Photographs by Cheng-Chia HuangChinese President Xi Jinping does not often look like he’s having a good time. His resting face at public events exudes a mixture of boredom and annoyance, as though he has more interesting business elsewhere. His displays of good humor have qualified as news in Chinese state media. When a camera caught him laughing during a meeting last October with Donald Trump, the moment “stunned observers,” according to one news report. At their meeting in Beijing in May, the staging spoke as forcefully as Xi’s expressions. His appearance with Trump at a press conference inside Xi’s official residence featured two nearly identical armchairs, except that the one reserved for the U.S. president was lower and softer, making him look smaller and slouchier than his host. If Trump took offense, he didn’t show it.The Chinese Communist Party, like its forebear in the Soviet Union, often communicates in winking, elliptical ways. In April, Xi hosted a lunch for a delegation from Taiwan. He drew his guests’ attention to the soup—chicken broth with sea clams. The same dish had been served, he said, during a state dinner that Beijing hosted for President Richard Nixon in 1972, when Xi was still a teenager. Two of his guests told me that Xi seemed oddly animated at the luncheon. He cracked jokes. He told stories. He showed his teeth when he smiled. In a break from their usual attire, Xi and his courtiers chose to wear blue ties. Blue is the symbolic color of Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, which currently holds the most seats in the island’s Parliament. Its chair, Cheng Li-wun, was the guest of honor that day.The friendly performance, like the meeting itself, seemed out of character. A central tenet of the Chinese Communist Party holds that Taiwan is not a sovereign country but a wayward province that must be subjugated before China can fully achieve its idea of national greatness. Since taking power, in 2012, Xi has made it his mission to isolate and dominate Taiwan. He warned Trump in May that their disagreements over Taiwan could lead to an “extremely dangerous situation” that might well cause the United States and China to “collide or even clash.”And yet, a month earlier, the Taiwanese Nationalists had received a warm reception in Beijing. They’d strolled through the Forbidden City, posed for pictures with curious crowds, toured an airplane factory, and talked business with Chinese executives. Xi had welcomed the delegation as though the delegates held the keys to his success. In many ways, they do.On Xi’s orders, the People’s Liberation Army has been preparing to seize Taiwan by force, and it has encouraged the world to imagine an invasion. Last December, it released an AI-generated video showing swarms of drones attacking Taiwan and humanoid robots marching through the ruins. In reality, drones would form only part of a Chinese attack. The first salvo could use cyberweapons to take down Taiwan’s power grid and communications networks, spreading panic among the population. Missiles and drones could then target Taiwan’s command posts, military bases, and air defenses, clearing the way for Chinese troops to storm its beaches.Taiwan has more than 200,000 active military personnel, and they could probably fend off a Chinese attack for a short while. But within a few weeks, the U.S., Japan, and other allies would need to resupply the island with fuel and weapons. The Chinese navy—the world’s largest fleet of warships—would do its best to keep them away. Cargo traffic through the Taiwan Strait, one of the world’s main shipping channels, would be interrupted, wiping trillions of dollars in value from global markets. If the U.S. goes to war with China to defend Taiwan, the likely death toll of soldiers and civilians would be in the tens of thousands on both sides. War games have consistently shown that, in a conventional conflict, the U.S. military could expect to lose more troops in the initial weeks of fighting than it lost over the course of 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.China has spent decades rehearsing for such a conflict. Its military has built training grounds with replicas of U.S. warships and fighter jets. One facility, in the desert of northern China, features a mock-up of the Taiwanese presidential headquarters and several streets close to Parliament. But Cheng told me that she did not ask Xi to ease up on the military threats. Their talks focused instead on a plan for Taiwan to drop its claim to independence, stop preparing for war, and move toward reconciliation with the mainland.During their lunch in April, Xi used the story about the soup to suggest a link between this plan for the future of Taiwan and Nixon’s opening to China half a century ago—a historic summit meant to turn adversaries into allies. Cheng was still beaming over the comparison a few weeks later, when we met in her office in Taipei. The trip had left her with a “very special” understanding that Taiwan and China “share the same culture, share the same blood, and that we can embrace this.” It allowed her to believe that “everything is possible, because we’re just one big family.”Cheng punctuated this remark with a gesture of relief, exhaling and letting her arms fall to her lap. With time, she seems to hope, Taiwan and its American allies will take the same view of China, accepting a slow, preemptive surrender as the best way to avoid war.Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic“We’re just one big family”: Cheng Li-wun, the leader of Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, sees no threat from China.Even a few years ago, pandering to China would have been a losing strategy for politicians in Taiwan. The ruling government of President Lai Ching-te, whose Democratic Progressive Party has been in power since 2016, has urged the U.S. to strengthen Taiwan’s defenses in anticipation of a Chinese attack. Cheng and her Nationalists have done the opposite. Their control of Parliament has allowed them to block defense spending, taking particular care to stall the domestic production of drones and other inexpensive weapons that Ukraine has used to great effect against Russia. The U.S. war with Iran has helped Cheng make the case that resisting China would be futile. Since launching the war, in February, the U.S. has been forced to move warships and aircraft from Asia to the Middle East; at the same time, the need to defend against Iranian drones and missiles has depleted an estimated two-thirds of the U.S. stockpile of advanced air-defense systems, which would be crucial in any war with China. Even Cheng’s opponents acknowledge that the Iran war has left the U.S. less ready to defend Taiwan.[Read: What China just learned from the Iran war]When I visited Taiwan this spring, I saw clearly how little faith remained in the U.S. as a force for stability and protection. My questions about American support usually elicited a long pause or a sad smile. When the answers came, whether from politicians, military veterans, or ordinary citizens, nearly all described the U.S. as “unpredictable,” a flabby word on which to hang a nation’s fate. This loss of confidence has forced many in Taiwan to rethink their attitude toward China. Should they continue to prepare for a war they cannot win on their own? Or should they accept the deal that Cheng and Xi have apparently hatched?Both of them have kept the details vague. In public they talk of shared identity, free trade, economic bonds, and peaceful coexistence, while skirting questions about the amount of freedom and democracy that China would accept in Taiwan and the amount of Taiwanese sovereignty it would tolerate. Cheng often gets asked about the example of Hong Kong, whose democratic institutions China has dismantled. Taiwan would get a better deal, she insisted in our interview—one that would permit free elections as long as the winner does not insist on Taiwan’s independence.Andrew Harnik / GettyDonald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, October 2025. Xi has warned Trump that their disagreements over Taiwan could lead to an “extremely dangerous situation.”Trump seems open to such an arrangement. After his May meeting with Xi, he described the U.S. sale of weapons to Taiwan not as a strategic necessity but as a “very good negotiating chip” in future talks with China about trade, nuclear arms, and the race to develop artificial intelligence. He also cast doubt on U.S. willingness to come to Taiwan’s defense: “The last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away,” Trump told reporters while flying home from Beijing on Air Force One. (The war with Iran, roughly 7,000 miles from U.S. soil, was then in its third month.)Given the choice, most people in Taiwan would prefer the status quo. They want to maintain their autonomy, trade freely with the world, and keep China out of their affairs. They value their place in the club of democracies that the U.S. once anchored and pledged to protect. But the American public is weary of foreign entanglements. The American president, enamored of autocrats, treats democratic allies as deadbeats and dupes.Against this background, Taiwan and its defenders struggle to explain why Americans should care enough about their cause to risk war with China. Shared principles of freedom and democracy no longer count for much in this debate. When the subject came up in my interviews in Taipei and Washington, people seemed embarrassed to talk about American values, as if the idea were quaint. The more forceful arguments for Taiwan’s defense came from military strategists, who see the island as a platform to secure American dominance over the Pacific. Other arguments are economic. More than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips are made in Taiwan—including the ones driving the AI revolution, which has propped up the American economy. The U.S. does not want China to control that crucial resource.[Read: Taiwan has a Trump problem]But Trump does not seem willing to confront China over that issue. He has described Xi as a “great leader” and a friend. Ahead of their meetings this year—the next one is due to take place in late September, when Xi visits the U.S.—Trump allowed the sale of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. The stated aims of Trump’s foreign policy center on the domination of the Western Hemisphere. In other parts of the world, he has either retreated or made a mess from which he would like to retreat. Taiwan might count among the lucky ones: Trump has not threatened its sovereignty, the way he has with Canada and Greenland.Annabelle Chih / GettyA launcher truck for American-made surface-to-air Patriot missiles, deployed at a park in Taipei as part of military exercises in 2025Still, the unraveling of the Pax Americana looks a lot more dangerous from the shores of Taiwan, a free nation that belongs to no trade bloc and has no formal alliances. Its survival depends on the promise of U.S. support, which no longer seems convincing. China’s allies in Taipei need only point to Trump’s prevarications as