Indo-Pacific Security Initiative

A repeated theme in recent discussions in Taipei was Taiwan’s ability to withstand Chinese coercion and to adapt and sustain its defenses while under attack.

Trade between China and Russia has risen sharply since the beginning of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, facilitating the Kremlin’s war effort.

Beijing’s influence campaign in pursuit of a “cognitive fait accompli” against Taiwan is conducted across multiple lines of operation.

The Russian president and the Chinese leader just met in Beijing to celebrate their increasing cooperation to create a new global order.

The US and Japan must modernize their command and control structures to ensure deterrence and defeat threats in the Indo-Pacific.

US policymakers and military leaders must rigorously study and plan for a broad range of implications from a years-long war against China.

Resilience is a nation’s ability to understand, address, respond to, and recover from any type of national security risk. Given the scale of risk Taiwan faces from mainland China, domestic resilience should be front and center in Taiwan’s national security strategy, encompassing areas such as cybersecurity, energy security, and defense resilience.

Production diplomacy provides opportunities to protect supply chains, strengthen alliances and partnerships, enhance deterrence, and build defense readiness, though it is not without risks and challenges.

As the Pacific Islands’ relevance grows, there’s an influx of diplomatic attention and development assistance as external powers seek to curry favor with the sixteen countries. Australia, India, Japan, and the United States (the Quad) seeks to bolster regional engagement to address key regional issues including climate, connectivity, economic development, and maritime security.

Washington and Seoul have drawn closer together in recent years, but concerns remain about what role the alliance would play in a US-China military conflict. The US and South Korea should take these steps to address this sensitive question.

Conventional wisdom in the United States holds that deterrence in Korea is strong, but this widespread confidence is based on a backward look at long-standing assumptions that are no longer tenable, along with rapidly shifting politico-military conditions. This report explains the urgent actions required to get ahead of these changes and maintain effective deterrence.

This report highlights two emerging and interrelated deterrence challenges in East Asia with grave risks to US national security: 1) Horizontal escalation of a conflict with China or North Korea into simultaneous conflict; 2) Vertical escalation to a limited nuclear attack by either or both adversaries to avoid conceding.