On December 29, 2025, the People's Liberation Army's Eastern Theater Command deployed ground, naval, air, and rocket force units to the waters and airspace surrounding Taiwan. The exercise, Justice Mission 2025, ran for two days. It involved at least 14 warships, 14 Coast Guard vessels, an amphibious assault strike group, and 130 military aircraft. Twenty-seven rockets were fired into waters near the island. The PLA explicitly stated the drills were preparation for a blockade of Taiwan, and claimed to have successfully blockaded the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung. (USNI News, December 31, 2025; Global Taiwan Institute, January 2026)
The exercise zones breached Taiwan's territorial waters for the first time since 2022. Live-fire drills ran for ten hours. The designated operating area was larger than any previous iteration. A drone released footage purporting to show Taipei 101 from overhead. The Eastern Theater Command released a poster captioned "Arrow of Justice, Control and Denial." (Al Jazeera, December 30, 2025; CNN, December 28, 2025)
This was the seventh major exercise around Taiwan since August 2022 and the second named operation of 2025, following Strait Thunder-2025A in April. The Global Taiwan Institute assessed that the exercises are best understood not as isolated demonstrations but as cumulative preparation for real military options, progressively integrating forces, validating command arrangements, and rehearsing capabilities for coercion, blockade, strike, and invasion. In each exercise, the PLA integrates something new. (Global Taiwan Institute, January 2026)
Two months later, the United States and Israel struck Iran.
Within weeks of the February 28 strikes, a pattern became visible across three domains.
The first is material. China increased its oil imports by 15.8 percent in January and February 2026 compared to the same period the previous year. Its strategic petroleum reserve stands at approximately 1.2 billion barrels. The ISW–AEI Coalition Defense of Taiwan project assessed that this stockpiling occurred before the Iran conflict began — not in response to it. Those reserves would prove instrumental in a Taiwan contingency, where China's reliance on overseas oil imports would make it vulnerable to a blockade of its own sea lanes. (AEI China & Taiwan Update, March 13, 2026)
The second is political. On March 5, China's National People's Congress opened the Two Sessions, its annual legislative meeting. The 2026 government work report changed a single phrase in its Taiwan section: "oppose Taiwan independence" became "crack down on Taiwan independence." PRC policy documents follow stock language year to year. Small wording changes reflect significant shifts in policy direction. The ISW–AEI project flagged this adjustment as reflecting an expansion of coercive efforts against Taiwan since the election of President William Lai Ching-te. (AEI China & Taiwan Update, March 13, 2026)
The same Two Sessions set the defense budget at approximately $278 billion — a seven percent increase over 2025 — while lowering the GDP growth target to between 4.5 and 5 percent, the lowest since 1991. Military spending is growing faster than the economy it draws from. (AEI China & Taiwan Update, March 13, 2026)
The third domain is study. On March 18, Bloomberg reported that China's military is studying the U.S.–Israeli operation against Iran for lessons applicable to a future conflict over Taiwan. Western officials, speaking anonymously, said Beijing was closely observing American offensive capabilities, precision munitions expenditure, and force deployment patterns. The officials assessed that China was gaining highly valuable information it would almost certainly factor into its plans for any potential conflict over Taiwan. (Bloomberg, March 18, 2026)
The study runs in both directions. Taiwan's defense ministry submitted a report to lawmakers on March 16 stating that low-cost interceptor weapons were urgently needed to counter China's growing arsenal of long-range rockets and drones. The report cited the Iran and Ukraine wars directly. The new systems would form part of the T-Dome, Taiwan's planned layered air-defense architecture. (South China Morning Post, March 16, 2026)
Meanwhile, the physical transfer of U.S. military assets from the Pacific has begun. Up to 2,400 Marines are being sent from Japanese bases to the Middle East, along with a command ship carrying F-35 fighter jets. Reports emerged of the potential relocation of Patriot missile defense systems from South Korea. Seoul's presidential office denied that the move would affect the allies' defense posture — a denial that confirmed the question was being asked. (Bloomberg via Pravda Taiwan, March 18, 2026; PBS News, March 14, 2026)
On March 17, President Trump announced he would delay his planned summit with Xi Jinping to prioritize the Iran conflict. (AEI China & Taiwan Update, March 20, 2026)
The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies published an assessment in early 2026 that addressed the most common counterargument: that China's military purges — including the investigation of CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia and Joint Staff Chief Liu Zhenli, announced January 24 — have degraded the PLA's readiness. The Fairbank Center's conclusion was the opposite. "Personnel purges coexist with, and may even facilitate, accelerating PLA capability development," the assessment stated. The actual track record of exercises through the end of 2025 showed real determination and progress. Observers should focus on the flourishing forest of capabilities, the researchers argued, not the felling of individual trees. (Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, 2026)
A PLA Navy–affiliated journal published an article in November 2025 outlining how precision strikes on Taipei's command center could force rapid capitulation. After the February 28 Iran strikes demonstrated exactly that kind of operation in the real world, Taiwanese analysts began studying whether their own distributed command doctrine could survive a similar opening blow. Max Lo, executive director of the Taiwan International Strategic Study Society, stated the lesson plainly: decapitation is not the end of the war but the beginning of a much more chaotic one. (South China Morning Post, March 21, 2026)
The U.S. intelligence community's 2026 annual threat assessment said China does not currently plan to invade Taiwan in 2027 and prefers to achieve unification without force. That assessment also said Beijing recognizes an amphibious assault would be extremely difficult and carry a high risk of failure, especially if the United States intervenes. (Reuters via Military Times, March 18, 2026)
Both of those statements depend on a condition: if the United States intervenes. The question the Iran war is answering — in real time, with observable data — is how much capacity the United States has to intervene in the Pacific while it is fighting in the Middle East, studying the expenditure of its own precision munitions, transferring Marines from Japanese bases, and postponing the summit where Taiwan was expected to be a top agenda item.
China does not need to invade Taiwan to change the balance. It needs to watch, prepare, and wait for the condition to change.
It is doing all three.