China’s ‘Justice Mission 2025’ Encirclement Drill Spurs Taiwan’s 2026 Unity-for-Defense Drive

China’s rehearsal echoes the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis, when missile tests backfired by nudging Taipei closer to Washington, just as today’s drill hardens Japanese and Filipino alignment. The episode also recalls the 1962 Cuban quarantine: a blockade-like move meant to compel without firing, gambling that the other side blinks. Structurally, it reflects three converging long-term trends: (1) Beijing’s shift from symbolic fly-bys to practiced encirclement and AI-driven cognitive warfare; (2) the slow erosion of Japan’s post-1947 pacifism; and (3) Washington’s incremental end-run around its own “strategic ambiguity” via ever-larger arms packages. On a 100-year arc, whether Taiwan can secure both the semiconductor supply-chain and democratic self-determination will shape the balance of techno-industrial power much as the 19th-century scramble for coal and steel colonies did before 1914. If the blockade playbook becomes normalized, future great-power disputes—from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf—may default to siege economics rather than immediate shooting wars, keeping the peace statistically but raising the long-term cost of miscalculation.