“We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.” — Eyck Freymann
Forget Iran for a moment. The Hormuz crisis is a template for the bigger crisis of Taiwan. Eyck Freymann — Hoover Fellow at Stanford, author of the brand-new Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China — believes that the fate of the 21st century may hinge on Taiwan. And he warns that if America can’t handle Iran, it’s certainly not ready for Beijing.
Freymann argues that China doesn’t need to invade Taiwan. Xi Jinping has watched Putin discover — with horror — what happens when you send unprepared forces into a country that fights back. China’s lesson from Ukraine is a strategy of quarantine rather than invasion. The United States will then face a choice between accepting Chinese checkmate or escalating a crisis with no domestic or international support. Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors and 99% of the cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs used to train frontier AI models. If those chip factories shut, there will be an instantaneous global financial crisis.
Forget today’s Iranian theater. Taiwan will be the real existential show.
Five Takeaways
• The Hormuz Alarm Bell. Iran has no navy, no air force — and it took 20% of global oil supply offline. China has vastly more. No plan for the economic shock. No domestic legitimacy. Allies suffering. Beijing’s conclusion: we don’t have to pick a military fight.
• The Semiconductor Chokehold. Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced chips, 99% of NVIDIA’s frontier GPUs. The CHIPS Act hasn’t changed this. The Arizona facility is two generations behind. If the fabs go offline: instantaneous global financial crisis. This is what’s at stake before you even get to the military question.
• The Quarantine: Winning Without Fighting. Xi’s plan A is not invasion. Declare that anyone flying to Taipei must first clear customs in Shanghai. Impound a United Airlines flight. Let the ambiguity do the work. No shot fired. Checkmate.
• What a Taiwan War Would Look Like. A war at sea. Control the skies, the undersea, the surface. Then 80 miles of Normandy-style strait crossing. First engagements decided in minutes by long-range precision munitions. Exceptional American operational capability. But China has home-field advantage and has been building for this systematically.
• The Four-Pillar Strategy. Diplomacy, military deterrence, economic resilience, allied coordination — all working together. Taiwan’s status must be resolved peacefully and democratically. Build enough resilience that authoritarian powers can’t extort the West. This is doable. It’s been done for fifty years. We just need the resolve.
About the Guest
Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and the author of Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China (Oxford University Press, 2026).
References
Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China by Eyck Freymann (Oxford University Press, 2026)
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Chapters:
00:00:31 Trump blockades the Strait of Hormuz: a Taiwan template?
00:01:53 US strategic incoherence: ends without means in Iran
00:06:34 Setting priorities: the first hard choice America won’t make
00:10:33 What Beijing is learning from America’s Middle East flailing
00:15:11 Xi’s national rejuvenation and Taiwan’s emotional significance
00:18:47 The moral case for defending Taiwan: democracy, not just chips
00:21:52 Taiwan’s semiconductor chokehold: 90% of advanced chips, 99% of NVIDIA GPUs
00:25:39 What a US-China war over Taiwan would actually look like
00:31:31 Is Beijing building for war? Xi’s systematic preparations
00:34:29 What China learned from Russia’s Ukraine disaster
00:37:33 The quarantine: winning Taiwan without firing a shot
00:39:35 The four-pillar strategy for honorable peace