Denial Without Disaster—Keeping a U.S.-China Conflict over Taiwan Under the Nuclear Threshold

Dahlia Anne Goldfeld, Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, Shawn Cochran, Alexis Dale-Huang, David R. Frelinger, Edward Geist, Jeff Hagen, Elliot Ji, William Kim & Nina Miller

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Introduction, Research Themes, and Methodology

U.S. President Joseph Biden and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping have twice publicly pledged that “nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won.”1 As nice as this may sound, if a war between the two countries ever comes to pass, this pledge will be put to the test. Passing that test could be harder than anticipated, and the United States should plan today to avoid disaster tomorrow. How to pass the test would vary across differing war scenarios, so, to focus our work, we consider what the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) describes as its “pacing scenario”: a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.2 For this scenario, we assume that the Chinese government’s decision to invade Taiwan would come after some unambiguous strategic warning, allowing the United States to prepare and mobilize forces.3 The United States has a long-standing policy to maintain “peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”—including “oppos[ing] any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side”—and specifically promises to “uphold . . . commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act to support Taiwan’s self-defense and to maintain . . . capacity to resist any resort to force or coercion against Taiwan.”4 Thus, for this scenario, we assume that the United States will militarily intervene to seek to stop the invasion and end the conflict.