Eyck Freymann

and then, if they meet resistance, if necessary, fight into the island, seize control of the capital, mop up the remnants of Taiwan's armed forces, and install a friendly government.

That's the invasion scenario.

It's plausible, given that Beijing's military is almost 20 times the size in its total budget,

But in order to make an amphibious invasion work, a great number of things have to go correctly, and they have to go correctly in a highly synchronized way.

There's lots and lots of ways that these things can go wrong.

It's the hardest kind of military operation to do.

And even the famous successes in history like D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, came very, very close to going disastrously off the rails.

Another option is he can bombard Taiwan with missiles, with drones.

He also has options to use cyber attacks to take out or otherwise manipulate Taiwan's critical infrastructure.

He can use false flag attacks, decapitation attacks against Taiwan's political leadership because he surely has special forces on the ground in Taiwan right now.

undercover, he can squeeze Taiwan economically through a whole number of tools, including a blockade, which is a sort of medieval move, no one in or out or we shoot at you, or something that is softer or more selective that tries to filter or incrementally seize control.

And then he's got options in the gray zone to bluster and posture that may or may not just lead Taiwan's morale to collapse.

For example, he can mobilize his forces to potentially do any of these things and just see what happens.

Maybe Taiwan gives up.

Maybe the U.S.

throws in the towel.

So the argument I make in the book is the United States should seek to deter a crisis, not just a war, because a crisis would be terrible.

It would be in many ways like the Cuban Missile Crisis, but also more dangerous in some respects.

So we need to deter the crisis, not just the war, which means...

building the capability so that Xi Jinping doesn't believe that an invasion would be straightforward to pull off or that a blockade would be checkmate, but also showing him that we have ways to respond in the gray zone, on the road to war, that would match him basically proportionally to show that we're resolved if he wants to take us to the edge,