proof that the Americans cannot be trusted. That may be all Xi needs to take Taiwan without firing a shot.Cheng Li-wun may agree with Xi’s talking points, but she lacks his flair for understatement. Cheng has a resonant voice, an eager laugh, and a tendency to slash the air with her hands for emphasis. At the start of her political career, in the 1990s, she defended Taiwan’s independence and denounced the Communist regime in Beijing—a stance that she now, at 56, explains away as youthful ignorance. Cheng first won a seat in Parliament on the Nationalist ticket in 2008, and she has since come to represent the party’s more radical wing, espousing a level of deference toward China that the dwindling old guard finds hard to stomach.Roughly 65,000 members of the party voted last fall in the election that made Cheng their chair—hardly enough for her to claim a popular mandate in a nation of 23 million people. Still, the position gives her enormous sway over Taiwan’s military spending and its ability to defend itself. It also places her in a lineage of party leaders that stretches back more than a century, to before the civil war that swept across China in the late 1940s. In 1949, Communist forces under Mao Zedong took power, with support from the Soviet Union. The defeated Nationalists, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to their strongholds on Taiwan and a few other islands off China’s coast.Bettmann / GettyGeneralissimo Chiang Kai-shek at a rally celebrating Taiwan’s National Day, October 1970They never acknowledged defeat. Even after Chiang’s death, in 1975, the Nationalists clung to the belief that the Communist regime would eventually collapse, making way for them to retake control of mainland China. The U.S. nurtured that delusion during the first two decades of the Cold War. It opened an embassy in Taipei and treated Taiwan’s leaders as the legitimate government of China. Taiwan even held China’s seat in the United Nations, where Taiwanese diplomats sat behind a nameplate that said China. For its part, the Communist regime in Beijing had no diplomatic relations with the United States or most of its European allies. The U.S. secured its position in Asia through a series of military alliances with China’s local adversaries—South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan.[From the May 1942 issue: Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘China Emergent’]Taiwan’s status proved untenable. In 1971, the UN gave Taiwan’s seat in the General Assembly to China. Nixon’s visit to Beijing the following year upended American policy toward China and Taiwan. By the end of the decade, the U.S. had withdrawn its embassy from Taipei and opened a new one in Beijing. It had also abandoned its mutual-defense pact with Taiwan and, in its place, provided softer assurances. The Taiwan Relations Act, signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, commits the U.S. to continuing to provide “arms of a defensive character” to Taiwan. It states that Chinese aggression toward the island, including an embargo, would be a matter of “grave concern,” whatever that might mean.Bettmann / GettyRichard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai during the American president’s first visit to Beijing, February 1972This policy of “strategic ambiguity” faced its greatest test during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995 and ’96, when the U.S. and China nearly came to blows. The crisis started innocently enough: The U.S. had merely granted a visa for Taiwan’s then-president to speak at Cornell University, his alma mater. China responded to the visit with a series of threats and military exercises, firing missiles in the vicinity of Taiwan and disrupting cargo traffic.President Bill Clinton, under intense pressure from Congress, sent two U.S. aircraft carriers to the area. One of them, the USS Nimitz, sailed through the Taiwan Strait as a warning to Chinese leaders, who ordered the military to stand down. “They felt a kind of humiliation from that,” Lee Hsi-min, a retired admiral in Taiwan’s navy, told me.Throughout the crisis, Lee commanded a submarine called the Sea Dragon, which had orders to remain beneath the strait, ready to ambush any Chinese warships that tried to cross. When we met in Taipei this spring, I asked him to describe what he’d felt during those weeks. “I didn’t get scared,” he said. “I was really confident.” The torpedoes he had on board could sink any vessel in China’s fleet, and he had the support of the USS Nimitz behind him. “But now,” Lee said, “I don’t have that confidence at all.”The Taiwan Strait crisis offered a conceptual blueprint: With enough advanced weapons, Taiwan could hold its own until the American cavalry arrived. China set out to challenge that idea. Within a few years, its defense spending increased by more than 50 percent. The focus was on weapons that could stop American warships from again threatening its shores. By the time Barack Obama took office, in 2009, the Chinese arsenal of submarines and missiles had undermined Taiwan’s defensive strategy.