US-China Relations

The Night the Jets Roared Over the Strait

It started with a phone call at 02:13 a.m. in Taipei—an aide to Taiwan’s defense minister jolted awake by news that the first crates of shoulder-fired Stinger missiles had landed at Taoyuan Air Base hours ahead of schedule. Within minutes, the alert rippled across the South China Sea to Beijing, where a red-eyed colonel in the Western Theater Command typed the order that lit up radar screens from Fujian to Hainan: “Exercise Thunder Sword—commence at dawn.”

A Deal Sealed in Silence

Washington had hoped to keep the $440 million arms package quiet. No press releases, no triumphant selfies on Capitol Hill. But when satellite imagery showed an American C-17—call sign REACH 492—touching down under floodlights, the whispers became a roar. The package: 250 Block I Stingers, 40 Abrams tanks, and a mobile radar array capable of tracking stealth sorties.

“We don’t seek escalation,” a senior State Department official told me over coffee in Foggy Bottom, “but we won’t let Taipei face a blockade with peashooters.”

China’s Reply Came in Sorties

By sunrise, H-6K bombers were skimming the median line of the Taiwan Strait. Over the next 72 hours, the People’s Liberation Army flew 312 sorties—its largest show of force since the 1996 missile crisis. State television broadcast J-16 fighters releasing flares in perfect choreography, while anchors promised “firm, forceful countermeasures.”

In the Taiwanese port of Keelung, fishermen watched a destroyer, the Chang Chien, steam past breakwaters at battle stations. “We’ve seen drills before,” said Lin Hsiao-ting, mending nets on the pier, “but never this close, never this loud.”

Inside the War Room

A Pentagon planner, speaking on condition of anonymity, walked me through a slide deck labelled “Strategic Deterrence 2024.” The worry: China’s newfound habit of encircling Taiwan with live-fire zones could normalize blockades, turning every future arms shipment into a potential powder keg.

• Day 1: China declares “no-sail” corridors.
• Day 2: US Navy’s Seventh Fleet reroutes two destroyers east of the Bashi Channel.
• Day 3: A Chinese drone loiters over Japan’s Yonaguni Island—Tokyo scrambles F-15s.

What the Neighbors Say

Tokyo lodged a formal protest, Seoul urged “maximum restraint,” and Manila quietly opened Subic Bay for allied logistics. Meanwhile, European diplomats in Beijing whispered about “Ukraine fatigue” sapping America’s bandwidth for a second crisis.

Yet in Taipei’s Huaxi Street night market, life carried on. College students queued for papaya milk tea, unaware that overhead, an American P-8 Poseidon had just banked north, its transponder dark.

The Human Ledger

Back in Washington, congressional aides calculate political capital. A senator from a Midwest farming state asks what China’s soybean embargo could cost. In Beijing, a think-tanker close to the foreign ministry sighs: “Every arms sale forces us to react harder. We’re trapped in a loop of mutual face-saving.”

Face-saving, perhaps, but the stakes are flesh and steel. On the coastal highway from Taipei to Yilan, military convoys now move under camouflage nets. Locals swap rumors of reservists receiving midnight texts: “Report by 06:00. Bring your own helmet.”

What Comes Next

Neither side wants war; both fear looking weak. The result is a choreographed spiral—missiles for deterrence, drills for deterrence, headlines for deterrence—until one miscalculation snaps the rhythm.

As I boarded the evening flight out of Songshan Airport, an American diplomat leaned over the aisle: “We’re one stray torpedo away from a story none of us want to tell.”

Outside the cabin window, the lights of Taiwan’s west coast flickered like a constellation under siege, bright enough to be seen from space—and from the bridges of warships now shadowing each other in the dark.