How to Out-Deter China

In January 1996, in the midst of a crisis brought about by a series of Chinese missile tests conducted in Taiwan’s waters, a Chinese general grimly alluded to a potential nuclear response to any U.S. intervention in defense of the island. “The American people,” he warned a U.S. official, “care more about Los Angeles than Taipei.” Such saber rattling, however, belied the fact that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) knew it did not have the military strength to deter the United States from intervening in a war over Taiwan. At the time, the costs and risks