[From the June 2005 issue: Robert D. Kaplan on how the U.S. would fight China]Arming Taiwan with sophisticated weapons, such as fighter jets and submarines, would not address the imbalance, because China had developed the means to destroy most of them in the opening phase of any war. U.S. military advisers soon began to argue that Taiwan should become a “porcupine republic,” bristling with smaller, portable weapons such as shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. Once properly trained in their use, Taiwanese soldiers would be able to sink enough approaching ships and down enough warplanes to make the idea of an invasion too costly. They could also deploy guerrilla tactics to resist a Chinese occupation.The new approach quickly gained favor in Washington. But it took another decade to catch on in Taipei. For most politicians, the idea of waging an insurgency in urban areas, with bazooka-toting soldiers on rooftops, does not make for an appealing electoral platform. Inside the military, generals balked at the structural changes needed to prepare for a porcupine defense. It would require giving lower-ranking officers the freedom to act on their own initiative, organizing ambushes and making decisions in a crisis—a foreign notion in their top-down military culture.When Trump began his first term, in 2017, Taiwan hoped that it might yet acquire the capacity to outgun China through the purchase of high-end American weapons. The U.S. tried to make the Taiwanese military reconsider. “Don’t build the strategy around 300 F-16s,” a U.S. Navy admiral recalls telling his counterparts in Taipei at the time. “This just doesn’t make any sense.” Taiwan could never buy enough jets or warships to rival China’s fleet, he argued: “You need to be able to shoot down aircraft. You need to be able to defeat drones.” (The American admiral, now retired, spoke with me on condition of anonymity because he does business in China.) At that point, China could manufacture more drones than any other country by far. A single company in Shenzhen controls more than 70 percent of the global drone market. Both Russia and Ukraine rely on drone components made in Shenzhen, including the motors, controllers, and batteries needed to fly them.Taiwan lags far behind in this technology. Not until 2022 did its government decide to form what it calls a national drone team. Taiwan, like the United States, bars the use of Chinese technology in its defense industry. So the team needed to make its weapons from scratch or find alternative suppliers. Max Lo, the founder of a commercial-drone company, was put in charge of the effort, and he began reaching out to contacts in the private sector. It was like Ocean’s Eleven, but with entrepreneurs whose background had little obvious value to the mission. Among the companies Lo recruited was the packaged-food giant I‑Mei, whose cookies and snacks are pantry staples throughout Taiwan. One of its subsidiaries had been working on delivery drones, which qualified the company to join the national drone team. To help get factories up and running, the government offered about $1.5 billion in investments last year, far short of what is needed.The most successful member of the national drone team has been Thunder Tiger, a publicly listed company that makes dental equipment as well as remote-controlled toys. It began making drones about a decade ago, mostly for use in disaster response. When I visited its headquarters, in the city of Taichung, the general manager, Gene Su, took me on a tour of the factory, in a run-down industrial park. In one room, robotic arms moved around inside plexiglass boxes, spooling copper wires onto little engines that would be used to power drones. The room was no bigger than a three-car garage. To reach it, we passed through a much larger open space, about half as long as a football field, where dozens of people in lab coats sat making dental drills. The company earns most of its money by selling them around the world, Su told me. Drones account for a fraction of its revenue. Taiwan’s defense ministry has said it needs about 200,000 drones. But Thunder Tiger cannot begin to meet those needs without financing from the defense budget. “We’re all just waiting for government money,” Su said. During my visit, I saw some of its designs displayed on a conference table. One, named Overkill, had four small rotors and a fake artillery shell strapped to its belly. It resembled a model I had seen a few months earlier in Ukraine, at a factory in Kyiv that makes about 4,000 small drones a day. At its current capacity, Thunder Tiger would need two months to produce that many.Cheng-Chia Huang for The AtlanticTechnicians at Thunder Tiger—a maker of dental drills and toys—working on drone motors.Cheng-Chia Huang for The AtlanticA model of a Thunder Tiger interceptor drone.The U.S. military does not disclose how many troops it has in Taiwan. At a meeting in Taipei, a retired officer in the Taiwanese navy chided me for asking about them. Beijing, he explained, sees any U.S. forces so close to its shores as a provocation. Their mission mainly involves training Taiwanese soldiers on how to use American weapons and preparing them to wage guerrilla warfare.Mark Montgomery, a retired American rear admiral, has put the size of the U.S. deployment at about 500. “It needs to be 1,000,” he told a congressional hearing in May of last year. “If we are going to give them billions of dollars in assistance, sell them tens of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. gear, it makes sense that we would be over there training and working.”Montgomery, who once commanded an aircraft-carrier strike group in the Pacific, belongs to a small but devoted community of Taiwan defenders in Washington. These military veterans and foreign-policy experts still have influence on Capitol Hill. They have little or none in the White House. During the first Trump administration, one of these stalwarts, Matt Pottinger, oversaw China policy on the National Security