COMMENTARY: Beijing arms Moscow and threatens Taiwan: China's double threat

COMMENTARY: Beijing arms Moscow and threatens Taiwan: China's double threat

Introduction: two fronts, one strategy from Beijing

China plays on two boards simultaneously

The People's Republic of China has chosen a strategy of remarkable audacity: indirectly arming Russia in its war against Ukraine, while simultaneously conducting increasingly aggressive military exercises against Taiwan. These two vectors are not separate — they form part of a coherent doctrine aimed at exhausting the West on two fronts, testing the limits of the American response, and creating the conditions for a world order where Beijing dictates the rules rather than submitting to them.

The week of June 21 to 28, 2026 provided alarming new elements on both dimensions of this strategy. The PRC responded to the expansion of the American list of sanctioned entities — the "1260H list" — with targeted economic countermeasures. Taiwan conducted five-day "immediate combat readiness" military exercises with tanks patrolling the streets. European powers issued a rare collective warning about the Chinese threat to the island. All of this, against the backdrop of RIMPAC 2026, the Pacific's largest allied naval exercise.

China's support for Russia: what we know and what we suspect

Beijing formally denies any arms deliveries to Russia. The facts are more nuanced. Chinese-made electronic components have been found in Russian military equipment recovered on the Ukrainian battlefield. Iranian drones with Chinese components fuel Russian strikes. Chinese front companies supply dual-use goods — computing technology, optics, tooling parts — which transit through third countries to reach the Russian defense industry.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported on June 26, 2026 that the PRC responded to the expansion of the American "1260H list" by prohibiting Chinese government entities from dealing with designated American companies, while imposing its own export controls in response. This is a calculated economic escalation — Beijing counters each American tightening with a proportionate countermove.

Taiwan: the five-day exercise that says everything

Tanks in Taiwan's streets — an unprecedented image

Taiwan conducted a five-day "immediate combat readiness" military exercise beginning June 22, 2026, with tanks patrolling the streets of the island in direct response to PLA (People's Liberation Army) exercises that Beijing had framed as simulations "toward real war." The Washington Post reported these scenes on June 22: armored vehicles on the urban arteries of Taiwan, an interior defense exercise against an enemy landing.

These images are deliberately chosen to communicate a message: Taiwan will not be caught off guard. The memory of Ukraine in 2022 — a capital that found itself surrounded within days — is present in every command room in Taipei. The exercise says: we have learned. We are ready. Come if you dare.

The tabletop exercise: the simulated quarantine

Bloomberg reported on June 25, 2026 that a tabletop simulation exercise had been conducted to test responses to a "maritime quarantine" imposed by Chinese forces around Taiwan. This scenario — distinct from a direct landing — is considered one of the most likely if Xi Jinping were to act: not a frontal invasion, but a gradual naval blockade that would force the island to surrender without a shot fired, or to trigger armed confrontation with the United States.

This quarantine scenario is particularly difficult for the United States to counter. Breaking a maritime blockade means sending American warships to breach it — an explicit act of war against China. Not doing so abandons Taiwan. That is the dilemma Xi would seek to create — a situation where Washington is forced to choose between escalation and capitulation.

RIMPAC 2026: 31 nations responding to China's naval rise

The Pacific's greatest allied naval demonstration

RIMPAC 2026 — Rim of the Pacific Exercise — began on June 24, 2026 and will run until July 31. With approximately 40 ships, 25,000 military personnel, and 31 participating nations, it is the world's largest and most diverse allied naval exercise, ThinkChina reported on June 25, 2026. Simultaneously, the Valiant Shield 2026 exercise launched on June 22 — a demonstration of American power projection in the Western Pacific.

The geopolitical significance is immediate: facing a Chinese navy that has surpassed the American navy in number of ships, allies are responding with quality, coordination, and a demonstration of cohesion. RIMPAC includes unexpected partners — nations from Africa, South America, Southeast Asia — signaling their refusal to be locked into a Chinese sphere of influence.

The China-NATO naval race in the Pacific

The PLA Navy today has more than 350 combat ships — more than the American navy. In terms of tonnage, the United States maintains an advantage. But the trend is clear: China is building at a pace that American arsenals struggle to match. Aircraft carriers, stealth destroyers, nuclear submarines — the Chinese navy is no longer the coastal infantry of old. It already projects power into the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Facing this reality, RIMPAC is also a collective industrial response: nations that buy American, South Korean, Australian, and Japanese equipment, train together, and standardize their procedures. The QUAD — United States, Japan, Australia, India — participates. Collective capabilities far exceed what China can field alone, even if the political cohesion of this coalition remains an ongoing challenge.

European powers alert on the Chinese threat

An unprecedented collective warning

European powers — including France, Germany, and other EU members — issued a collective and rare warning about the Chinese threat against Taiwan, according to reports by Yahoo News on June 24, 2026. This is a significant political signal: until recently, European countries carefully avoided explicitly naming China as a threat on the Taiwan issue, fearing trade retaliation.

