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THE U.S.-LED ATTACK ON IRAN HAS CHANGED THE CALCULUS OF HOW A WAR WITH CHINA OVER TAIWAN COULD PLAY OUT

- CHRIS ROBERTS, MICAH McCARTNEY AND DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP'S ALLIES ONCE BOASTED HE WAS THE MASTER OF 4D CHESS. In Washington, Taipei, Tokyo and a constellation of think tanks, military-minded policy wonks keep gathering around maps to play a different game: What happens if China decides to seize Taiwan?

The pace is slower than you might think—more Risk than charades. The war games don’t generally start with Chinese marines clawing their way up a beachhead, Normandy style. They start with something quieter and, in some ways, even more frightening: a Chinese coast guard vessel ordering a merchant ship to submit to inspection, an undersea cable cut, lights going out across the island. The point of the games is to identify the threshold at which coercion becomes crisis.

Many of them share an assumption: that China would tighten the noose gradually and the United States would try to manage the situation, not escalate it. It might escort shipping, redeploy forces and voice public opposition, but it would move carefully because the risks of open war would be too costly unless there were no other option.

Then Trump attacked Iran, and now those assumptions may have changed.

GAME CHANGER The U.S. unleashed its military on Iran, left, in Operation Epic Fury, changing assumptions about how Trump might approach an attempt by China to strangle Taiwan.

The lesson from Iran is not that China is Iran. It is not that defending Taiwan would be easy. It is about how politics changes the calculus. When the Trump administration decided on war, for reasons that are still publicly opaque, the U.S. did not slowly escalate. It attacked with crippling force at the heart of the enemy.