Soon after Nancy Pelosi, speaker of America’s House of Representatives, left Taiwan on August 3rd, China launched war games around the island, which it claims as its own. A sabre-rattling response to Ms Pelosi’s intentionally provocative act, these were also a dry run for a bid to reunify Taiwan with the mainland by force, which China does not rule out. Troubling, then, for Taiwan and its Western backers, that in American simulations of the conflict the Chinese side often prevails. One congressional report in 2018 warned that America could plausibly face a “decisive military defeat” against China in a battle over Taiwan.
Since then China
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