This shift in posture reflects a deep evolution in European perception. The delivery of Chinese military components to Russia, made evident by analysis of equipment captured in Ukraine, has convinced many European capitals that Beijing is an active strategic adversary — not merely a commercial competitor. This realization has direct implications for EU trade policy and for coordination with Indo-Pacific allies.

The European dilemma facing China

Europe finds itself in an uncomfortable position: it depends on China for entire segments of its supply chains — rare earths, critical materials, basic electronics, solar panels, batteries — while increasingly recognizing that this dependency is a strategic vulnerability. The European policy of "de-risking" — reducing critical dependencies without severing all commercial relations — is underway, but advances slowly against economic realities.

The temptation of convenient ambiguity is strong. Nations like Germany, whose automotive industry has deep ties to the Chinese market, resist overly aggressive decoupling policies. But after the lessons of gas dependency on Russia in 2022, the European consensus is shifting: better to pay the cost of de-risking now than to pay the cost of a brutal geopolitical crisis later.

The 1260H list and the China-US economic war

The weapon of economic designations

The "1260H list" — an American designation targeting Chinese entities involved in supporting Russia or in activities contrary to American national security interests — was expanded, triggering an immediate reaction from Beijing. The ISW detailed on June 26, 2026 how the PRC responded with its own export controls and prohibitions on dealings with designated American companies.

This economic escalation is a new chapter in the trade and technology war between Washington and Beijing. Semiconductors, data processing technologies, critical materials are the stakes in this economic conflict. Each American designation creates costs for targeted Chinese companies. Each Chinese countermeasure creates costs for American companies present in China. It is a war by commercial proxy.

The implications for global supply chains

The escalation of sanctions and economic countermeasures between the United States and China is creating a progressive fragmentation of the global supply chain. Multinational companies must now choose sides — operating according to American or Chinese standards, but not both. This "forced decoupling" carries real economic costs, but it reflects a geopolitical reality that economic decision-makers can no longer ignore.

Russia benefits from this tension: it can position itself as a raw materials supplier to both camps while playing them against each other. But Beijing ultimately controls this game — it decides the degree of support it grants Moscow based on its own interests, not the Kremlin's. China is the strategist. Russia, in this relationship, is the junior partner.

European support for Taiwan: words and deeds

From rhetoric to concrete means

The European warning on Taiwan is symbolically important. But what is its concrete reach? Europe cannot defend Taiwan militarily — it has no substantial naval presence in the Western Pacific. What it can do is support economic sanctions against China in the event of aggression, reduce its own dependencies to resist Chinese economic pressure, and maintain unambiguous diplomatic support for the one-China policy while refusing to accept the change of the status quo by force.

RIMPAC exercises now include European participants — France with its Pacific territories, the United Kingdom having sent ships to the region. These participations are not symbolic: they build interoperabilities, command relationships, and contingency plans. This is the concrete military dimension of the European political discourse on Taiwan.

The necessary coherence: Ukraine and Taiwan are linked

There is a fundamental coherence that the West must maintain: if Russia is allowed to conquer Ukraine by military force, it sends China a signal that the same strategy could work for Taiwan. Ukraine's defeat would be the best news for Xi Jinping since the end of the Cold War. A Ukrainian victory, conversely, would send the opposite signal: military aggression against a democracy results in economic isolation, military exhaustion, and strategic failure.

The two crises — Ukraine and Taiwan — are therefore linked in a logic of global deterrence. This is not a reason to confuse them or to neglect one for the other. But it is a reason to understand that the West is simultaneously fighting for the security of Europe and of the Indo-Pacific — and that these two battles feed each other.

North Korea in the equation: the axis of threats widens

Pyongyang, Moscow, Beijing — the triangulation of threats

Analysis of the Chinese threat cannot be isolated from the broader axis uniting Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang. North Korea has supplied artillery shells and ballistic missiles to Russia for the war in Ukraine, in exchange for military technologies and diplomatic support. This trilateral axis creates a sanctions-circumvention network and an implicit strategic coordination that the West cannot ignore.

Kim Jong-un issued a call for a "destructive" military posture toward South Korea, media reported on June 25, 2026. North Korea is marking the second anniversary of its mutual defense treaty with Russia, pledging even deeper ties. This dynamic creates a secondary but real threat to regional Asian security — and diverts American resources from the primary threat in Europe.

North Korean soldiers in Ukraine — a confirmed reality

The presence of North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine is now a documented and acknowledged reality by Western intelligence services. North Korean prisoners of war have been captured by Ukrainian forces. Seoul opened the door to receiving North Korean POWs held in Ukraine, Caliber.az reported on June 23, 2026 — an unprecedented diplomatic development.

