Ashton Ng
The dawn of 2026 arrived in the Taiwan Strait with a thunderous dissonance. On the water, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was concluding Justice Mission 2025, a massive exercise involving 89 warplanes, drone swarms, and blockade simulations that Taipei rightly characterized as an unprecedented escalation. Yet, on the airwaves, President Xi Jinping’s New Year’s address offered a different frequency. While he reiterated that reunification is “unstoppable,” the context was not one of imminent fiery conquest, but of cool, historical inevitability.
For defense planners in Washington and Taipei, the impulse is to merge the drills and the speech into a single signal of accelerating aggression – a countdown to a D-Day scenario. Such a reading is superficially correct but strategically flawed. By misinterpreting Beijing’s confidence as urgency, the West risks preparing for the wrong war.
No comments:
Post a Comment