and a potential conflict over Taiwan. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to apply its instruments of power in a similar fashion in a Taiwan contingency, specifically because China is not Russia, and Taiwan is not Ukraine. Nevertheless, the war in Ukraine offers lessons across the elements of national power for the prospects and likely consequences of a Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan. For both military and economic reasons, China is unlikely to follow Russia’s example of an overt invasion; instead, it will likely rely on diplomatic and informational power to accomplish its objectives.
Amphibious Invasion Complexities: Military Challenges for China
The principal lesson that President Xi Jinping is likely to have learned from watching Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the past three years is disarmingly simple: Invasions are hard.
Russia and Ukraine share a long contiguous land border that is largely flat and rolling hills—the easiest of all geographical conditions for a land invasion. Additionally, the Black Sea ostensibly allows Russia to use its advantage in seapower to apply additional pressure on Ukraine from the south, and there is a long fighting season from approximately May to October during which military operations are essentially unhindered by weather or terrain conditions. Literally none of these conditions apply to a potential invasion of Taiwan.
Most obviously, Taiwan is an island separated from the Chinese mainland by roughly one hundred miles of open water. There are only two months—May and October—when sea conditions would allow China to launch an amphibious invasion of Taiwan, which has limited (and well-defended) invasion beaches, a significant mountainous spine, subtropical jungle, and several large cities, all of which present major obstacles to military conquest even if the Taiwan Strait could be conquered. Amphibious operations are among the most difficult of all military operations, in no small part because they require the achievement of air superiority prior to beginning the invasion to protect vulnerable troop transports. This is why the “so few” in Winston’s Churchill’s famous quote—“never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”—were the pilots of the Royal Air Force. Russia’s inability to achieve air superiority over Ukraine is hence an important cautionary tale for Xi; if Ukraine’s skies have been protected by American intelligence and American missiles, it is not too much to expect that Taiwan’s would be as well—and that the island, about six percent the size of Ukraine and surrounded by a sea likely to be populated with American air defense assets aboard ships, would be even better defended against air attack than Ukraine has been.
Moreover, Russia’s challenge in establishing dominance over the Black Sea highlights another vital requirement for any successful campaign: naval superiority. Without command of the sea, China would be unable to secure and sustain the logistical lifeline required for a full-scale amphibious assault or to shield its invasion fleet from interdiction. Despite the significant advances of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, the narrowness of the Taiwan Strait could become a deadly bottleneck under the threat of Taiwanese and American submarines and missile-equipped ships. The United States Navy and its regional allies and partners possess considerable blue-water capabilities and regional presence, making the contest for maritime dominance not only unavoidable but arguably decisive. Xi’s planners must therefore consider not only how to reach Taiwan—but how to keep the corridor open once the first boots are ashore.
Sanctions and Interdependence: Economic Deterrents and Limits
China has become the manufacturing center of the world and, therefore, a pivotal component to global supply chains. It has also become the largest trading partner to most countries, and through the Belt and Road Initiative, it has emerged as a major investor. Consequently, the degree of sanctions currently being imposed on Russia are unlikely to be replicated for two reasons. The first is that implementing these kinds of sanctions on China would require a significant level of decoupling between the United States, its partners, and China. This is likely to be particularly painful to the consumer economies in the West. Even with the requisite political will, a policy of decoupling would be difficult to implement. The second is that China is increasing its footprint in emerging markets, which may mitigate some of the effects of US and European sanctions. This means that even if sanctions were imposed, the interconnected nature of the global economy provides Beijing with access to additional markets outside of the sanctions regime, as Moscow has quickly learned. Put simply, the United States would face domestic and structural challenges if it sought to impose the same level of punitive economic sanctions on China.
Despite these relatively positive lessons, there are legitimate economic constraints to China’s resort to the use of force. The most important of these is that any conflict across the Taiwan Strait would have a negative economic impact even in the absence of sanctions. This is important because of Beijing’s preoccupation with ensuring a stable environment conducive to economic development—something Chinese officials have long believed to be correlated with social stability, and therefore, security. There is also the concern that any cross-strait conflict would result in the reorientation of regional shipping and a spike in insurance costs. Few Chinese ports would be capable of conducting regular trade operations and overland trade routes would not be capable of handling the current volume. This would result in compounding economic challenges that may prove too costly for Chinese officials that have historically prioritized domestic stability.
