# ESSAY: Taiwan under pressure — war games, maritime standoff, and democratic lethargy

> On June 22, 2026, in Taoyuan — home to the island's largest international airport — Taiwanese army tanks rolled through streets and onto highways. This was not a military parade: it was the launch of the "Immediate Combat Readiness" exercises, five days of intensive training designed to test the army's ability to mobilize rapidly in response to a sudden escalation of People's L

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Essay
- Published: 2026-06-27
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/essai-taiwan-sous-pression-exercices-de-guerre-standoff-maritime-et-la-lethargie

## Introduction: five days of tanks in the streets, and the West "expresses concern"

### The launch of the exercises on June 22, 2026

On **June 22, 2026**, in **Taoyuan** — home to the island's largest international airport — **Taiwanese army tanks** rolled through streets and onto highways. This was not a military parade: it was the launch of the **"Immediate Combat Readiness"** exercises, five days of intensive training designed to test the army's ability to mobilize rapidly in response to a sudden escalation of **People's Liberation Army (PLA)** gray-zone tactics.

According to **Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense**, the exercises — running until **June 26** — aimed to evaluate **"the speed at which military units could mobilize"** in response to the PLA's persistent maneuvers. These gray-zone tactics — naval patrols, drone operations, coast guard vessel presence — stop just short of open war but create constant pressure.

### 23 aircraft, 7 ships, 5 additional Chinese official vessels

Between the Sunday and Monday preceding the exercises, **Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense** had logged **23 PLA aircraft** approaching the island, accompanied by **7 warships** and **5 additional Chinese official vessels**. This is not exceptional activity — it is the baseline level of military pressure that **Beijing** applies daily. The **normalization of the threat** is itself a threat.

The **Washington Post** reported on **June 23, 2026** that these exercises represented a **deliberate paradigm shift** in Taiwanese military training: moving from scheduled, predictable exercises to realistic maneuvers simulating the opening phase of a Chinese offensive. **Taiwan is no longer preparing for a hypothetical war — it is preparing for a possible one.**

*Tanks in the streets of Taoyuan. This image alone should be enough to wake up Western chancelleries. If Taiwan is rolling armored vehicles through its cities to prepare for war, its military analysts consider the risk serious enough to justify disrupting civilian life. Has Europe grasped this? The signals I receive suggest not.*

## The maritime standoff: coast guard versus coast guard

### The Pratas Islands and the gray-zone confrontation

Simultaneously with the land exercises, the waters surrounding **Taiwan** were the scene of increasingly frequent maritime confrontations. Taiwan's **Coast Guard** reported a new **standoff with Chinese coast guard vessels** near the **Pratas Islands**, in the northern South China Sea — the second in two weeks, according to **US News** reporting from **June 5, 2026**. These standoffs involve Chinese patrols in waters **Taiwan** considers under its jurisdiction, warnings issued to foreign commercial vessels, and direct confrontations between vessels from both coast guards.

More alarming still: in early **June 2026**, according to the **Wall Street Journal**, Chinese coast guard forces had begun issuing **direct warnings to foreign commercial vessels** in waters east of Taiwan's main island. This five-day operation, which ended on **June 10**, drew **criticism from the United States, Taiwan, and other Western countries**. This is a qualitative escalation: **Beijing is no longer just patrolling — it is attempting to exercise jurisdictional authority.**

### Taiwan fires rockets toward China

In this context of escalation, the **Taiwanese navy** had done something unusual in early **June 2026**: it **fired rockets in the direction of China for the first time during a military exercise**. A deliberate, strong signal sent to **Beijing**: Taiwan was no longer content with passive defense. The **June** exercises included real-time simulations of a response to an enemy landing.

These exercises, according to **The Straits Times** from **June 21**, were part of modernization plans aimed at **"shifting the training focus from scheduled events to more realistic exercises simulating warfare."** **Taiwan** is preparing for the opening phase — the one in the first hours after China decides to act — as the most critical for its survival. The upcoming **Han Kuang 42 exercises**, planned for **August 2026**, will be even more extensive.

*Taiwan fires rockets toward China as part of a military exercise. A first. A clear message. And Europe's reaction? A communiqué of "deep concern"? A statement from the EU Council? Meanwhile, Chinese tanks are training to cross the strait. There is an absurd gap between the urgency of the situation and the sluggishness of the democratic response.*

## China's gray-zone strategy: wear down without declaring

### The logic of progressive attrition

The strategy **Beijing** is deploying around **Taiwan** is not new — it is the same one used in the South China Sea for years. The goal is to **normalize Chinese military presence** until what was considered a violation becomes the norm. Every additional aircraft sent into **Taiwan**'s Air Defense Identification Zone, every additional patrol vessel, every warning issued to a commercial ship — all of this progressively pushes back the tolerance threshold.