Council. He worked hard to ensure that Trump’s isolationist urges did not eat away at Taiwan’s defenses. No one seems to play a comparable role in the White House today.In response to my questions about Taiwan, a senior administration official sent a terse response via email. It focused mostly on contrasting Trump’s positions with those of President Biden, whose name the statement deliberately mangled. “The O’Biden team proved that prioritizing allies’ interests over America’s does NOT result in greater security,” the official wrote.Biden agreed during his tenure to sell Taiwan about $8 billion worth of weapons, significantly less than the $11 billion Trump has so far approved in this term. But only a fraction of the weaponry has been delivered to Taiwan; the backlog on orders is immense. It would take years for U.S. manufacturers to produce the arms Taiwan has already paid for, especially given the need for them to replenish American stockpiles because of the war in Iran.In terms of messaging, Biden was far tougher on China than Trump has been. Biden never visited China during his presidential tenure. When asked whether the U.S. military would defend Taiwan, Biden responded on four separate occasions that it would. Trump has never said that. He has focused instead on efforts to do business with China and lower the trade deficit. During his trip to China this spring, Trump invited a coterie of billionaires to join him, including Elon Musk and Tim Cook. A published list of passengers on Air Force One featured Eric Trump and his wife, Lara. But it did not appear to include any recognized China hands. When a veteran of Obama’s National Security Council, Brett Bruen, pointed this out on X, he received a juvenile response from the White House director of communications, Steven Cheung: “Stop calling yourself an expert in anything, aside from sucking.” Cheung added that Bruen was a “slope-brained, mouth breathing moron.”At least one China expert did join the White House delegation to Beijing: Ivan Kanapathy, the senior director for Asia on the NSC and a Marine Corps veteran. Kanapathy’s views on Taiwan align with those of most other experts in the field, and his writings appear in an influential book, The Boiling Moat, alongside essays by Pottinger and Montgomery. Soon after he joined the White House staff, Kanapathy faced an accusation of disloyalty from one of Trump’s outside advisers, the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer. Ever since then, “he’s barely got a job,” one of his friends, a fellow Taiwan expert, told me. “She’s after him.” (The White House declined to allow Kanapathy to speak with me.)The expert community often meets up to run simulations of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. The results are almost never reassuring. Over the past three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies has played out dozens of scenarios in three rounds of war games. The only ones that end in defeat for China have two things in common: Taiwan shows determination in fighting back, and the U.S. swiftly intervenes with the full might of its military. Both must happen. Even then, Taiwan’s infrastructure would suffer weeks of bombardment, while the U.S. and its allies would lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of troops—or so CSIS concluded in the first of three reports about the war games, published in 2023.Two authors of the CSIS reports, Eric Heginbotham and Matthew Cancian, traveled to Taiwan in 2024 to present their findings to military leaders. They got a mixed reception. One of their meetings nearly ended in a fistfight, Heginbotham told me. In the southern city of Kaohsiung, a group of retired Taiwanese naval officers invited the Americans to an ice-cream parlor and, over a round of sundaes, told them to stop preparing for war. They said that Taiwan possessed neither the determination nor the means to fight, and that the U.S. would never intervene to help. The defeatist attitude angered the two Americans, for what it said about Taiwan’s morale and for a more personal reason: Heginbotham’s son, who serves on a U.S. submarine in the Pacific, could be sent to fight in a war with China. “Sorry for my language, but what the fuck?” he recalled saying. “My son’s life is on the line to defend you guys.”The circular psychology is hard to break: The U.S. will not step in to help if Taiwan lacks the will to fight, and the Taiwanese will be more tempted to surrender if they believe the U.S. isn’t ready to help them. For most people in Taiwan, the pessimism of the naval officers would not come as a surprise. A survey conducted this spring found that fewer than a quarter of Taiwanese voters consider the U.S. a “trustworthy ally,” and only 35 percent believe the U.S. would be likely to help Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. Both figures had dropped sharply after Trump began his second term. Among Americans, his claims of friendship with Xi might sound like idle flattery, sly diplomacy, or self-delusion. In Taiwan, they perpetuate the idea that resisting China would be a hopeless cause.Cheng and the Nationalists now preach this idea in the halls of Parliament. Richard Y. K. Chen, a retired admiral in the Taiwanese navy who represents the party on the defense-and-foreign-affairs committee, told me that Taiwan has no chance of surviving a Chinese invasion even with help from the Americans. He has met with the U.S. military advisers working to turn his country into a porcupine republic, and their plans struck him as fanciful. Once the