Looming over every development, negotiation, and controversy in the ongoing war with Iran is a persistent question: Could this be the prelude to World War III?
It’s not an unreasonable concern. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is squeezing the global economy. Iran’s nuclear ambitions remain at the center of high-stakes negotiations. All the while, China—reportedly aiding Iran in targeting U.S. military sites—watches closely, waiting for the right moment to launch an attack it has spent decades preparing for: an invasion of Taiwan.
This would mark the biggest crisis of this century—the moment when tensions between the United States and its foremost rival finally come to a head, and the fate of an island at the center of the world’s most critical high-tech supply chains hangs in the balance. And it is a scenario for which, according to the author of today’s Big Read, we have no plan.
Eyck Freymann is the author of a new book, Defending Taiwan, and he offers a sweeping examination of this looming conflict, and what the United States must do to prevent it. Today’s essay, adapted from the book, drops us into the opening hours of a Taiwan crisis—and explains why our failure to learn from the Iran war may already be pushing us closer to global economic disaster than we realize. —The Editors
The strike comes without warning. A night watchman streaming television dramas on his smartphone tries to refresh the page. On the seafloor beneath the Taiwan Strait, underwater drones and frogmen are severing the dozens of undersea cables connecting Taiwan to the outside world. A university student scrolling social media assumes there is something wrong with the dormitory Wi-Fi. The bandwidth keeps slowing and slowing, until nothing will load at all. Then cyberattacks start to cripple the power plants that service downtown Taipei. Neon signs and streetlights go dark. Taipei’s broad boulevards are now illuminated only by headlights of passing cars and the moonlight.