This strategy is effective because it never clearly crosses the line into war — it stays in the blur of **"short of war"** that Americans call the gray zone. It wears down the adversary psychologically and financially (maintaining a posture of permanent vigilance is costly), without offering a clear casus belli that would trigger a Western military response.

### The PLA tests and measures

The **23 aircraft and 7 ships** logged by **Taiwan** Sunday-Monday are not a random bluff. They are data collection. **Beijing** is watching how **Taipei** responds, how the **United States** repositions its assets, how regional allies — **Japan**, the **Philippines**, **Australia** — alert their forces. Every Chinese exercise is also an intelligence exercise on adversary responses.

**Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense** was explicit: its exercises aimed to test responses to gray-zone tactics **"in real time."** This is the same logic, but on Taiwan's side: learn to react fast, mobilize in the first hours, avoid being caught off-guard by a sudden escalation. Both sides are watching, studying, and preparing for a scenario that no one officially wants to name.

*War in the Taiwan Strait is not inevitable — but it is possible. The difference between "possible" and "inevitable" depends partly on the solidity of Western deterrence. And the solidity of that deterrence depends on the political will of democracies to make clearly stated commitments about what they will do if Beijing acts. That is a commitment I do not hear clearly from Europeans.*

## Western democracies: from concern to action

### The gap between rhetoric and capabilities

Western democracies regularly express their **"concern"** over the situation in the **Taiwan Strait**. The **United States** criticized the Chinese coast guard operation in June. The **European Union** issued statements calling for peace in the strait. **Japan** is increasing its defense budget. But the gap between expressed concern and actual capacity to intervene is striking.

Europe, whose economic dependence on **China** is considerable, is particularly vulnerable to this gap. A war in the **Taiwan Strait** would cause global supply chain disruptions on a scale unseen since **World War II**. It would cut off access to **Taiwanese semiconductors** — on which the entire global technology industry depends. It would destabilize the entire Asian economy. And Europe has no plan for that.

### TSMC: the dependency that makes everything concrete

**TSMC** — **Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company** — makes more than **90%** of the world's most advanced chips. iPhones, electric cars, AI servers, weapons systems — all of this depends on factories in **Hsinchu**. If these factories stopped — due to war, a blockade, or even a credible threat — the global economy would partially collapse. This is the geopolitical version of "too big to fail." **Taiwan is too important to be abandoned — and yet democracies are slow to explicitly defend it.**

This is precisely what **Beijing** exploits. Western dependence on **TSMC** — and by extension on Taiwan — is both what makes the island strategic and what makes Westerners hesitant to publicly commit to defending it. **China is turning Western economic dependence into an instrument of deterrence against the West itself.**

*TSMC is the involuntary geopolitical hostage of the entire world. Beijing knows it and plays on this dependence. Democracies are working to diversify — Intel in Germany, new plants in Japan and Arizona — but these efforts will take years. In the meantime, the fragility is real and Beijing has no intention of letting the West extract itself without paying a political price.*

## The Ukrainian precedent and the Taiwanese lesson

### What the war in Ukraine has taught

The war in **Ukraine** provided a crucial lesson for the defense of **Taiwan**: democracies can support an attacked country with equipment, intelligence, and diplomacy, but the ultimate military decisions belong to the attacked state. **Ukraine** was able to hold — and reverse the situation — because it had prepared its defense, had a trained army, and had the will to fight.

**Taiwan** is drawing these lessons. Realistic training, rapid mobilization exercises, simulation of the first hours of an attack — all of this reflects an understanding that if war comes, **Taipei** will have to hold alone for the first days or weeks before any outside support arrives. This is the Ukrainian scenario applied to the island geography of the strait.

### Europe and the strait: an ignored geopolitical urgency

What is striking in European media coverage of the **June 2026** Taiwan exercises is the relative discretion with which the continental press treated the event. Tanks in the streets of **Taoyuan**, maritime standoffs, rockets fired toward China — all of this deserved front-page coverage. This was not the case in most European capitals, absorbed by their own internal crises — Trump's tariffs, asylum reform, Spanish and Italian political crises.