enemy lands on the beaches, “it’s too late,” the admiral told me. “Even if you try to engage in some guerrilla warfare, the local government agencies have already collapsed.”The measures he proposed, such as evacuation plans, emergency-medicine distribution, and “societal resiliency to protect the public,” focused mainly on minimizing casualties during a Chinese attack and preserving Taiwan’s infrastructure. When I brought up the Ukrainians, who managed not only to thwart Russia’s attack on Kyiv in 2022 but to partly roll back the invading forces, Chen offered a list of reasons their tactics would not work in Taiwan. Ukraine, for a start, has nearly 17 times more land on which to maneuver, as well as a border with Poland that its allies have used throughout the war for resupply. That would not be possible on an island like Taiwan.And what about drones? The war in Ukraine has shown their effectiveness, especially for the defenders. The Ukrainians have pioneered the use of naval drones—remote-controlled boats packed with explosives. In the Black Sea, these weapons have helped damage or destroy at least a third of Russia’s naval fleet, forcing the rest of its warships to retreat from their base in Crimea. One of the developers of Ukraine’s most famous naval drone, the Magura, told me it would be particularly useful in the Taiwan Strait, where a few hundred of them could sink a Chinese armada.[Read: Taiwan faces its Ukraine moment]Chen gave me a sidelong look when I brought this up, as if to ask whether I could really be so naive. “The Black Sea is not the Taiwan Strait,” he said. For one thing, the Ukrainians have relied on Starlink satellites to pilot their drones against Russia; Elon Musk, who owns those satellites, has not allowed Taiwan to use them. Starlink describes this as a business decision, but many in Taiwan question Musk’s motives, pointing out that his car company, Tesla, has one of its biggest factories in Shanghai. Other satellite networks exist, albeit less reliable ones than Starlink. But Chen brushed those options aside as worthless to Taiwan. Even if Taiwan were to spend many more billions of dollars on advanced weapons, Chen said, “how long can you defend the coast? Three weeks? Four weeks?” In that time, he said, China would already have won.Given those odds, it did not surprise me to learn that draft-dodging in Taiwan remains pervasive. The government decided only in 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to increase the required military service from four months to one year. But the recruitment effort left open a variety of loopholes. Some men of fighting age (19 to 36 years old) have reportedly made themselves obese, eating their way to a medical exemption. Others opted for alternative service. Puma Shen, an ambitious young member of the defense-and-foreign-affairs committee, has campaigned for higher military spending and promoted a culture of respect for the armed services. But when called to complete his own mandatory service, he chose to do it at the transportation ministry, where his work mostly involved giving directions to tourists.Regular military service in Taiwan also involves a lot of common chores, such as cutting grass, Shen told me in his office in Taipei. “People think it’s a waste of time.” On the wall behind him hung a large poster of David sitting atop Goliath’s severed head. It had been a gift from a soldier he met in Ukraine, which he visited in 2023 to learn from its defenders. The trip made clear how far behind Taiwan’s military had fallen. Only last year did basic training begin to provide lessons in piloting drones rather than fighting with bayonets. Much of the top brass in Taiwan remains averse to risk, change, and new technologies. “They really want to protect their own,” Shen said. “This is the way we always do it.”Cheng-Chia Huang for The AtlanticTaiwanese cadets at a military ceremony in JuneThe offices of Taiwan’s Parliament occupy a drab building on a narrow street in the center of Taipei. When I arrived one morning this spring, lawmakers had already gathered inside to debate a special military budget. There was no security at the entrance—not even an ID check. A clerk sent me right up to the office of Wang Ting-yu, a senior member of the defense-and-foreign-affairs committee and a close ally of Taiwan’s president.He happened to be in a meeting with a large U.S. defense firm, AeroVironment, whose representatives sat around his conference table. One of them greeted me as I walked in. We had met earlier that week at a defense forum in Taipei, where he had been talking up the value of an American drone called the Switchblade. Designed to launch out of a tube and explode on impact, the weapon had performed badly against Russian forces in Ukraine. The company has tried to improve its drones based on the lessons from that war. But the U.S. military has reportedly cut back on buying them.Taiwan can afford a lot of weaponry. Its foreign-currency reserves, the sixth-largest in the world, are worth roughly $600 billion. But a defense bill had been stuck for months in Wang’s committee. Its opponents in the Nationalist Party had turned the budget debate into a proxy battle over Taiwan’s future, its relations with China, and its reliance on the United States. The need for a new budget arose late last year, when the Trump administration approved the biggest sale of American weapons to Taiwan in history. The $11 billion package included rocket launchers, artillery, anti-tank missiles, and other sophisticated gear.The following week, the