# Eric Heginbotham: How China Could Take Taiwan Without Firing a Shot - And Why It Could Catastrophically Backfire

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/decoding-geopolitics-podcast-with-dominik-presl-6862131/eric-heginbotham-how-china-could-take-taiwan-without-firing-a-shot-and-why-it-could-catastrophically-backfire
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/decoding-geopolitics-podcast-with-dominik-presl-6862131/eric-heginbotham-how-china-could-take-taiwan-without-firing-a-shot-and-why-it-could-catastrophically-backfire.md
Podcast: [Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl](https://stenobird.com/podcast/decoding-geopolitics-podcast-with-dominik-presl-6862131)
Published: 2026-07-11T07:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dominik-presl/episodes/Eric-Heginbotham-How-China-Could-Take-Taiwan-Without-Firing-a-Shot---And-Why-It-Could-Catastrophically-Backfire-e3l79sv
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO6749538609.mp3
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Duration seconds: 2293

## Resource

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://decodinggeopolitics.substack.com/This is a conversation with Eric Heginbotham, a principal research scientist at MIT's Security Studies Program, about a scenario that’s often sold as China’s safer, lower-risk alternative to an invasion of Taiwan - and one that’s also increasingly likely to happen. Eric and his colleagues ran a major war-gaming study on exactly this - what would a blockade actually look like and whether it would be successful.We get into why the war games suggest that an easy win is a dangerous illusion: how a blockade would be more likely to spiral into a full US-China war rather than remain controlled, why China may not actually be able to coerce Taiwan to a surrender, and what everyone misunderstands about what would it actually look like.

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