"The Taiwan Evacuation Trap" - by CWP alum Eyck Freymann
When China’s military launched its “Justice Mission 2025” exercises last December, simulating a blockade of Taiwan’s major ports and air routes, hundreds of civilian flights between Taiwan and its outlying islands were disrupted. For thousands of stranded passengers, the drills offered a brief, unsettling glimpse of what a real crisis might feel like.
They also exposed a question few in Washington want to confront: What happens to the hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians living in Taiwan—including roughly 11,000 Americans—when the next crisis isn’t a drill?
Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, where he directs the Allied Coordination Working Group. He is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, the Institute of Geoeconomics in Tokyo, and the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.
Dr. Freymann works on strategies to preserve peace and protect U.S. interests and values in an era of systemic competition with China. He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China (Oxford, 2026), The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices (Hoover, 2025), and One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard, 2021). His scholarly work has appeared in The China Quarterly and is forthcoming in International Security.
Dr. Freymann comments on bipartisan national security issues in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, War on the Rocks, The Wire China, and The Atlantic, among other venues.
Before Hoover, Dr. Freymann held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Columbia. He holds a doctorate from Oxford, masters degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, and a bachelors from Harvard, all in history and China studies.
Photo Credit: https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/29/taiwan-china-us-war-invasion-crisis-evacuation-civilians/
By 總統府 - 05.18 國璽, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93732324
