When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

In August 2025, 25 international experts gathered at Syracuse University to do something unusual: plan China’s invasion of Taiwan. For two days, academics, policy analysts, and current and former U.S. officials abandoned their typical defensive postures and attempted to inhabit Beijing’s offensive strategic mindset in a wargame. They debated not how America should respond to Chinese aggression, but how China might overcome the obstacles that have so far kept it from attacking the island nation.

This role reversal yielded an uncomfortable insight. The invasion scenarios that dominate U.S. military planning — involving massive amphibious assaults on Taiwan and preemptive strikes on American bases — may fundamentally misread Beijing’s calculus. As the wargame revealed, analysts seeking to understand China’s intentions should pay greater attention to plausible alternative military pathways to reunification that involve far less force and far more political calculation.

Thinking Like Beijing

Our intention in designing the wargame in this way was motivated by concern that insufficient attention has been given to understanding how China’s leadership and war planners may conceptually approach the problem of bringing Taiwan to heel.  This was particularly important given our participant composition: while predominantly U.S.-based, the group included a few international players. Participants brought diverse high-level experience, including former U.S. officials from the State Department, Department of Defense, and CIA, as well as the UK Cabinet Office. Several participants had military backgrounds, having served in the U.S. Army or Navy, and a few were established scholars in international relations. Around half the participants had expertise in the Chinese military or the Chinese Communist Party. Therefore, we deliberately designed the game to force participants to confront practical questions Chinese strategists would face when they draft and update their war plans, such as: How much force is enough to compel surrender without triggering U.S. intervention? What surrender terms would Taipei accept? How does Beijing transition from military action to political control of Taiwan to a favorable post-war status quo in the region and beyond?

These types of questions expose a gap in American strategic thinking. Most U.S. wargames focus on operational and tactical military interactions — ship movements, missile salvos, casualty counts, what percentage of Chinese troops land in the north of Taiwan vs. the south. The focus is overwhelmingly on the invasion scenario. They rarely examine the political context that shapes military decisions. This narrow focus produces a dangerous blind spot: the United States prepares for the war it can fight or prefers to fight, not the one China expects to win.

The exercise revealed three scenarios that generated the most debate among participants. First, a limited missile barrage followed by diplomatic ultimatum — essentially, coercion without invasion. Second, a graduated escalation that stops short of attacking U.S. forces. Third, an assault designed to cripple U.S. forces at the outset and present Taipei with a new reality of isolation. Each path reflected different risk tolerances and assumptions about American resolve.

Calculated Restraint

Participants quickly discovered that when confronted with the decision to attack U.S. forces, this seemed to make little strategic sense when they attempted to look at it from Beijing’s perspective. A typical assumption held by many analysts, including most participants prior to the game, and one that features prominently in American wargames, is that China will simply launch a preemptive surprise strike against U.S. forces in a manner somewhat analogous to Pearl Harbor. But why start a war with America when you might avoid one? As the game participants soon found, there is no guarantee of U.S. military involvement, nor Japan’s, nor other countries‘, if China refrains from attacking them in an opening round. By placing themselves in the shoes of Chinese planners — who in real life are presumably familiar with the contemporary American political scene and the historical record of how Washington reacts to unprovoked attacks — participants recognized there would almost certainly be a natural hesitancy to initiate a war against the United States. In other words, rather than assume Chinese planners simply ignore the difficulties any U.S. administration would face in starting a war with China if American forces are not attacked first, they might instead use these difficulties to Beijing’s advantage and design their war plans accordingly. Indeed, it is precisely because of these difficulties that most U.S. wargame designers wanting to get a war going between Chinese and American forces begin with the Chinese attacking American forces rather than the other way around.

This logic shaped the exercise’s most plausible hypothetical scenario. China launches precision strikes against Taiwan’s military infrastructure while simultaneously offering generous surrender terms: local autonomy, preservation of democratic institutions, and minimal mainland administrative presence. The message to Taipei is clear: accept reunification on favorable terms or face devastation. The message to Washington and the American public is equally clear: this is a Chinese civil matter, not worth American lives.

The comparison to Hong Kong’s former autonomy arrangements, once seemingly reasonable, now rings hollow given Beijing’s crackdown there. Participants struggled with this credibility gap. Would Taiwan believe any Chinese promises after Hong Kong? Even if the Taiwanese don’t believe them, do they have a better alternative to accepting them? The debate highlighted a crucial uncertainty: China’s ability to make its threats credible while keeping its surrender terms sufficiently enticing.

A Military Reality Check

The exercise forced participants to confront an uncomfortable truth about China’s military capabilities. Despite decades of modernization, the People’s Liberation Army has not fought a major conflict since 1979. It has never conducted an amphibious assault on a major scale. Its logistics remain untested. Its command structure is riddled with political interference. In contrast to most wargames that portray the Chinese military as a competent machine operating at maximum efficiency, the perspective from Beijing is likely more sobering.

