"We’re Sleepwalking Into a Taiwan Disaster" - by CWP alum Eyck Freymann

April 18, 2026
The question of how the United States would respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is not academic. It is the whole thing. And the answer, at the moment, is: Nobody knows.

Looming over every development, negotiation, and controversy in the ongoing war with Iran is a persistent question: Could this be the prelude to World War III?

It’s not an unreasonable concern. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is squeezing the global economy. Iran’s nuclear ambitions remain at the center of high-stakes negotiations. All the while, China—reportedly aiding Iran in targeting U.S. military sites—watches closely, waiting for the right moment to launch an attack it has spent decades preparing for: an invasion of Taiwan.

This would mark the biggest crisis of this century—the moment when tensions between the United States and its foremost rival finally come to a head, and the fate of an island at the center of the world’s most critical high-tech supply chains hangs in the balance. And it is a scenario for which, according to the author of today’s Big Read, we have no plan.

Eyck Freymann is the author of a new book, Defending Taiwan, and he offers a sweeping examination of this looming conflict, and what the United States must do to prevent it. Today’s essay, adapted from the book, drops us into the opening hours of a Taiwan crisis—and explains why our failure to learn from the Iran war may already be pushing us closer to global economic disaster than we realize. —The Editors

https://www.thefp.com/p/were-sleepwalking-into-a-taiwan-disasterisaster

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://www.thefp.com/p/were-sleepwalking-into-a-taiwan-disasterisaster

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.