EDITORIAL: China, the Top Threat: Taiwan Is Our Front Line

EDITORIAL: China, the Top Threat: Taiwan Is Our Front Line

The Authoritarian Axis: One Global Strategy, Two Fronts

The Moscow-Beijing Connection as an Operational Fact

EU High Representative Kaja Kallas's confirmation that China is training Russian soldiers in demining and drone operations is not a minor news item. It is concrete proof that the Moscow-Beijing authoritarian axis is no longer a rhetorical alliance. It is an operational military partnership that includes transfers of technology, training, and expertise directly applicable to combat in Ukraine. China is not a passive observer of the war in Ukraine. It is an active participant, with its own interests in the outcome. For Beijing, a Russia that survives the war with its regime intact is a valuable strategic partner — an energy supplier, a counterweight to American power, a partner in contesting the liberal international order.

The presence of 10,000 North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine — confirmed by Zelensky and corroborated by Western intelligence sources — extends the authoritarian axis to three players. North Korea supplies Russia with soldiers, ammunition, and missiles in exchange for military technology transfers that accelerate its weapons program. Analyses by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies published on June 25, 2026, document improvements to North Korea's KN-23 missiles thanks to Russian assistance. This Russia-China-North Korea triangle, with Iran as a fourth partner supplying its Shahed drones, forms a coherent axis whose members share a common interest: weakening American primacy and the liberal international order.

The NATO Ankara Summit: What Is Really at Stake

5% of GDP: A Historic Commitment to Defense

The NATO Ankara Summit on July 7–8, 2026, takes place against a backdrop of unprecedented budget pressure on European defenses. The Alliance has set a target of 5% of GDP in defense spending by 2035 — an astronomical figure compared to the 2% goal from the Wales summit of 2014. This escalation of targets reflects the collective recognition that the world has entered a period of sustained military competition. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte mentioned "tens of billions" in defense contracts to be announced at the summit, covering systems that take years to produce — ammunition, armored vehicles, air defense systems, drones.

But the Ankara summit takes place under a cloud of uncertainty. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched a six-month review of the American military presence in Europe and conditioned U.S. contributions to NATO on allies meeting their spending targets. The cancellation of 4,000 U.S. troops planned for Poland — documented by the Guardian — and statements calling into question the automaticity of Article 5 guarantees have created cracks in the certainty that the United States would unconditionally defend its European allies. If Beijing believes that Washington would hesitate to defend its European allies, the same logic applies to its reading of the American commitment to Taiwan.

What Europe Must Do Now for Taiwan

Recognizing the Ukraine-Taiwan Connection

The fundamental lesson Europe must draw from its experience with the war in Ukraine is that geopolitical security problems do not remain geographically contained. What happens around Taiwan affects global security through technology supply chains — Taiwan manufactures approximately 90% of the world's most advanced chips through TSMC — through the stability of Indo-Pacific maritime routes, and through the signal that Taiwan's defeat or survival would send to every dictatorship on earth. The joint Franco-British-German statements on the movements of the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning are a first step. But Europe needs a coherent Indo-Pacific policy that is not merely deference to American priorities.

The basic principle of deterrence is that it must be established before a crisis, not during one. The West is learning this lesson the hard way in Ukraine: the weapons and support being provided today would have had infinitely more deterrence value if they had been supplied in 2021. The same logic applies to Taiwan. The defense systems Taipei seeks to acquire, the joint military exercises it wants to conduct, the American strategic clarity it demands — all of this has more value as deterrence today than as support after a crisis has begun. A Europe that raises its defense spending from 2% to 5% of GDP but has no strategy for the Indo-Pacific is missing the essential long-term threat.

Introduction: The Choice the West Refuses to Make

Two Wars, One Question

While the West mobilizes for Ukraine, bolsters its defense spending, sanctions Russia, and debates peace, another threat — larger, more patient, better funded — keeps advancing. China is encircling Taiwan methodically, week after week, incursion after incursion, vessel after vessel. And the West, consumed by Ukrainian emergencies and Iranian-American tensions, has not yet found the courage to name that reality with the clarity it demands: Taiwan is our front line. If it falls, it is not merely an island of 23 million people disappearing under the yoke of a dictatorship. It is the liberal international order itself that receives the killing blow.

I do not claim to have all the answers on how to defend Taiwan. I do not have access to the military plans of Washington, Tokyo, or Canberra. But I can name what I see: a deliberate accumulation of facts on the ground by Beijing, a systematic attempt to normalize a maritime and aerial presence that erodes Taiwanese sovereignty millimeter by millimeter, and a West that prefers strategic ambiguity over moral clarity.

