Lawfare Archive: How China Might Coerce Taiwan
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 May 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From May 15, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman talked with Evan Braden Montgomery and Toshi Yoshihara, both Senior Fellows at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, to discuss their recent Lawfare article, "Beijing's Changing Invasion Calculus: How China Might Put Taiwan in its Crosshairs."
Together they discuss how China might use a blockade, subversion, and nuclear threats to intimidate Taiwan, the United States, and key regional states like Japan. They also discuss how Taipei and Washington might change their approach to reduce the risk of Taiwanese coercion.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Jacob Krauss, a Tarbell fellow at Lawfare, writing about artificial intelligence. |
| 0:10.0 | The core idea of lawfare is to deliver reliable, independent, nonpartisan, expert analysis at the pace of news. |
| 0:19.0 | That kind of analysis is essential in domains like AI, where the technology |
| 0:24.5 | is evolving rapidly and raising urgent policy considerations. We are a 501c3 nonprofit, and everything |
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| 0:48.7 | Just $10 a month or more if you're able makes a real difference and helps us continue to offer all our content for free |
| 0:55.7 | for everyone. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll support Lawfare for May 17, 2026. |
| 1:28.3 | On May 13th, President Trump traveled to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping in a critical |
| 1:33.7 | two-day summit to address the large-scale issues impacting U.S.-China relations. |
| 1:39.4 | Taiwan and the flow of U.S. weapons to the self-governing island are key concerns that Chinese officials indicated they expect the two presidents to address during their talks. |
| 1:49.0 | For today's archive, I chose an episode from May 15, 2025, in which Daniel Bimon sat down with Evan Braden Montgomery and Toshi Yoshihara |
| 1:59.0 | to discuss the tactics and strategies that China may employ to intimidate Taiwan, the U.S., and other regional actors in order to maintain regional power. |
| 2:08.6 | The It's the Lawfare Podcast. |
| 2:25.3 | I'm Daniel Beiman, a foreign policy editor of Lawfare. |
| 2:29.3 | And I'm with Evan Braden Montgomery and Toshi Yoshihara, who are at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary |
| 2:36.8 | assessments. Individually, a lot of these coercive efforts are not new, and in some cases don't even |
| 2:44.0 | have a particularly good historical track record. But if you start thinking about how they |
| 2:47.9 | might be employed in combination, and because you have a series of at least three, frankly more, but three main targets, if you think about |
| 2:55.2 | Taipei, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C., that creates an opportunity for those different coercive |
| 3:00.8 | efforts to kind of work in tandem in potentially a very powerful way. |
| 3:05.8 | We are talking about how China might coerce Taiwan. |
... |
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