This inattention is a form of strategic negligence. The stability of the **Taiwan Strait** is directly linked to European economic security. **Europe does not have the military means to intervene in a Pacific conflict — but it has the political duty to hold clear positions, articulated red lines, and economic contingency plans for a disruption of East Asian trade.**

*Europe was caught off-guard by the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It has no valid reason to be caught off-guard by a Taiwan crisis — all the signals are there, clear, documented, analyzed. If Europe has no coherent strategy on Taiwan, it is not a lack of information — it is a lack of political will. And that is inexcusable.*

## Taiwan and democratic deterrence

### The central question: does deterrence hold?

Deterrence rests on a simple equation: the potential attacker must believe the cost of aggression exceeds the benefits. For deterrence to work over **Taiwan**, **Beijing** must believe that: Taiwanese armed forces can inflict sufficient losses in a first assault to make success uncertain; the **United States** will intervene militarily; regional allies (**Japan**, **Australia**, **South Korea**) will join; and Western economic sanctions will be severe enough to devastate the Chinese economy.

Each of these elements is contestable. **Taiwan**'s defensive capability is improving but remains insufficient to hold alone for long. The American commitment is real but not formalized as a security guarantee. Regional allies are cautious. And sanctions, as the Russian case showed, are effective over the long term but not deterrent in the short term. **Deterrence is fragile. This is what the June 2026 exercises are seeking to reinforce.**

### The narrow path between deterrence and escalation

The **June 2026** Taiwan exercises are designed to strengthen deterrence by showing **Beijing** that **Taipei** can mobilize quickly and fight effectively. But this same demonstration could be interpreted by **Beijing** as a provocation or a signal of Taiwan's growing will to formally resist reunification. In **Xi Jinping**'s logic, every strengthening of Taiwan's defense can justify reinforcing Chinese pressure. This is the spiral of mutual deterrence — each side strengthens its posture, and each reinforcement increases the risk of an unwanted incident.

*I do not claim to have the answer to the Taiwanese equation. It is one of the most complex geopolitical problems in the world, with military, economic, identity, and diplomatic dimensions that I do not fully master. What I know is that watching without reacting — as Europe tends to do — is not a policy. It is an absence of policy disguised as prudence.*

## The economic dimension: why Taiwan is irreplaceable

### TSMC and semiconductors: a global dependence without equivalent

**Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company** — **TSMC** — is the world's largest semiconductor foundry. It manufactures approximately **90%** of the most advanced chips used in global electronic devices: smartphones, servers, autonomous vehicles, high-tech weapons systems. Without **TSMC**, the global technology economy would stop — not gradually, but abruptly. This reality gives **Taiwan** a strategic importance that far exceeds its geographic or demographic size.

For the **United States**, a **China** that controlled **TSMC** — and therefore global advanced chip production — would represent an incalculable strategic advantage. That is why Washington has invested massively in bringing part of **TSMC**'s production back to the United States through the **CHIPS Act**. It is also why technology sanctions against China are so closely linked to the Taiwan question: the American goal is to maintain a technological lead in advanced chips, and that advantage largely resides in Taiwan.

### What Chinese annexation would mean for the global economy

In a scenario of **China** annexing **Taiwan**, economic experts agree on one point: the disruptions would be catastrophic, regardless of how long the fighting lasted. Even a rapid war would severely damage **TSMC**'s infrastructure — production facilities, precision equipment, component supply chains. A Western economic response in the form of sanctions against **China** would create a brutal decoupling of two deeply integrated economies. The global cost of such a crisis is estimated by some studies at several tens of trillions of dollars.

This is precisely the economic calculation that constitutes the strongest argument for deterrence: **Beijing** itself would suffer massively from such a crisis. The Chinese economy depends on Western export markets, foreign technologies, and international capital. An invasion of **Taiwan** would trigger unprecedented sanctions that would destroy much of the economic gains of the last forty years. **That is the calculation Xi Jinping must integrate.**

*The economic argument for peace in the Taiwan Strait is powerful, but it has limits. Wars often break out despite rational economic calculations — because authoritarian leaders weigh nationalist, ideological, and political survival factors differently. Xi Jinping may know that invasion would be economically catastrophic and decide to launch it anyway if domestic political conditions push him there. Economics is a brake, not a guarantee.*

## The international diplomatic response: insufficient but not zero

### Western statements and their real weight

Western democracies have progressively hardened their rhetoric on **Taiwan** since 2020. G7 statements, **NATO** communiqués, bilateral American, Japanese, and Australian positions — all of this sketches a growing diplomatic support for stability in the strait. But "diplomatic support" is far from equivalent to "security guarantee." The United States still has no formal alliance treaty with **Taiwan** — the **Taiwan Relations Act** of 1979 is deliberately ambiguous about the American military obligation in case of aggression.

