How Britain can help keep the peace in Taiwan

During a recent trip to Taipei, I sat down with several retired Taiwanese national security officials to talk about the possibility of war with China. Their responses were sobering: most agreed an outright war is likely this decade or in the early 2030s – whenever Beijing thinks it can outmuscle the US and Japan. They wanted the world to know the situation’s severity. ‘I lived to see Taiwan’s rise,’ one elder statesman told me. ‘Now I fear I will live to see its fall.’

Officials in the Pentagon are laser-focused on the western Pacific. They see Vladimir Putin as little more than a distraction. Senior US Navy officials, such as the chief of naval operations Admiral Michael Gilday, have warned war could come this year. The Marine Corps, too, is retraining: the last US war was a counterinsurgency in the desert, the next one is likely to be an island battle in the Pacific.