Tensions between the United States, China, and Taiwan have reached a fever pitch in 2025, as new revelations about Chinese land acquisitions near U.S. military bases and Taiwan’s ambitious missile defense plans underscore the high-stakes chess match playing out across the Indo-Pacific. With both Washington and Taipei ramping up efforts to counter Beijing’s growing military and intelligence reach, the world is watching anxiously to see whether these moves will deter conflict — or simply raise the stakes of any potential confrontation.
On Taiwan’s National Day in October 2025, President Lai Ching-te announced an audacious new initiative: the T-Dome, a homegrown, multi-layered missile defense network modeled after Israel’s famed Iron Dome. According to The New York Times, Lai’s goal is to give the island a fighting chance in the opening hours of any war, as China continues to mass new missile bases and deploy hypersonic weapons along its eastern coast, just across the Taiwan Strait.
“Deterrence through strength is essential to maintaining peace,” Lai declared, calling on Beijing to renounce the use of force and respect the cross-strait status quo. The T-Dome, short for “Taiwan Dome,” will be part of a special defense budget to be proposed by the end of the year. Lai’s administration is aiming to raise defense spending beyond 3% of GDP, targeting a robust 5% by 2030, a move welcomed by U.S. officials who see Taiwan’s self-reliance as crucial to regional stability.
The new system is designed to integrate high-level detection and interception capabilities, forming a nationwide “safety net” against missiles, drones, and other aerial threats from China. Taiwan’s current arsenal includes U.S.-made Patriot missiles and indigenous Sky Bow (Tien Kung) interceptors, and it recently unveiled the Chiang-Kong system for mid-range ballistic defense. The T-Dome aims to tie these disparate elements together, creating a more resilient shield in the face of China’s ever-expanding missile threat.
Why the urgency? As reported by Chris Buckley and Pablo Robles in The New York Times, China has been transforming its east coast into a launchpad for missile strikes against Taiwan. Satellite images reveal that missile brigades like Brigade 611 in Anhui have doubled in size, adding three dozen new launchpads and even dummy tunnels for training. Brigade 616 in Jiangxi, just south of Anhui, has also expanded rapidly, with new facilities built on cleared farmland in only 18 months. These bases are now deploying advanced projectiles, including the DF-26 “Guam Killer” and the DF-17 hypersonic missile, both of which significantly complicate Taiwan’s defense calculus.
According to U.S. Department of Defense estimates cited by The New York Times, the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) has grown by a staggering 50% over the past four years, adding 3,500 more missiles to its arsenal. That’s a lot of firepower pointed at Taiwan — and a major reason why Taipei is racing to get T-Dome off the ground.
Yet, as Tianran Xu writes in Open Nuclear Network, Taiwan’s existing missile defense systems, while dense, remain quantitatively inadequate against China’s massive arsenal. The island operates nine Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-2/3 batteries and 12 Tien Kung-2/3 batteries, with newer Tien Kung-4 and PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) systems expected by 2026. As of April 2025, Taiwan has about 380 PAC-3 Cost Reduction Initiative interceptors — its only proven anti-tactical ballistic missile weapons. The Tien Kung-3, with its directional-fragmentation warhead and Mach 5.5 speed, offers limited capability against ballistic missiles.
Joe Trevithick, writing for The War Zone, notes that the Chiang-Kong system can engage targets up to 70 kilometers in altitude, comparable to Israel’s Arrow 2. However, its hit-to-kill capability and operational deployment speed remain uncertain. The main challenges for Taiwan’s missile shield, experts agree, are survivability, mobility, cost scalability, and effectiveness against a saturation missile attack. In other words, even the best shield might buckle under a relentless barrage.
To bolster its deterrence, Taiwan has also developed a formidable offensive missile arsenal. The Hsiung Feng III boasts a 400-kilometer range, while the Ching Tien supersonic cruise missile can strike targets over 2,000 kilometers away — with upgrades in the works to push it into hypersonic territory. These long-range missiles are intended to target Chinese invasion staging areas, missile bases, and critical infrastructure, aiming to impose costs and buy time for U.S. and allied intervention should war break out.
But will it be enough? A RAND analysis from June 2023, cited in The New York Times, suggests that Taiwan is most vulnerable in the first 90 days of a Chinese invasion attempt — the window needed for the U.S. to marshal sufficient forces to intervene. The T-Dome, then, is less about invulnerability and more about endurance: surviving the initial onslaught long enough for help to arrive.
Meanwhile, on the U.S. mainland, a different kind of threat has been raising eyebrows in Washington. Chinese entities have been quietly acquiring farmland near sensitive U.S. military bases, prompting fears of espionage or even sabotage. Former national security official David Feith, who worked on U.S.-China policy for the State Department and the National Security Council, laid out the risks in a recent interview with 60 Minutes.
“The ability to own large tracts of land, especially close to sensitive U.S. military and government facilities, can pose an enormous problem given the nature of technology today,” Feith warned. He pointed to Ukraine’s recent drone attack on Russian bombers, carried out with drones smuggled into the country, as an example of how unconventional methods can yield devastating results. For China, Feith explained, owning farmland in the U.S. offers “more operating room for potential strikes.”
In 2023, North Dakota politicians blocked a Chinese company from building a corn mill near Grand Forks Air Force Base, citing security concerns. While Chinese nationals own just under 1% of U.S. agricultural land (277,336 acres, according to the latest USDA data), the mere proximity to military sites has been enough to spur legislative action. Twenty-nine states now limit or ban foreign ownership of farmland, and the Trump Agriculture Department announced a seven-point national security plan in 2025 to increase transparency and restrict adversarial acquisitions.
The threat isn’t limited to farms. Chinese-backed cryptocurrency mining operations, often located near military facilities, have also drawn scrutiny. These massive data centers not only pose intelligence collection risks, but could also sabotage the power grid due to their enormous energy demands. In May 2024, President Biden ordered a Chinese-backed firm to sell a crypto mining property near Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, citing national security concerns.
Feith underscored the unique risk posed by Chinese companies, noting that Chinese law requires corporations to cooperate with the government, even abroad. “In the view of U.S. intelligence officials and government leaders now for years, China is preparing to be able to fight and defeat the United States military in a war,” he said. That sobering assessment is fueling bipartisan efforts to close loopholes and guard against potential vulnerabilities on American soil.
As the U.S. tightens restrictions at home and Taiwan rushes to fortify its skies, the shadow of China’s military and intelligence ambitions looms large. Whether these defensive moves will deter aggression or merely set the stage for a higher-stakes standoff remains an open question, but one thing is clear: the contest for strategic advantage is only intensifying.