These limitations don’t make China weak — they make it cautious. Why attempt a Normandy-style invasion when missile strikes and economic strangulation might achieve the same goal? Why risk military humiliation when political victory remains possible? Participants found themselves naturally gravitating toward strategies that minimized operational complexity and maximized the potential to de-escalate if things went badly wrong and then re-escalate later at a more favorable time.

This caution extends to the timeline. Any major amphibious operation requires weeks, if not months, of visible preparations. Participants recognized this transparency as China’s greatest vulnerability but also noted the world’s failure to deter Russia in 2021–2022 despite similar warning signs. International condemnation means little without credible threats of military intervention.

What Successful Deterrence Requires

The wargame’s insights challenge conventional deterrence thinking in three ways.

First, deterrence can’t focus solely on defeating an invasion. If China’s theoretically preferred strategy involves limited strikes and political coercion, Taiwan needs resilience against pressure campaigns, not just beach defenses. This means hardening critical infrastructure, preparing the population psychologically, and maintaining political unity under extreme stress. It also means understanding the dynamics of how China will attempt to lure Taiwan into an early surrender and then taking steps to undermine these.

Second, the exercise showed that uncertainty about U.S. intervention shapes every Chinese decision. But credibility isn’t just about presidential statements or forward deployments. It’s about Chinese assumptions about the circumstances in which the president would authorize force, Congress would support military action, whether the American public would accept casualties, and whether allies would provide meaningful support. A key takeaway from the game was that Chinese strategists will be focusing at least as much on these basic issues about whether the United States will use force as opposed to what forces they will use.

Third, deterrence requires denying China easy political victories, not just military ones. If Beijing believes it can achieve reunification through limited force and favorable terms, traditional military deterrence fails. Therefore, arguably more important than Taiwan’s military vulnerabilities are its political vulnerabilities. While Taiwan has so far remained steadfast in maintaining its independence, the combined effects of China finally crossing the military threshold, limited prospects of outside military help, and Beijing offering favorable surrender terms (backed by threats of massive escalation for refusal), might prove sufficient to undermine the will to fight.

The Unresolved Questions

Several critical debates remained unsettled when the exercise ended. Participants disagreed sharply on whether China would choose to blockade Taiwan — some saw it as perfect graduated pressure, others as an invitation for U.S. naval intervention, an opportunity for Taiwan to bring its forces to maximum readiness, or prone to rapidly escalate to a full-blown confrontation if attempts are made to break through it.

Most revealing was the disagreement over timing. Some participants argued China must move within this decade while it maintains a favorable military balance. Others speculated the timing might be tied to the 72-year-old Xi Jinping wanting to achieve reunification before his death. Alternatively, it was contended that time favors Beijing — Taiwan’s economy increasingly depends on the mainland, younger generations lack their parents’ anti-communist fervor, and the conventional and nuclear balance may become even more lopsided in China’s favor.

These unresolved debates matter because they reflect legitimate uncertainties about Beijing’s decision calculus. American planners who assume they know China’s timeline or red lines are deceiving themselves.

Next Steps

The Syracuse exercise represents just one attempt to understand Chinese strategic thinking. Its participants brought their own biases and blind spots. They may have overcorrected for perceived American misunderstandings. They certainly lacked access to classified Chinese planning documents.

Yet the exercise’s value lies not in perfect prediction but in expanding imagination. By forcing Americans to try and think like Chinese planners, it revealed possibilities that U.S. planning overlooks. It showed that the most dangerous scenarios might not be the most dramatic ones. And it demonstrated that effective deterrence requires understanding not just China’s capabilities, but also its images of future war, the doubts of its leaders, and the difficulties of its planners to confidently provide winning options.

The next step is translating these insights into policy. This means wargaming not just military scenarios but political ones. It means understanding Beijing’s conceptions of what a war over Taiwan looks like and the content of Chinese war planning. It means testing assumptions about alliance cohesion and domestic resolve. It means preparing for the many types of wars China is developing options to wage, not just the one we’re comfortable planning against.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Taiwan’s future, regional stability, and the U.S.-led rules-based order in Asia all hang in the balance. We can’t afford to misunderstand Beijing’s thinking. The Syracuse exercise offers a start — thinking like the adversary to avoid becoming its victim.

Jeffrey Michaels is an associate of RAND Europe and a strategic adviser at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. He is the co-editor with Tim Sweijs of Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War (2024), and co-author with Lawrence Freedman of The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 4th Edition (2019).

Michael John Williams is director of the Carnegie-Maxwell Policy Planning Lab and associate professor of international affairs at Syracuse University. He is the coauthor of International Security: Theory and Practice (2025) and of Science, Law, and Liberalism in the American Way of War (2015).

Image: Midjourney