When the Chinese military launched its “Justice Mission 2025” exercise last December, simulating the blockade of Taiwan’s main ports and air routes, disrupted hundreds of civilian flights between Taiwan and its outlying islands. For thousands of stranded passengers, the exercise provided a brief and unsettling glimpse of what a real crisis might feel like.
This article was taken from Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China, Eyck Freymann, Oxford University Press, 432pp., $29.99, April 2026
They also revealed a question that few in Washington want to grapple with: What happens to the hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals living in Taiwan—including about 11,000 Americans—when the next conflict isn’t a rehearsal?
The real answer is that no one knows—because no one has a plan.
The question is important because the most likely way of the Taiwan conflict is not a sudden invasion, but a slow, gray escalation over a period of weeks or months. There would be time for Taipei, Washington, and others to act, but every step taken by the American president, including the decision to evacuate US citizens, would itself be a signal in the escalation.
In short: The conflict over Taiwan may not start with the first shot. It can start with the first departure.
In the worst case, The presence of foreign nationals in Taiwan is one of the strongest deterrents against a surprise attack by China. As of April 2023, Taiwan was home to more than 800,000 foreign residents representing 164 countries, including an unknown number of Chinese nationals. About 700,000 visitors come from Southeast Asia, but there are also large communities of Americans, British, Canadians, French, Germans, Indians, Japanese, Singaporeans, and South Koreans, among others.
If a Chinese attack were to kill or injure large numbers of these civilians or make them unable to be safely evacuated, Beijing would risk drawing their countries into the conflict. For that reason, it would prefer to pressure foreign governments to remove their people from Taiwan before it takes any military action.
But finding that population will be a monumental task—and one for which the United States and its allies are largely unprepared. A non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) from Taiwan would dwarf anything the US and its allies have ever attempted.
The Department of Defense joint publication on NEOs it lays out detailed doctrine on how the process as a whole should work, involving coordination between the State Department and the Pentagon, agreements with host countries, and planned evacuation steps. None of this has been adapted to the situation in Taiwan. In 2023, The Armed Services Committee asked the Pentagon developing possible NEO plans for Taiwan – strongly suggesting that no such plan existed at the time. There is no public evidence that the US government has acted on this proposal since then.
No country with Taiwan’s large population currently comes close to the resources and training to quickly remove its citizens. The United States and its allies do not have a common doctrine for NEOs, nor a coordination system. In a conflict, each country would essentially improve under the most stressful conditions possible.
History offers little reassurance.
The 1975 American airlift from Saigon, one of the largest emergency evacuations in American history, carried only 45,000 people, including 5,600 Americans. Those efforts, however, still left thousands of refugees and many civilians behind—including the U.S. ambassador and his staff. More than 7,800 people were supposed to be evacuation by helicopter in the last two days of despair. The South Vietnamese government collapsed in the process, and images of helicopters hovering over the embassy roof became a lasting symbol of American defeat.
In 2021 displacement of Kabul, some 122,000 people were airlifted over a 16-day period. US forces already had a large combat presence in and around the Afghan capital – a military base that would not have been in or near Taiwan when the conflict began. However, the evacuation was chaotic, and many Afghans were left behind to meet their fate at the hands of the Taliban. This became a political disaster for then-US President Joe Biden, in part because it played out in full view of the cameras.
The experience also forced officials to confront the limits of such activities outside the conditions that allow for the same. “I think there can be a misconception that what we saw in Afghanistan is something that the US government can do anywhere and everywhere in the world,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said. he said in the results. In another context, referring to Ukraine at the time, he said no American “should expect that we can be in a position to do something similar to what we saw in Afghanistan.”
The evacuation of Taiwan would occur over a greater distance and under less permissive conditions than any of these operations. And unlike Ukraine, where millions fled to neighboring countries following a full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, Taiwan’s geography makes air evacuation the only viable option on a large scale. The island is about 100 miles from mainland China and about 400 miles from the nearest US military base in Okinawa. In addition, the United States has had no the ability to save organic strategic soldiers since 1973, and the base of US-flagged commercial passenger traffic that historically held it back is gone.