This strategic ambiguity is intentionally maintained to deter both Chinese action (by suggesting a possible American intervention) and a Taiwanese independence declaration (by not formally committing to defending a change of status). This is a delicate balance that successive American administrations have preserved — but whose limits are becoming more apparent as Chinese military pressure increases.

### The narrow path between deterrence and escalation

The **June 2026** Taiwan exercises are designed to strengthen deterrence by showing **Beijing** that **Taipei** can mobilize quickly and fight effectively. But this same demonstration could be interpreted by **Beijing** as a provocation or as a signal of Taiwan's growing will to formally resist reunification. In **Xi Jinping**'s logic, every strengthening of Taiwan's defense can justify reinforcing Chinese pressure. This is the spiral of mutual deterrence — each side strengthens its posture, and each reinforcement increases the risk of an unwanted incident.

Maritime incidents involving Chinese coast guard and Taiwanese or American vessels represent this risk of involuntary escalation. A poorly managed incident, an overly rapid reaction, a miscommunication — and a diplomatic crisis can degenerate into a military confrontation that no one really wanted. **This is when the absence of direct communication lines between Beijing and Taipei becomes dangerous.**

*I do not claim to have the answer to the Taiwanese equation. It is one of the most complex geopolitical problems in the world, with military, economic, identity, and diplomatic dimensions that I do not fully master. What I know is that watching without reacting — as Europe tends to do — is not a policy. It is an absence of policy disguised as prudence.*

## Conclusion: the hour of choices is approaching

### The time for passive concern is over

The five days of Taiwanese exercises, the maritime standoffs, the rockets fired toward China — all of this paints a clear picture: the situation in the **Taiwan Strait** is deteriorating. Not catastrophically, not immediately — but inexorably. Chinese pressure increases every year. **Beijing**'s military capabilities are improving. And the hour at which **Xi Jinping** might judge the window of opportunity for action to be optimal is approaching.

Western democracies need to move from concern to action: strengthen arms deliveries to **Taiwan**, clarify their commitments, develop economic contingency plans, and above all, stop treating the Taiwan question as a distant problem that does not directly concern them. **It does concern them. Deeply. Economically. Strategically. And morally.**

### What the West must decide

The question that will face the democracies is not "if" but "when" and "how." If a crisis in the strait breaks out, will they be ready? Will they have clear positions? Will they be capable of responding in a coordinated manner? The Ukrainian experience — where the Western response was delayed, fragmented, and insufficient in its early phases — is not encouraging. **Taiwan deserves better than a repetition of the same improvisation.**

*Five days of military exercises in Taiwan. Chinese coast guards blocking vessels. And the West "watches with concern." At what point does concern transform into preemptive action? At what point do we decide to arm Taiwan sufficiently so that invasion is clearly too costly for Beijing? These questions are not comfortable. But the discomfort of answering them now is infinitely preferable to managing an open crisis tomorrow.*

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [The Straits Times — Taiwan to stage five days of combat readiness drills — June 21, 2026](https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/taiwan-to-stage-five-days-of-combat-readiness-drills)

- [Washington Post — Taiwan begins 5-day military exercises with tanks in the streets — June 23, 2026](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/06/22/taiwan-hosts-military-drills-readiness-china/0c4d53a2-6e13-11f1-8730-e7fd0e2a6404_story.html)

- [US News — Taiwan and China coast guards in renewed standoff at top of South China Sea — June 5, 2026](https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2026-06-05/taiwan-china-coast-guards-in-renewed-standoff-at-top-of-south-china-sea)

### Secondary sources

- [Wall Street Journal — China's assertions of authority over foreign ships near Taiwan draw U.S. rebuke — June 24, 2026](https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/chinas-assertions-of-authority-over-foreign-ships-near-taiwan-draw-u-s-rebuke-d0546eb0)

- [Institute for the Study of War — Korea/China-Taiwan update — June 23, 2026](https://understandingwar.org/research/china-taiwan/korean-peninsula-update-june-23-2026/)

- [Stars and Stripes — Taiwan-China coast guard standoff in the South China Sea — May 26, 2026](https://www.stripes.com/branches/coast_guard/2026-05-26/taiwan-china-coast-guard-standoff-21782158.html)

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Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/essai-taiwan-sous-pression-exercices-de-guerre-standoff-maritime-et-la-lethargie