The USS Abraham Lincoln has been in the Arabian Sea since January 26. The Gerald R. Ford transited Gibraltar on February 20. Thirteen Aegis destroyers, 600-plus Tomahawks in single-salvo capacity, 500 aircraft spread across bases from Jordan to Qatar—the largest American force concentration in the Middle East since 2003. Every analyst in Washington is writing about the coming air campaign against Iran. None of them are writing about what matters, which is that Beijing is using this spectacular distraction to take Taiwan without an amphibious landing, without a naval engagement, and without a shot fired.
To understand why the Iran crisis is a feature and not a bug from the Chinese strategic perspective it is first, necessary to understand what actually happened in June 2025, as opposed to what the censors convinced the media happened.......
Xi spent seventeen years in Fujian Province, directly across the strait from Taiwan. Vice mayor of Xiamen, party secretary of Fuzhou, governor of the province, and simultaneously head of the Party Committee’s Leading Group for Taiwan Affairs. His specific job for nearly two decades was courting the top Taiwanese businessmen with tax incentives, land deals, and government support. Xiamen and Fuzhou became the primary hubs for Taiwanese investment on the mainland under his direct management. He opened the direct shipping routes between Xiamen and Kinmen. The cross-strait economic integration model that later became national policy was his personal creation, built from the ground up at the provincial level.
Then five years in Zhejiang, which is the other major destination for Taiwanese investment, followed by Shanghai. He staffed his government accordingly. Zheng Shanjie, now the NDRC chairman, started as a local official in Xiamen when Xi was deputy mayor. In a “surprise” career move, Zheng was appointed deputy director of the Taiwan Office. This should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention.
Xi doesn’t need intelligence briefings about the Taiwanese business elite. He’s known them for thirty years. He knows who’s leveraged, who owes him favors, who’s sympathetic to unification, and who can lean on others. A political transition doesn’t require tanks. It requires the right phone calls to the right people at the right moment, and Xi has spent his entire career assembling the right numbers.
Washington’s analytical failure on Taiwan isn’t an intelligence failure. It’s a cultural failure.
The entire American strategic establishment runs on Clausewitzian concepts: war as politics by other means, identify the center of gravity, mass force, achieve decisive battle. That’s how they think about Taiwan, in terms of carrier groups, kill chains, amphibious lift ratios. The analytical infrastructure is organized around “can China successfully invade?” as if that were the relevant question. But it’s not.
Sun Tzu’s hierarchy of strategic excellence ranks the highest achievement as defeating the enemy’s strategy, followed by disrupting his alliances, then attacking his army, with besieging walled cities at the bottom—the mark of failure, the option you resort to when everything else has gone wrong. An amphibious invasion of Taiwan is literally the lowest-ranked option in the strategic tradition Xi was educated in. Everything Beijing is actually doing—the economic integration, the KMT cultivation, the United Front work, the three-theater overextension of American forces—maps to the higher levels of the hierarchy. But the Pentagon keeps modeling the lowest one, because that’s the one they know how to wargame.
The entire PLA buildup may serve a dual purpose that the military analysts can’t see because they’re not trained to look for it: fixing Washington’s analytical attention on the invasion scenario, consuming defense budgets and strategic planning bandwidth on the wrong problem, while the actual operation proceeds through political channels. All warfare is based on deception, and the most elegant deception is one where the enemy sees exactly what you’re doing—building an invasion force—and draws exactly the wrong conclusion about what it’s for.
Xi Jinping is 72. He has broken every CCP institutional policy in order to remain in power. The 2027 Party Congress is where he has to either step down or pursue a fourth term. The centennial of the PLA’s founding falls the same year. Taiwan’s next presidential election is January 2028.
Mao founded the People’s Republic. Deng opened it to the world. Neither accomplished reunification with Taiwan island. I believe Xi intends unification to be his crowning legacy, and peaceful reunification would mark the superior achievement, not just in strategic and economic senses, but in the Chinese civilizational context. Military conquest would prove the PLA is strong. Peaceful reunification would prove that Chinese civilization’s gravitational pull is irresistible, that the Western model of strategic competition was defeated by patience and political art, and that the last holdout returned to the fold voluntarily. It would vindicate not just the CCP but the entire Sunzian tradition against the Clausewitzian one. The Americans spent trillions preparing for an invasion that never came while China won through asymmetric unrestricted warfare and 勢—the patient cultivation of positional advantage until the outcome becomes inevitable.
That would be a personal legacy that surpasses Mao, and Xi knows it.
The board is now set. Iran absorbs American attention and interceptor stocks. Russia pushes toward Odessa while the European governments begin to collapse under the weight of their impotence and corruption. The KMT builds its position inside Taiwan. Xi waits for the convergence, the right moment when US forces are committed, interceptors depleted, Europeans are helpless, Taiwan’s DPP is discredited, and the first quiet phone calls are made.
I don’t know the exact timeline. But I know the strategy, and I know about the man, and as an East Asian Studies major and armchair military historian, I know the tradition he operates in. From the Chinese perspective, the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting a battle. And while we’re watching Iran, I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening.