In a crisis, hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of Taiwanese citizens would also try to flee before hostilities began, competing with foreigners in small planes. Even under optimistic assumptions, it would still take weeks to evacuate all the foreign nationals. At the same time, China’s military pressure will make Taiwan’s airspace sluggish and commercial carriers unwilling to operate.
Taiwan could declare martial law, banning men of fighting age from leaving, as Ukraine did. Its leaders may also interpret the US-led exile as a sign of abandonment, thereby reducing their motivation to cooperate. Under such difficulties, political collapse is not impossible, as the governments of South Vietnam and Afghanistan collapsed during the evacuation. Refugees may attempt dangerous sea crossings to islands in southwestern Japan, overwhelming local communities unable to accommodate them.
Given all these uncertainties, humanitarian and political consequences would occur throughout the Indo-Pacific region.
As tensions rose, the president of the United States would be faced with a decision without good options.
Encouraging Americans to voluntarily leave Taiwan while the conflict drags on for weeks or months, as Washington did before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, may seem prudent. But Taiwan is not Ukraine, and one person’s playbook doesn’t necessarily work for another. Ensuring the safety of its citizens abroad is a fundamental responsibility of the US government, especially when the host country is unable or unwilling to protect them. But this must be balanced against the debilitating effect that the bailout order can have on the crisis itself.
An extradition order would signal an imminent conflict, which Beijing could interpret as a sign of American reluctance, encouraging further escalation. This problem shows why NEO is so difficult to implement. Keeping citizens in place can, ironically, serve as a deterrent: Their presence forces Beijing to risk killing or injuring citizens of several countries, any of which could go to war in response. But leaving them vulnerable carries clear moral and political costs that cannot be brushed aside in the name of strategic logic.
The president would be faced with a real dilemma, with every choice carrying dire consequences:
Leave early and the risk you invite escalates, alienating Taiwan’s government and public in the process.
Leave late—when flights may already be canceled, airports overcrowded, and China’s navy tight—and risk an all-too-visible catastrophe in Kabul, as the spectacle of Americans scrambling to leave the besieged island is broadcast live on television.
Refuse to move, leaving the Americans open to harm. This option preserves the deterrent value of foreign nationals on the island, but at an incredible moral and political cost. If Americans died in Chinese strikes, the domestic political conflict would be huge. If they were detained or used as brokers, Washington would face a hostage crisis placed on top of geopolitics.
Or try to move quietly, hoping to minimize exposure without signaling a retreat. But in the age of social media, nothing stays silent for long. Flight bookings, consular advice, and troop movements can be leaked within hours. A failed attempt at rational reduction could combine the worst of both worlds: strategic destruction to signal withdrawal, without taking people to safety.
Any option that includes evacuation will also force an immediate reckoning among US allies, especially those with citizens on the island, who will face domestic pressure to do so. This could lead to a high-profile international withdrawal that would damage Taiwan’s morale and economy long before any shots are fired. And because there is no common system for partner transfers, each country will be making its own decisions in an information vacuum, with less coordination and a higher chance of confusion.
None of this is theoretical. Since 2022, the Chinese military has been conducted a series of increasingly realistic exercises targeting Taiwan, simulating blockades, missile strikes and siege operations. It has rapidly pushed closer for the island at all times, the line between practice and operation grows ever thinner.
The question of relocation is not a secondary issue nor is the problem of logistics solved after the crisis started. It cannot be separated from the larger question of whether the United States has an effective strategy for the gray area between peace and war in which China is already operating. If Washington has no plan for something as basic as protecting its own citizens on the island, what does that mean about its willingness to manage financial shocks, coordinate with allies, or communicate with Beijing as the conflict unfolds? The recovery gap is a symptom of a greater failure: the absence of an integrated strategy that treats political, military and economic blockade as a single problem.
The question may define the presidency. It could decide whether the United States enters the war or stands aside. It can be created if partners come together or break up. And it’s a question that Washington, by its own admission, has barely begun to answer. The time to build a plan is before the next drill becomes a real thing.