The Numbers Speak for Themselves

Since June 1, 2026, Chinese coast guard vessels have been patrolling near-continuously in the waters east of Taiwan — a zone historically excluded from Beijing's direct sphere of coercion. On June 25, 2026, 14 PLA aircraft sorties were detected in a single day, with 10 crossing the median line. The aircraft carrier Liaoning just completed its longest deployment in the South China Sea and western Pacific — more than 40 days. The PLA Daily published, on June 22, the first official image of the hypersonic DF-17 missile equipped with the DF-ZF glide vehicle — designed precisely to destroy enemy air defense networks. And the EU confirmed that China has trained Russian soldiers on drones and demining in Ukraine.

These facts are not isolated incidents. They are pieces of a puzzle we are assembling in real time. And the picture taking shape is not reassuring.

The Model Beijing Is Testing: Erode Without Triggering

The Strategy of Progressive Fait Accompli

What makes China's strategy toward Taiwan particularly formidable is precisely that it avoids triggering a direct Western military response. Beijing is not staging a spectacular invasion that would instantly galvanize Taiwan's allies. It advances in successive layers of normalized presence: coast guard patrols, then escorted research vessels, then environmental surveys, then "law enforcement operations," then military exercises moving progressively closer.

Each step is presented as a response to a Taiwanese or foreign "provocation." Each step, taken in isolation, seems "manageable." The cumulative effect is catastrophic. ISW documented this mechanism in its report of June 26, 2026: China is seeking to normalize its presence in the waters east of Taiwan the same way it normalized its presence around the Kinmen Islands since 2024 — what analysts call the "Kinmen model." If the Kinmen model extends to eastern Taiwan, the island will be practically encircled by a permanent Chinese military and paramilitary presence.

The Ongoing Political Influence Operation

AEI documented on June 26, 2026, the existence of a network of 163 inauthentic Facebook pages broadcasting pro-Beijing content targeting Taiwanese voters ahead of the November 2026 local elections. China does not need to invade Taiwan if it can install Beijing-friendly local governments through electoral subversion. And beyond local elections, opposition parties in the Taiwanese Parliament — some with links or conciliatory positions toward Beijing — blocked the 2026 defense budget for over nine months, delaying critical weapons purchases.

The combination of gray-zone military operations, internal political subversion, and budget obstruction constitutes a multi-domain attrition strategy whose effectiveness surpasses that of a frontal invasion, which would inevitably provoke an international response. This strategy is more dangerous precisely because it is less visible.

Why Taiwan Is Our Business

Beyond Microchips: A Question of Freedom

The world knows that Taiwan manufactures approximately 90% of the world's most advanced chips used in global industry — through TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). This economic dependency is documented and constitutes an economic deterrent against a Chinese invasion. But reducing the defense of Taiwan to a question of semiconductor supply chains is to miss what matters most.

Taiwan is a living democracy. With its 23 million people, its universal healthcare system, its press freedom, its free elections, its remarkable civic engagement — Taiwan represents what a Chinese-speaking society can achieve without the constraints of an authoritarian regime. Its destruction as a free political entity would send a devastating message to every democratic force in Asia: you can fight, but if Beijing decides you have grown too strong, you will fall.

The Pacific Chain and Indo-Pacific Stability

Strategically, Taiwan is a central link in the first island chain — the line of island bases that has structured the defense of the western Pacific since the end of World War II. If Taiwan came under Chinese control, the People's Liberation Army Navy would gain direct access to the western Pacific without passing through the Taiwan Strait — an incalculable strategic advantage that would upend the naval balance across the entire region. Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and South Korea would find themselves in a fundamentally different defensive position than today.

That is why nations as different as Japan, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, and New Zealand have maintained a naval presence in the South China Sea and the western Pacific. That is not provocation. It is the expression of those nations' vital interest in maintaining a rules-based international order rather than the law of the strongest.

The Democratic Response: What Has Been Done and What Is Missing

Military Exercises and Arms Sales

Taiwan conducted its combat readiness exercises from June 22 to 26, 2026, the most realistic in its history. Its first domestically built submarine continues sea trials. It launched HIMARS systems into the Taiwan Strait during recent exercises. The United States notified Congress of a new arms sale to Taiwan. The Valiant Shield and Resolute Dragon exercises with Japan run through July 1. The Pentagon expanded its list of Chinese military companies.

But one essential element remains missing: strategic clarity. The United States deliberately maintains ambiguity over its commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion. That ambiguity, which may have been useful during the Cold War to preserve flexible stability, has become a source of vulnerability in a context where Beijing seeks to calculate precisely the cost of action. If Beijing believes Washington will hesitate, the risk of a catastrophic miscalculation grows.

What Europe Must Do Now

Europe, preoccupied with the security of its eastern flank and the war in Ukraine, has long viewed Indo-Pacific affairs as secondary. That perception must change. The confirmation that China is training Russian soldiers on drones and demining reveals that the two theaters — Ukraine and Taiwan — are linked by the Moscow-Beijing authoritarian axis. This is not two separate wars. It is a single strategy to contest the Western international order, waged on two fronts.

