This article originally appeared in Real Clear World.
By Joe Varner, January 5, 2026
As we approach 2026, China is pursuing a unified, and increasingly assertive, military posture across the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, and the Himalayan frontier.
These theatres are often discussed as separate issues. They are not. Beijing is treating them as interconnected fronts in a long-term campaign to erode U.S. influence, evaluate allied cohesion, and normalize Chinese dominance across Asia.
Nowhere is this clearer than Taiwan, the centre of gravity in China’s regional strategy. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) now flies dozens of sorties a week around the island, with many crossing the once-respected median line in the Taiwan Strait. Warships operate off Taiwan’s east coast. Large encirclement drills, once rare, have become routine, rehearsing maritime blockades and coordinated missile strikes. These are not signals of imminent invasion, but they are far more than political theatre. China is conditioning the region to live with a permanent, intrusive PLA presence. The goal is simple: make Taiwan’s isolation feel inevitable and U.S. support appear costly.
But Taiwan is only one front in a widening strategic contest. In the South China Sea, the Philippines now faces daily harassment from China’s coast guard and maritime militia. At Second Thomas Shoal, Scarborough Shoal, and Sabina Shoal, Filipino vessels have been water-cannoned, rammed, and their passage blocked. Lasers and flares have been fired at aircraft. These activities fall below the threshold of open conflict but are just high enough to create the risk of a fatal incident–one that could force the U.S. to decide whether its Mutual Defense Treaty with Manila still means what it says it does. For Beijing, this grey-zone pressure is a feature, not a bug. If China can make the Philippines doubt American resolve, it will send a powerful message to every U.S. ally in the region.
To the north, Japan faces its most dangerous operating environment since the Cold War. Chinese and Russian joint bomber patrols now fly routine circuits through airspace around Japan’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ), forcing Tokyo to scramble fighters. Chinese coast-guard vessels have dramatically increased their intrusions around the Senkaku Islands, staying longer and deploying larger ships designed to intimidate Japanese patrols. At the same time, PLA Navy carrier groups treat the Miyako Strait as their gateway for operations east of Taiwan, an unmistakable warning that China views the entire Ryukyu chain as a strategic corridor. In December alone, Japanese fighters were radar-locked by Chinese jets near Okinawa, underscoring just how thin the margin for error has become.
China’s posture toward South Korea is less overtly confrontational but strategically consequential. Combined Sino-Russian air patrols regularly probe the Korean ADIZ, signalling deepening coordination between Beijing and Moscow at a time when Pyongyang is accelerating its nuclear program with their implicit backing. Any enhancements to U.S.–South Korea missile defence systems are met with Chinese diplomatic threats and economic coercion. In short, China is telling Seoul that aligning too closely with Washington carries a price, and that North Korea’s growing capabilities can be wielded as leverage.
Meanwhile, the quietest but most enduring front of all lies in the Himalayas, where India faces a hardened Chinese military presence. Since the violent 2020 clashes in Ladakh, the PLA has built roads, air bases, and permanent barracks that allow rapid force mobilization along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Despite diplomatic talks, China has not reversed its gains. Instead, it has entrenched them. At sea, Beijing’s “research vessels” and naval patrols in the eastern Indian Ocean now challenge India’s maritime awareness, threatening its traditional dominance in a region that is vital to global energy flows.
Individually, these flashpoints look local, but together they form a deliberate pattern: China is applying coordinated pressure across the Indo-Pacific to force Washington to divide its focus while Beijing incrementally shifts the balance of power.
The real danger heading into 2026 is not a planned offensive but a miscalculation, a collision in the South China Sea, an intercept gone wrong near the Senkakus, or a communications failure over Taiwan, playing out against a backdrop of normalized Chinese coercion. The region is becoming a pressure cooker, and whether it boils over depends on whether democracies grasp that these are not isolated flare-ups but parts of a single strategy that grows bolder each time it goes unchallenged.
Joe Varner is the deputy director of the Conference of Defence Associations, a senior fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and the Center for North American Prosperity and Security in Washington, D.C.