Chinese military responded with a series of drills off the shores of Taiwan, firing missiles and rehearsing a blockade. Taiwan’s ruling party used the threats to argue for an additional package of American weapons, this one worth $14 billion. But President Lai needed Parliament to approve all the extra spending. In addition to the annual defense budget, about $20 billion, he sought a special disbursement of more than $40 billion over the next eight years. Roughly three-quarters of it would go toward American arms, while the rest would aid the development of Taiwan’s own defense industry, especially its drone factories.According to most polls, the extra spending bill had broad support. Voters saw it as a way to deter China and keep the Americans happy. It would satisfy Trump’s demand that all U.S. allies spend more on defense. It would also create jobs in the military industry and stimulate the broader economy, including in districts that the Nationalist Party controls. But the plan faced stiff resistance: In a phone call in February, Xi warned Trump to show “extreme caution.” The White House then decided to withhold the bulk of the arms packages until Xi and Trump had a chance to discuss them in person. Since their summit in May, the sales remain on hold.For Wang, arms deals double as a test of American resolve. No other country sells weapons to Taiwan. “So it’s a matter of life and death to Taiwan,” Wang said. He did not object to the U.S. pursuing dialogue with China, but he warned that Taiwan must not be used as some kind of bargaining chip. Would Trump treat it like one? Wang looked at his hands for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t criticize our allies.”In the end, the legislators agreed to a pared-down budget worth about $25 billion. Practically all of it would go toward the purchase of American weapons—the Nationalists managed to cut the money for Taiwan’s drone industry. Nothing was left for the kinds of inexpensive, homegrown systems that Ukraine has used to fight the Russians. In late June, the Nationalists submitted a competing plan to meet the military’s need for drones. It included a lot more oversight and red tape that would slow the process down. Parliament has since been deadlocked over which plan to pursue, leaving the nascent drone program in limbo, which is precisely where China wants it.After her meeting with Xi in April, Cheng returned to Taiwan with a package of support from the Chinese Communist Party, called “the 10 incentives.” Their provisions would allow Taiwanese farmers, fishermen, and people in some other industries to sell food and goods in China. They also promised that certain TV shows, documentaries, and cartoons from Taiwan would be shown on the mainland (with proper vetting, of course). Chinese state media cast the incentives as a gift from Xi to the Nationalist Party. Friendly behavior, they suggested, would elicit additional favor.Taiwan’s government has tried to block the incentives, calling them a blatant form of political interference. At the very least, they offered a preview of how the Chinese might try to influence Taiwan’s next presidential election, which is due to take place in 2028. Cheng has suggested that she intends to run, and her campaign will no doubt benefit from the support of China, which she portrays as a generous neighbor. “They have become so modern,” she told me. During her visit to the mainland, officials in Shanghai treated her to an order of bubble tea—a Taiwanese invention—that was delivered via drone. The delegation also attended a performance of Mozart and Tchaikovsky at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. “Their chief violinist was actually an American!” Cheng told me through an interpreter. “So I think China has become more confident. They’re more inclusive and more globalized.”When I asked what China might want in return for its friendly incentives, she seemed surprised at my suggestion that the relationship could come with strings attached. Xi had assured her, she said, that China would respect Taiwan’s system of government. He had not talked about making Taiwan a part of China. He had not brought up the experience of Hong Kong, whose democratic institutions survived for less than a decade after the British colony’s absorption into China in 1997. Wouldn’t China seek to do the same to Taiwan? “No,” she said, using the English word to make sure I understood. “We do not need to sacrifice or make any compromise regarding Taiwan’s freedom, democracy, economy, or our rule of law.”But China has already worked hard to curtail the rights of Taiwan and its elected leaders. Because of China’s decades-long pressure campaign, only 11 nations have formal relations with Taiwan. In April, China prevented President Lai from visiting one of them: At the request of Beijing, the Seychelles, Mauritius, and Madagascar refused to grant Lai’s plane the right to transit their airspace, forcing him to postpone his trip to Eswatini, a landlocked country in southern Africa. When I asked Cheng about the incident, she shrugged it off, saying Lai had brought it on himself “due to his own policies.”Last year, a few months after Trump began his second term, his administration denied Lai’s request to stop in the U.S. on his way to Latin America. But Cheng and the Nationalists have faced no restrictions. Less than two months after her visit to Beijing, Cheng led a delegation of party members on a trip to Washington and several other U.S. cities. During an appearance at the Asia Society, in Manhattan, she cast Xi as