US Must Deny China Access to Area Around Taiwan: Former Acting Defense Secretary

Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller speaks during a meeting at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., on Nov. 13, 2020. Alex Wong/Getty Images

The U.S. military must fully prioritize denying China’s communist regime the ability to seize Taiwan or else risk its own core interests, according to a new report by a former defense official.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, would further seek to displace the United States if allowed to conquer Taiwan, writes former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.

“By far the most significant danger to Americans’ security, freedoms, and prosperity is China,” Miller says in a new report.

“If China could subordinate Taiwan or [U.S.] allies like the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan, it could break apart any balancing coalition that is designed to prevent Beijing’s hegemony over Asia.”

Prioritizing Denial

Miller’s report appears in the 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a comprehensive series of proposed policies published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

In it, Miller claims that the CCP’s efforts to subdue and subordinate its neighbors in Asia is just a starting point for a global campaign to undermine and displace the United States as well as the rules-based international order.

Actively preventing that outcome from becoming a reality should be the foremost priority of the U.S. military, he says.

“[China] apparently aspires to dominate Asia and then, from that position, become globally preeminent,” Miller says.

“If Beijing could achieve this goal, it could dramatically undermine America’s core interests, including by restricting U.S. access to the world’s most important market. Preventing this from happening must be the top priority for American foreign and defense policy.”

Accordingly, Miller believes that the foremost priority of the military must be to deny China access to the first island chain, the archipelago that stretches from Japan down through Indonesia and comes between China and the open Pacific.

To “prioritize a denial defense against China,” Miller says that “all U.S. defense efforts, from force planning to employment and posture” must be reoriented to contend with the regime before any other issue is considered.

This means allocating the resources necessary to defeat such an invasion “before allocating resources to other missions, such as simultaneously fighting another conflict.”

US Must Embrace Irregular Warfare

It also means embracing non-kinetic forms of warfare that the United States, at present, does not seem ready to commit to when confronting China. Primarily the active use of irregular warfare and more serious economic and diplomatic efforts to cripple the regime’s growing influence worldwide.

A key target in the effort, Miller says, should be the CCP’s global economic development project known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

To preserve U.S. interests, Miller believes, the nation must “make irregular warfare a cornerstone of security strategy” and actively work to counter the BRI on a global scale by using special forces and non-military instruments of national power to erode the CCP’s sway in nations it has begun to infiltrate.

Ensuring the continued preeminence of the United States over China abroad, especially with partner nations from whom the U.S. purchases energy, is a vital issue, Miller said.

To that end, the report reflects some similar comments that Miller made during an April 4 talk with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“I believe with the Chinese threat, the way to approach that is a very subtle and indirect approach … irregular warfare,” Miller said at the time.

“We can’t go all in on any one thing. We need to have a wide range of capabilities.”