The Taiwan Strait has become a recurring stage for calibrated displays of power. In recent months Beijing has sustained high-tempo air and maritime operations near Taiwan, while Washington and close partners have continued freedom of navigation transits and routine naval and air movements through the same corridors. Those parallel patterns are not isolated events. They are mutually reinforcing behaviors that raise the baseline risk of dangerous encounters and complicate longer-term deterrence dynamics.
On the Chinese side the practice of sending mixed air and naval formations into and around Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, and in some cases crossing the Taiwan Strait median line that once served as an informal buffer, has become a regular instrument of pressure. Taipei’s defense briefings and open-source analysis through 2023 document a diversification of PLA activity: not just more sorties but more complex routings, more east-of-Taiwan operations and the introduction of different mission sets, including early-warning, electronic warfare and unmanned systems. That evolution matters because it erodes long-standing operational norms that helped limit the chance of miscalculation.
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense reported discrete spikes in PLA activity that underline the tempo. For example, Taiwan said on November 1, 2023 that Chinese forces had deployed dozens of aircraft and several ships in a 24-hour period, many of which crossed the median line—an episode that underscores both the intensity and the psychological effect Beijing aims to produce. Those episodic surges are intended to fatigue Taiwan’s air and naval responses and to signal to outside actors that Beijing can impose costs and friction short of open conflict.
Washington’s responses are predictable in form but consequential in effect. U.S. Seventh Fleet and allied transits through the Strait, and public statements asserting rights of navigation and overflight, are designed to reaffirm legal norms and reassure partners. Joint transits with Canada in 2023 were explicit demonstrations of that principle; they also prompted Chinese monitoring and public protest. The United States frames these moves as routine and lawful, but routine transits through a now-contested corridor will necessarily generate confrontation vectors when the other side is actively contesting space.
Dangerous interactions have already occurred. In June 2023 U.S. Indo-Pacific Command publicly described an unsafe maritime interaction when a Chinese destroyer crossed the bow of the U.S. destroyer USS Chung-Hoon during a Taiwan Strait transit, forcing the U.S. ship to slow to avoid collision. That incident is illustrative. It was not part of a declared exercise; it was a bilateral encounter that could easily have produced a casualty or escalation. As these behaviors normalize, the margin for accidental crisis shrinks.
Operationally, the pattern is a classic gray-zone campaign plus a signalling campaign. Beijing gains by shaping routine behavior, increasing the costs of a higher-tempo U.S. presence, and signaling resolve to domestic and regional audiences. Washington gains by visibly contesting unilateral claims to maritime control and by underscoring that international waters remain open. But neither side gains much strategically from a sequence of close calls. Over time, normalizing aggressive interception and provocation degrades mutual restraint and increases the chance that an unplanned incident spirals.
Policy implications are threefold. First, risk reduction must be institutionalized. The two militaries and their interlocutors need clearer, reliable incident-mitigation channels and mutually understood rules for encounters at sea and in international airspace. Public admonitions and ad hoc statements cannot substitute for standing, credible, and operationally useful communication mechanisms. The June 2023 unsafe-interaction video drove short-term attention precisely because a routine transit nearly became a crisis; such moments demand durable procedures that reduce ambiguity.
Second, deterrence will require calibrated presence and allied burden-sharing. Washington can sustain the legal argument for transits while also deepening allied participation so that single-vessel or single-nation transits do not present easy targets for coercive harassment. The September and November 2023 joint transits with Canada show how allied cooperation can both signal and distribute risk, but allied presence must be predictable and politically sustainable.
Third, Taipei’s long-term resilience is central. Even if U.S. transits and public messaging reassure partners, the most direct costs fall on Taiwan. Continued investment in asymmetric defense, improving air surveillance and distributed strike and survivability measures, and bolstering reserve readiness will make coercive patrols less likely to achieve their aims. At the same time, Taipei, Washington and partners should coordinate public messaging to avoid inadvertent escalation while preserving deterrent clarity.
Ultimately, the current pattern of intensified patrols and shadowing is a symptom of a deeper strategic friction: a rising China testing the limits of what it can impose short of war, and a United States and partners seeking to uphold open access and reassure friends. That friction will persist. The near-term task for policymakers is to manage interaction so that routine operations do not become the proximate cause of a crisis. The longer-term task is to craft a durable equilibrium that constrains coercive normalization and lowers the probability that an incident in the Strait becomes the trigger for a broader conflict.