Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl
@decodinggeopoliticspodcast·119K subscribers·282 videos
How China Could Take Taiwan Without Firing a Shot - And Why It Could Catastrophically Backfire
Posted
July 11, 2026
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July 11, 2026
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This is a conversation with Eric Heginbotham, a principal research scientist at MIT's Security Studies Program, about a scenario that’s often sold as China’s safer, lower-risk alternative to an invasion of Taiwan - and one that’s also increasingly likely to happen. Eric and his colleagues ran a major war-gaming study on exactly this - what would a blockade actually look like and whether it would be successful.
We get into why the war games suggest that an easy win is a dangerous illusion: how a blockade would be more likely to spiral into a full US-China war rather than remain controlled, why China may not actually be able to coerce Taiwan to a surrender, and what everyone misunderstands about what would it actually look like.
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