We Are All Out of Doves

The age of doves is finished. Soft engagement, strategic patience, and the fiction that the Chinese Communist Party can be managed through trade and dialogue have produced only strategic erosion. What remains is a binary choice: national survival under a hard national mantle, or continued subordination under the illusion of interdependence. President Trump alone has demonstrated the will to discard the failed consensus. He must now formalize it—treat the CCP under Xi Jinping as the primary existential adversary of the American Republic and organize every instrument of national power accordingly.

Congressional defense committees have placed electromagnetic pulse weapons at the center of their fiscal 2027 authorization bills. A high-altitude nuclear detonation roughly 124 miles above the continental United States could generate an EMP pulse affecting up to three million square miles—approximately 80 percent of the country. The result would not be limited to temporary blackouts. Large power transformers, supervisory control systems, cellular networks, data centers, and satellite links would suffer lasting damage. Analysts now term this “blackout warfare.”

The House and Senate have ordered briefings from senior Trump administration officials on Chinese capabilities, Taiwan’s vulnerabilities, U.S. hardening shortfalls, and the status of EMP protection standards for military bases and critical infrastructure. Technology to mitigate the threat exists and is relatively inexpensive. Political will to implement it at scale has lagged. That lag is no longer tolerable.

Parallel to EMP research, the People’s Liberation Army is systematically weaponizing weather-modification capabilities derived from civilian meteorological infrastructure. Chinese military literature now speaks of “meteorological environment shaping”—the deliberate creation of conditions favorable to PLA operations and unfavorable to the adversary. Reported techniques include artificial heavy rain to flood logistics routes, fog generation or dispersal to degrade electro-optical sensors and precision-guided munitions, lightning manipulation, localized drought or temperature alteration, and even influence over typhoon tracks.

These are not speculative strategic climate weapons capable of generating continental-scale disasters. They are tactical tools designed for concealment within natural weather patterns, thereby complicating attribution. China remains a signatory to the Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), yet PLA writings continue to explore hostile applications. The architecture required—satellites, radar networks, atmospheric modeling, delivery platforms, and specialized munitions—is already being integrated. In a Taiwan or East China Sea contingency, even limited weather shaping could degrade U.S. and allied reconnaissance, aviation, and logistics at decisive moments.

Space Command’s Gen. Stephen Whiting has stated bluntly that China’s counter-space suite is expanding at a “breathtaking pace” and constitutes the most significant challenge he faces. The inventory includes direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, ground-based lasers, electronic jammers, and co-orbital systems capable of rendezvous and proximity operations. Dual-use satellites such as the SJ-21 series have demonstrated robotic arms and synchronized “dogfighting” maneuvers that can clear debris—or disable satellites. On-orbit refueling and servicing experiments further expand PLA maneuver and sustainment options.

Equally consequential is China’s development of space-based targeting architectures that enable over-the-horizon fires against U.S. naval, air, and ground forces. These systems are not future concepts; they exist today and are designed to deny the United States the space-enabled command, control, intelligence, and precision-strike advantages that have underpinned American power projection for three decades. Loss of space superiority would cascade across every domain.

Operational indicators reinforce the strategic picture. Japan’s Defense Ministry reported that Chinese reconnaissance aircraft prompted fighter scrambles for five consecutive days near the country’s southwestern islands in the East China Sea. Such persistent probing tests response times, rules of engagement, and alliance cohesion while normalizing heightened PLA activity close to Japanese and Taiwanese airspace.

These flights are not isolated. They form part of a broader pattern of gray-zone coercion intended to wear down resolve, gather targeting data, and create faits accomplis short of open conflict.

Taken together, EMP, weather modification, counter-space systems, and persistent aerial pressure constitute a coherent approach: simultaneous, multi-domain disruption designed to raise the cost of American intervention while preserving Chinese escalation control. A high-altitude EMP pulse against Taiwan or U.S. forward bases, paired with localized weather effects and satellite degradation, could produce cascading paralysis across power, communications, sensing, and logistics before conventional forces even close. Attribution would be contested; decision timelines compressed; political will tested.

This is not the behavior of a status-quo power seeking peaceful rise. It is the behavior of a Leninist-Maoist-Stalinist  party-state preparing instruments of coercion against a peer competitor it regards as the principal obstacle to regional hegemony and, ultimately, global influence.