De Jure Containment and Coalition Building: Diplomatic Obstacles for Taiwan
One key distinction between the conflict in Ukraine and a potential one over Taiwan is their legal status and the effect this can have on the framing of the discourse over such an event. Ukraine is a recognized sovereign state. As a result, it is straightforward to designate Russia’s actions as a war of aggression. Moscow is essentially undermining two foundational norms of the international order: the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a recognized state. This messaging has currency across the globe. Taiwan, however, is a different entity altogether given its lack of de jure recognition. While the US interpretation of the “One China” policy does not necessarily recognize Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan, this is not the case around the world. In fact, Beijing makes this the basis for the establishment of diplomatic relations with other countries. This makes framing a mainland invasion of Taiwan as a war of aggression more difficult given that few countries recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country.
Furthermore, Beijing actively blocks Taiwan’s participation in international organizations such as the United Nations and even forums like the World Health Organization by leveraging its position within these bodies. This systematic marginalization reduces Taipei’s ability to build international coalitions or gain official support in the event of conflict, further complicating global efforts to frame Chinese military action as unlawful aggression. As a result, many countries may see a cross-strait operation as a domestic issue for China.
Shaping the Discourse: Informational Power and Taiwan’s Marginalization
Chinese officials have worked to shape international narratives to portray Taiwan as an inseparable part of China. In this effort, China has used both overt and covert means to influence media outlets, foreign governments, and international institutions. Over the past two decades, China has invested heavily promoting its media platforms around the world. Chinese media companies have established a foothold by increasing their overseas capacity and presence, training local journalists, acquiring existing local outlets or establishing new ones, and finally, creating local content. This allows them to achieve Xi Jinping’s mission of “telling China’s story well,” a phrase rooted in his broader strategy to shape global public opinion around Chinese interests and legitimize China’s governance model.
For its part, the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department (ILD) has played a significant role in advancing these objectives. Traditionally tasked with managing party-to-party diplomacy, the ILD has increasingly positioned itself as a tool of influence operations abroad, including shaping discourse around Taiwan. Through building relationships with foreign political parties and think tanks, particularly in developing nations, the ILD subtly promotes Beijing’s narrative that Taiwan is an internal matter and not a subject of international concern. This strategy enables Beijing to cultivate sympathetic elites and suppress pro-Taiwan positions in multilateral forums. Additionally, the ILD often collaborates with United Front organizations and media partners to amplify favorable coverage while discrediting Taiwan’s democratic legitimacy. Such efforts are part of a broader, long-term campaign to normalize the Beijing’s claims and marginalize Taiwan on the world stage. As a result of these developments, China is likely to have a greater capacity to shape the discourse surrounding the status of Taiwan than Russia has had vis-à-vis Ukraine—as well as the legality of any use of force—among a broader audience.
China has been paying close attention to the ongoing war in Ukraine, including reportedly sending some of its own soldiers to observe the battlefield. What Chinese leaders have learned cannot be encouraging to a country that has not engaged in combat since 1979, and that in a war it arguably lost to a much smaller neighbor. Rolling the iron dice of war is always a risky endeavor; doing so to invade a country that the under secretary of defense for policy has repeatedly declared is his top national security priority is a reckless act beyond any China has conducted since its intervention in the Korean War seventy-five years ago. That invasion happened because China believed that its homeland was under imminent threat; it is hard to imagine an equally rash act short of a similar belief today. So long as Taiwan does not announce its independence, China is far more likely to play a patient game of increasing diplomatic and informational pressure, accompanied by military actions short of war, to win this battle without firing a shot.
Zenel Garcia is an associate professor of national security studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy and codirector of the Resident Course China Integrated Course at the US Army War College. He is the author of China’s Western Frontier in Eurasia: The Politics of State and Region-Building and China’s Military Modernization, Japan’s Normalization and the South China Sea Territorial Disputes.
John Nagl is a professor of warfighting studies and codirector of the Resident Course China Integrated Course at the US Army War College. He is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and directs the Army War College Ukraine War Integrated Research Project.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Army War College, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: 玄 史生