a reliable partner and repeated her assertion that China and Taiwan belong together. The moderators pressed her to explain how Taiwan’s democracy could survive such a partnership. “It’s a win-win scenario,” Cheng said, recalling how Xi had promised her that “anything can be negotiated.”In their seats near the front, several experts on Taiwan and retired U.S. diplomats exchanged skeptical looks and rolled their eyes. One whispered to me that Cheng sounded like “a whack job.” To me, she seemed more like an opportunist. At a time of lost trust in American resolve, she has reached for the bargain China is offering. Voters in Taiwan can feel the balance of power shifting, and many will choose the side that looks more stable, even at the risk of their own liberties.Near the end of Cheng’s talk in Manhattan, a member of the audience stood up and urged her not to pursue this deal. He warned that China would demolish Taiwan’s democracy, as it had demolished democratic processes in Hong Kong, and he demanded to know why Cheng had blocked funding for the drones that Taiwan needs. “Xi Jinping is a dictator!” the man shouted. Security guards then seized his microphone and removed him from the hall. Cheng seemed to enjoy the spectacle. “Drones should not be used as weapons,” she said with a smile, “but they should be used to deliver bubble tea.”Cheng-Chia Huang for The AtlanticA tourist on Kinmen island, the westernmost outpost of sovereign Taiwanese territory, looks across the bay toward Xiamen, China. Once considered a front line in Taiwan’s defense, Kinmen is now a popular destination for travelers from China.Kinmen island, the westernmost outpost of sovereign Taiwanese territory, used to be a fortress. It sits only a few miles off the coast of China, close enough for a good swimmer to make it across to the mainland. In the late 1940s, the retreating Nationalists built bunkers here, positioned tanks, and studded the coastline with metal spikes to impale enemy landing craft. Thousands of Communist soldiers stormed these beaches during the Battle of Kinmen, in October 1949. Most were killed, the rest taken prisoner.Today, several monuments commemorate this part of Taiwan’s origin story, and a museum stands near the site of the battle. When I visited this spring, the guides urged me not to miss the immersive experience. It featured a dark room with eerie music and animations of war on the walls. Cameras took my photo and projected it onto a battle scene, inviting me to see myself as a defender of Kinmen. Only a few people alive in Taiwan today can remember fighting a war against China, and the simulation felt like an attempt to help younger generations imagine that experience.Many schoolchildren come to the museum on field trips. But the more common visitors lately are tourists from mainland China. Ferries bring them to Kinmen several times a day, and local businesses ply them with fried fish and sorghum liquor, the pungent local specialty. Such visits are part of China’s strategy. In a treatise published in 2023, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party laid out a plan to pamper Kinmen with investment and tourism, turning the island into part of a “demonstration zone” to show what life might be like after the “complete reunification of the motherland.” The plan calls ultimately for a bridge to link Kinmen and the closest city on the mainland, Xiamen, about two miles away.At the start of his career, Xi Jinping served as the vice mayor of Xiamen. His preferred path for absorbing Taiwan into China has always relied on convincing the Taiwanese that life would improve under Beijing’s rule. China’s growth has made that easier. In the early 1990s, Taiwan’s economy was more than half the size of China’s. Now it’s one-20th the size. Residents of Kinmen can see the skyscrapers in Xiamen. They will soon be able to see jets landing at its new international airport. Many of them feel a greater kinship with the mainland than they do with Taipei.Atop one of the bluffs closest to China, a tower of speakers still broadcasts Taiwanese propaganda toward the mainland in a loop, calling on the Communists to defect and gain their liberty. The recording used to play loudly enough for people on the mainland to hear it. But local authorities have turned down the volume, converting the speakers into a tourist attraction.Cheng-Chia Huang for The AtlanticOnce a fortified front line, now a tourist site: A tower of speakers on Kinmen aims propaganda across the water, toward the mainland.Cheng-Chia Huang for The AtlanticBarnacle-encrusted barriers against invasion at a beach on Kinmen island. They face the mainland city of Xiamen.On the beach below, metal spikes still protrude from the sand, tilted at China, eroded by salt water and covered in barnacles. Wooden signs with skulls and crossbones used to warn about the risk of land mines on this coast. But the last of the mines have been cleared away, and the government has declared the beach open for swimming. On my last afternoon on the island, I decided to make my way toward China. My clumsy backstroke carried me 100 yards or so, just far enough to be able to look back at the coast and see that it no longer resembles anyone’s idea of a geopolitical flash point. There were no lookout posts or fortifications, no Taiwanese patrol boats. Only the battle museum and the tower of speakers, playing a message that no one in China can hear.This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Will Taiwan Just Give Up?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.