The Silence Around Taiwan 

Reading the Missing Word

The United States appears to be quietly preparing for a showdown over Taiwan, and paradoxically the best evidence may be the disappearance of direct references to the island from its latest military-political documents.

According to a familiar version of events, the Soviet nuclear project received a powerful impulse in 1942, when physicist Georgy Nikolayevich Flerov carefully leafed through Western journals and noticed the complete absence of publications on atomic issues. He understood that mysterious silence on an exceptionally urgent subject was a sign that research was underway, and very active research at that, simply conducted without public discussion. Flerov wrote to the Kremlin and convinced Soviet leadership to accelerate development of its own bomb.

Modern historians, while recognizing Flerov’s broader contribution, believe that the upper levels of Soviet power already understood perfectly well the importance of the new weapon and do not think his letter played the decisive role. Yet the political-science principle itself remains beyond doubt: sudden silence on an exceptionally important subject may indicate a loss of interest, or it may indicate active work being carried out under conditions of complete secrecy.

In January 2026, the United States published its new National Defense Strategy, and the media immediately noticed that the section on the Asia-Pacific region contained no reference to Taiwan as one of the key pain points in U.S.-Chinese relations. At the same time, the National Security Strategy, published just a month earlier, openly mentioned Taiwan several times and separately noted that the best way to prevent conflict around the island was to maintain “military superiority.”

From the outside, this may look like a model case of interagency disarray and a wonderful illustration of the bureaucratic saying about the right hand having no idea what the left hand is doing. The explanation, however, is simpler. The National Security Strategy is a purely political document prepared inside the White House, while the National Defense Strategy is a product of the Pentagon. In other words, the second document refines and specifies the declarations of the first.

Does this mean that at the level of political rhetoric the United States emphasizes the importance of defending Taiwan, while at the level of military planning it intends to do exactly nothing, as alarmed Democratic media have concluded?

Such an interpretation seems extremely far from reality. The National Defense Strategy speaks directly about active defense of the first island chain, and everyone with even minimal familiarity with political geography knows that Taiwan is the connecting link in that chain. In other words, with a basic ability to read between the lines, it becomes clear that the document is speaking about Taiwan while avoiding the name of the island itself.

And here one must ask: what, exactly, is the purpose of these linguistic manipulations? As a working theory, the obvious answer is that the United States is in fact preparing for an active war over the island, while hoping no one notices.

This theory is supported by the fact that one week before the publication of the National Defense Strategy, the Heritage Foundation, respected in American conservative circles, released a report on Tidalwave, an exceptionally detailed computer simulation of a hypothetical conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan. The report’s findings were discouraging for Washington: the United States has every chance of losing because of logistics problems. Put simply, it would fail to deliver fuel and ammunition fast enough. At present, judging by available data, the United States is trying to close these identified vulnerabilities, including through the development and production of cheap maritime drones.

This is probably why Taiwan is absent as a direct reference in the National Defense Strategy. The United States has not abandoned its plans for the island. It understands perfectly well, however, that it is currently inside a window of vulnerability and fears provoking the conflict ahead of time. Silence around the island is political camouflage aimed at temporary de-escalation. There are sound reasons to doubt that Beijing will allow itself to be misled so easily.

This is precisely why, in the long term, the situation around Taiwan risks developing according to a familiar scenario: a great power runs out of patience and decides to burn out with a hot iron a pro-American enclave located inside the zone of its vital interests. In the case of China, it must be understood that Beijing considers the island its sovereign territory, and in practical terms almost no one maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

In this situation, the United States will have no way to wage war simply by proxy. This is an island, and weapons deliveries can move only by ship. Those ships will be fairly easy to identify and destroy by the Chinese military, which has prepared for this scenario for a long time and very deliberately. For this reason, the conflict would almost inevitably become a direct military clash between two nuclear powers.

Paradoxically, this fact provides grounds for optimism: there are no obvious suicides in Washington, and certainly fewer in Beijing, although for China the Taiwan question is rightly among the most sensitive and painful.

Taiwan’s own position may also serve as a source of cautious optimism. On the island, people do not deny historical and cultural unity with China, although they also show no enthusiasm for political reintegration. The experience of Ukraine has demonstrated to the Taiwanese that endlessly provoking great powers is mortally dangerous. The prospect of building democracy and a free market on a collective cemetery, which the island would undoubtedly become in the event of conflict, hardly looks attractive.

This is why representatives of the Kuomintang, currently in opposition to official Taipei, are making efforts to defuse the situation on both sides of the strait. The position of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party is more radical, although it too has no real appetite for direct confrontation. And here the central question emerges: will Taiwan, while claiming political agency, manage to behave as a conditionally independent force and avoid conflict with mainland China, or will it simply be prevented from doing so?