This situation reveals the interconnectedness of global geopolitical crises. The war in Ukraine, the threat to Taiwan, North Korea's nuclear ambitions, Iran's support for regional proxies — all these files are linked in a logic of collective challenge to the liberal international order. The West cannot treat these crises in separate silos. They form a coherent front.

The American response: between INDOPACOM and Europe

The challenge of two simultaneous theaters

The United States faces the strategic challenge of maintaining credible commitments on two simultaneous theaters: Europe, facing the Russian threat and supporting Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific, facing China's growing naval power and the threat to Taiwan. These two commitments draw on the same resources — ships, aircraft, ammunition, personnel — and create tensions in American strategic planning.

This is precisely why the rise in European defense spending is so crucial to the American calculation in Asia. If Europeans can ensure more of their own security, the United States can concentrate more resources on the Indo-Pacific. This is the strategic link that connects the NATO Ankara summit and RIMPAC 2026 exercises within a common logic — even if the two events seem to belong to different worlds.

INDOPACOM and the credibility of deterrence

INDOPACOM — the US Indo-Pacific Command — is the military institution that manages day-to-day competition with China. Its resources, operational plans, exercises — including RIMPAC and Valiant Shield — are the concrete translation of American deterrence policy in the Pacific. The central question of 2026 is whether these resources are sufficient and whether their credibility is strong enough to deter aggressive Chinese action.

Analyses by the Rand Corporation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and other serious think tanks converge on an uncomfortable conclusion: China may believe its window of opportunity is narrowing and that action in the coming years would be less costly than action in 2030–2035. This perception — true or false — is itself a risk factor that the RIMPAC 2026 exercises are precisely designed to counter.

Conclusion: the double threat cannot wait

No strategic silos

The temptation to treat the Russian threat and the Chinese threat in separate silos — a European affair and an Indo-Pacific affair — is understandable organizationally, but strategically dangerous. Moscow and Beijing are coordinating. Not in a formal alliance, not without tensions between them, but in a common direction: weaken Western leadership, test the limits of allied cohesion, and create the conditions for a multipolar world where neither liberal values nor institutional structures impose themselves as the norm.

The West must respond to this double threat with the same coherence: firm support for Ukraine, credible presence in the Pacific, gradual economic de-risking, and a unified message on the consequences of aggression. The week of June 21 to 28, 2026 showed that all the pieces of this chessboard are moving simultaneously. The West cannot afford to move only one at a time.

The next critical window

The NATO summit in Ankara on July 7 and 8, 2026 will be an opportunity to gauge whether the West has integrated the Indo-Pacific dimension into its collective strategy — or whether Ankara remains a European meeting about Ukraine, ignoring the Sino-Russian connection. Partners like Japan, Australia, and South Korea will be present as observers. Their presence says something about the perceived widening of the threat. What the communiqués say — or do not say — about China will be a clear indicator of the Alliance's strategic maturity.

China's double threat — arming Moscow, threatening Taiwan — is not a hypothesis. It is the reality of June 2026. And it requires a double response: coherent, sustained, and commensurate.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

My positions on China

I am Maxime Marquette, a geopolitics columnist. I consider China under Xi Jinping the primary long-term strategic threat to the Western liberal order. This position is acknowledged. I recognize, however, that the West-China relationship is infinitely more complex than the West-Russia relationship — economic ties are deep, interests are intertwined, and a total rupture would be economically catastrophic.

Information on RIMPAC, Taiwanese exercises, the 1260H list, and European warnings comes from sources dated between June 22 and 26, 2026: ISW, Washington Post, ThinkChina, Bloomberg, Yahoo News. I do not have access to classified intelligence on Chinese military intentions.

What I do not know

I do not know if or when Xi Jinping intends to act militarily against Taiwan. I do not know the precise extent of Chinese material support to Russia. I acknowledge that my analyses of Chinese intentions are based on observable behaviors and public statements — not on knowledge of internal decisions made by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

It is possible that my reading of the Chinese threat is overstated by my pro-Western biases. Other analysts, including some respected ones, believe that China prefers the status quo over military adventurism. I present my point of view, not the absolute truth.

Sources

Primary sources

ISW — China-Taiwan update: PRC retaliates against 1260H list with export controls — June 26, 2026

Washington Post — Taiwan: five-day immediate combat readiness exercise, tanks in the streets — June 22, 2026

ThinkChina — RIMPAC 2026: 40 ships, 25,000 personnel, 31 nations facing China's naval rise — June 25, 2026

Bloomberg — Taiwan tabletop drill simulates maritime quarantine by Chinese forces — June 25, 2026

Secondary sources

Yahoo News — European powers issue rare warning about Chinese threat to Taiwan — June 24, 2026

The Guardian — NATO leaders fear losing US support — June 27, 2026