🔴 Website 👉 https://u-s-news.com/
Telegram 👉 https://t.me/usnewscom_channel
OAN Commentary by: Stacy Washington
Thursday, April 3, 2025
In 2026, Americans will celebrate 250 years of independence. The following year, we may find ourselves fighting desperately to defend the nation our forefathers built.
Advertisement
Foreign policy experts have been warning for years that China may invade Taiwan in 2027, the 100th birthday of the People’s Liberation Army, and a report published last month marshaled plenty of evidence to support that conclusion. Compounding these concerns is a March declaration from China — which is sour over President Trump’s new tariffs — that it can beat the U.S. in “any type of war.”
Let’s consider the “short war” scenarios first.
The most appealing outcome (for Americans at least) would be a quick and decisive victory, which might look something like this:
China sends forces to blockade Taiwan. The U.S. responds by dispatching four carrier groups to lift the blockade. The Chinese commander refuses to comply, and battle is joined.
Thankfully, it’s all over quickly. American aircraft, submarines, and surface ships prove vastly superior to their Chinese counterparts. U.S. forces lose only a few aircraft and an escort ship or two but inflict crippling losses on the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
China, exposed as a paper tiger, immediately sues for peace and renounces its claim on Taiwan. The stock market surges. America remains the world’s sole superpower.
But a short conflict could also end with a Chinese victory.
In this scenario, the fleets approach each other as before, but perhaps this time, Chinese hypersonic missiles slip past U.S. defenses, taking two carriers out of the fight before they can scramble their full complement of fighters. The Chinese then press their advantage, launching an air battle in which American pilots find themselves overwhelmed by sheer numbers. The U.S. commander orders a withdrawal before things get any worse. One carrier is already halfway to the bottom of the Pacific, while the other manages to limp back toward Pearl Harbor with the rest of the fleet.
The blockade remains in place. Hunger and deprivation force the Taiwanese government to the table, and a few weeks later the “reunification” treaty is signed. America plunges into an economic depression. The dollar loses its status as the global reserve currency. The Chinese Century begins.
If we want to avoid this, we’ll need to build up our navy, fix the broken military procurement process, and step up intelligence gathering operations to ensure we don’t get blindsided in the South China Sea.
But what if the war drags on? It’s difficult to say, since the longer the conflict lasts the more variables emerge. What happens, for instance, if China attempts to take Taiwan by storm?
As Michael Puttré noted in a 2021 analysis, no military has attempted a large-scale contested amphibious landing against a peer adversary since the Korean War. It may be the case that advances in military technology have rendered such operations possible. China might fail to land a single soldier on the island, with Taiwanese missiles and American torpedoes inflicting massive losses as the invasion fleet crosses the 120-mile strait.
Or perhaps the PLA will establish its beachhead, which could lead to a quick Taiwanese surrender or to a protracted Stalingrad-like battle for each neighborhood, block, and house of Taipei.
If the U.S. were unable to tip the balance by piercing China’s blockade, then both sides would be forced to settle in for a long war. Everything would be on the table: nuclear threats, attacks on communication satellites, coordinated cyberattacks. China could launch ballistic missiles at Guam and U.S. bases in Japan and the Philippines or open another front by ordering its North Korean vassal to send troops across the 38th parallel. The U.S. might consider bribing India to invade Tibet, and would almost certainly attempt a blockade of Chinese ports coupled with a diplomatic campaign to isolate the People’s Republic economically.
The conflict would turn into a brutal test of which side could maintain its resolve longer. Under such conditions, even areas of public policy that seem totally unconnected to war would take on strategic significance.
If hostilities broke out suddenly, the nearly 300,000 Chinese nationals living in the U.S. on student visas would constitute an unacceptable security risk. The U.S. government would have to negotiate their deportation to China in the midst of a shooting war. If China refused to take them back, we’d be left with ugly options like mass surveillance or even internment.
America’s commitment to industrial policy could also spell the difference between victory and defeat. Many of our smart munitions rely on semiconductors from Taiwan, which makes around 90% of the global supply. Congress passed the CHIPs Act to jumpstart a U.S. based semiconductor industry, but we’re still in the early stages. If Taiwan ends up blockaded for months or years, we’ll need every last one of those domestically produced chips to keep our war machine running.
Or consider antitrust policy. Pam Bondi and Gail Slater at the Department of Justice approving a merger between American telecom firms HPE and Juniper would create a company capable of challenging state-subsidized Chinese giant Huawei’s global dominance in the 5G equipment market. Developing countries’ reliance on Huawei tech would leave them vulnerable to Chinese cyberattacks, making them less likely to take sides against the People’s Republic. But instead of approving the merger in an attempt to mitigate China’s global telecom advantage, the pre-Bondi and pre-Slater Department of Justice foolishly sued to block it.
Neither side would “win” in a lengthy war between the U.S. and China, but one side would very definitively lose. Unless we want to be that loser, we’ll need our government to consider every decision in light of how it will affect a future U.S.-China conflict. If we fail to plan, then we plan to fail.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Stacy Washington (@StacyOnTheRight) is an Air Force Veteran, Ambassador for the American First Policy Institute, and host of Stacy on the Right on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125. She is a frequent guest on Fox News and previously served as a Co-Chair of Black Voices for Trump and Advisory Board Member for Veterans for Trump and Women for Trump.
Advertisements below