European countries sending vessels into the Pacific — France with its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, the United Kingdom with its frigates — are making the right call. Those that view the "Indo-Pacific as none of our business" are making the same type of error as their predecessors who thought "Ukraine is none of our business" in 2021. We know how that story ends.

North Korea in the Equation

The Axis of Aggressors Expands

The threat does not come from China alone. North Korea has sent 10,000 soldiers to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, according to Zelensky. Kim Jong-un, on June 25, 2026, called for a "destructive" military posture and announced new weapons tests. Pyongyang has received technology transfers from Moscow in exchange for its soldiers and ammunition, according to analyses by ABC and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. South Korea is responding by building an army of "drone warriors" — 500,000 soldiers trained to operate 20,000 drones.

This trilateral axis — Russia, China, North Korea, with Iran as a fourth partner — is not a coincidence. It is the deliberate construction of an anti-Western bloc that tests our capacity for simultaneous multi-front responses. The democratic alliances — NATO, AUKUS, QUAD — are the institutional answer. But their effectiveness depends on the political will to use them.

The Signal the West Must Send

The NATO summit in Ankara on July 7–8, 2026, will be an opportunity to clarify the Alliance's defensive commitments. But NATO alone cannot defend Taiwan — that is an Indo-Pacific theater requiring different frameworks. What NATO can do is send a signal of cohesion and resolve that discourages Beijing from concluding that now is the moment to act while the West is distracted. That signal includes defense spending, joint military exercises, and — most importantly — the willingness to name China for what it is: the primary long-term threat to global security.

This is not hatred of the Chinese people. It is a clear-eyed assessment of the Chinese Communist Party regime, which has chosen to use its country's economic growth to fund a war machine and a regional expansion strategy. These two things — respect for the people and clarity about the regime — can coexist.

Conclusion: Naming the Danger Is the First Act of Resistance

The Hour of Clarity

China is the greatest threat to the liberal international order in the medium and long term. That is not a controversial opinion among serious strategists. It is the conclusion of dozens of independent analyses, Pentagon reports, allied intelligence services, and reputable academic institutions. What is controversial is drawing the political consequences from it. This editorial argues that we do exactly that — now, while there is still time to build the deterrence architectures that will make a Chinese invasion of Taiwan too costly for Beijing.

That much, at least, is not in dispute. The record is written in actions, not in intentions. History will judge the choices made here — not the speeches delivered, but the decisions taken, the weapons sent or withheld, the alliances honored or abandoned. That is the standard that applies.

Taiwan Must Know the West Is There

The Taiwanese people, who face daily military and psychological pressure from their giant neighbor, deserve to know that the West considers them a valued partner and not a sacrificeable geopolitical pawn. Surveys show that 44.9% of Taiwanese believe their security depends above all on strengthening their own defense capabilities, with a comparable share citing cooperation with the United States. That determination deserves to be honored with concrete action — unambiguous arms sales, clearly defensive military exercises, and diplomatic engagement that leaves no doubt about Western priorities.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

A deliberate editorial

This article is an editorial, which means it is deliberately engaged. I consider China the primary threat to the liberal world order and Taiwan a democracy that deserves to be defended. These are positions I own fully and that are consistent with the editorial doctrine of this publication. The facts I use to support these positions are real and sourced. The value judgments are mine.

Readers are entitled to weigh that context when assessing this piece. Transparency about where a columnist stands is not a disclaimer — it is a condition of intellectual honesty. I hold these positions publicly and consistently, and I do not expect every reader to share them.

The limits of my perspective

I am a Western observer with a Western perspective. I recognize that non-allied Asian governments hold nuanced positions on tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and that my reading may appear one-sided from those perspectives. I also do not have access to the actual intentions of the CCP leadership, and any analysis of Chinese intentions involves a degree of inference. My sources are cited below and are all publicly available.

These limits do not invalidate the analysis. They define its perimeter. Every judgment I make here is grounded in verifiable public sources, cited in the section below. Where I speculate or infer, I say so. Where I assert, the evidence is in the record.

Sources

Primary sources

AEI — China-Taiwan Update, June 26, 2026 — Eastern Taiwan waters and CCG operations

Tribune India — Taiwan detects surge in Chinese incursions — June 25, 2026

Straits Times — Taiwan stages five days of combat readiness drills — June 21, 2026

ISW — China-Taiwan Update, June 18, 2026 — Chinese research vessel and espionage

Secondary sources

Mainichi — Lai calls on Beijing to renounce force — June 19, 2026

Tribune India — Washington raises alarm over China's escalating pressure — June 12, 2026

Ground News — Zelensky: 10,000 North Korean soldiers in Russia — June 2026

Straits Times — U.S. arms sale to Taiwan not contingent on China — June 26, 2026