Words and warnings are insufficient. The United States must execute a decisive, visible, and sustained military build-up across the Indo-Pacific. Forward-deployed forces in Japan, Guam, the Philippines, and Australia require rapid expansion of munitions stocks—particularly long-range anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, and air-defense interceptors—to levels that impose immediate and credible costs on any PLA invasion attempt against Taiwan. Distributed lethality must become operational reality: more mobile, hardened, and survivable units capable of operating inside contested zones rather than relying on large, vulnerable fixed bases.

Space resilience demands accelerated deployment of proliferated low-Earth-orbit constellations, on-orbit servicing, and active defenses against co-orbital and directed-energy threats. EMP hardening of critical military and civilian infrastructure can no longer remain a paper standard; it must be funded, tested, and completed on an accelerated timeline. Joint exercises with Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and other partners should shift from symbolic interoperability to realistic, high-intensity rehearsals of multi-domain denial operations.

Central to restoring deterrence is the forward deployment of advanced nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missiles. The United States must field modern nuclear IRBMs in the Indo-Pacific theater—systems with the range, accuracy, survivability, and dual-capable flexibility to hold at risk key PLA command nodes, missile brigades, airfields, ports, and logistics hubs across the First and Second Island Chains. These weapons restore a missing rung in the escalation ladder that conventional forces alone cannot fill. Their presence signals to Beijing that any attempt to achieve a rapid, low-cost victory over Taiwan or to coerce U.S. allies will confront the prospect of prompt, precise, and devastating nuclear response options short of strategic intercontinental exchange. Deployment must be accompanied by clear declaratory policy, robust command-and-control, and alliance consultations that leave no ambiguity about American resolve.

The message to Beijing must be unambiguous: any attempt to seize Taiwan or coerce regional allies will confront a prepared, resilient, and overwhelming American-led response from the first hour—conventional, space, electromagnetic, and, if necessary, nuclear.

Military posture alone cannot succeed without parallel economic pressure that strikes at the CCP’s core sources of strength and elite privilege. Current sanctions have been too narrow, too reversible, and too easily circumvented. A new phase of economic warfare is required—targeted, escalatory, and designed to impose permanent costs on the Party’s financial architecture and the personal networks of its leadership.

Elite Chinese banking institutions that facilitate capital flight, technology acquisition, dual-use financing, and the personal wealth of CCP cadres and princelings must face comprehensive secondary sanctions. Access to dollar clearing, correspondent banking relationships, and Western capital markets should be severed for those entities that underwrite military-civil fusion, United Front operations, or the personal enrichment of senior Party officials. Asset freezes, travel bans, and public exposure of beneficial ownership must extend beyond designated entities to the family networks and offshore vehicles that shield regime elites.

Broader sectoral penalties should accelerate full decoupling in semiconductors, advanced computing, critical minerals processing, pharmaceuticals, and dual-use research. Export controls must be tightened, enforced with real penalties, and expanded to third-country transshipment. Reciprocity must become the operating principle: Chinese investment in U.S. critical infrastructure, farmland near military installations, and sensitive technology sectors should face the same barriers Beijing imposes on American firms. The goal is not managed competition. The goal is to raise the financial, technological, and political price of CCP aggression until the Party’s calculus of risk and reward is fundamentally altered.

President Trump must therefore assume the national mantle in explicit terms. Economic decoupling in strategic sectors must accelerate under clear national-security authority and be paired with the banking and elite sanctions outlined above. Military posture in the Indo-Pacific requires the sustained investment, forward presence, munitions depth, and advanced nuclear IRBM deployments necessary to outpace Chinese missile, space, and EMP inventories. Counter-intelligence must treat United Front operations, talent recruitment, and technology acquisition as domestic priority missions. Alliances must be rebuilt around shared recognition of the threat rather than shared trade deficits.

The doves will warn of provocation, isolation, and economic disruption. They issued the same warnings throughout the Cold War. History demonstrated they were wrong. Xi Jinping has made his intentions clear through doctrine, capability development, and operational activity. A republic that refuses to name the adversary and organize against it is already halfway to strategic defeat.

We are out of doves. The alternative to clarity is not peace. It is slow-motion subordination. The time for national resolve—military, economic, and political—is now.

Travis A. Karnes is a strategic analyst who was the FMR lead editor of the Peace Through Strength Institute.