Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, November 16, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
In 2023, during the Biden era, China’s Xi Jinping openly envisioned a future where, along with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and their allies North Korea and Iran, they would dominate the world with help from clients in Venezuela and Cuba.
They were “at the height of their power projection,” wrote Geostrategy-Direct‘s Rick Fisher for a Taiwan newspaper.
Xi and Putin apparently still bought into narratives relentlessly propagated at the time by American legacy media that Donald Trump would never be president again and might even be going to jail.
State media were allowed to record Xi telling Putin on March 22, 2023:
“Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.”
Oh how wrong they were.
“In their hubris, Xi and Putin likely did not expect the re-election of President Donald J. Trump, and most likely did not expect that two years later, in March 2026, their ally Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro would be cooling in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York; their ally Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his nuclear weapons program would be dust; and their ally Cuba would be on the verge of collapse and begging for negotiations with Trump,” Fisher noted in a March 16 analysis for The Taipei Times.
“This is the counter Communist hegemony momentum that Trump will bring to his April 2026 summit with Xi, whose Party-military-intelligence apparatus must be furiously generating lessons to be drawn from Trump’s capture of Maduro and the United States-Israel war against Iran.”
There are also lessons for Taiwan and the government of President William Lai Ching-te, who is preparing his forces to deter an invasion by China, and faces down the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to advance a a US$42 billion military budget.
“Maduro and his wife get to live and Venezuela gets to start a new era, but Khamenei and 50+ of Iran’s top leaders, not so much,” Fisher noted. “But the Islamic terror regime has survived two weeks of U.S. and Israeli bombing, demonstrating to Taiwan the advantages of distributed government authority, a well-armed police and the requirement for a very large armed militia.”
Since 2014, communist China has used a full-scale reproduction of the presidential compound in Taiwan to practice their own decapitation operations.
The main Iran lesson for Xi’s regime, Fisher noted, “is that air power and decapitation will not produce victory if the Taiwan government survives. Taipei likewise should have no illusions — a PLA victory requires an invasion — with or without invitation.”
As such, Fisher continued, “Taipei has long had warning to prepare for securing the President and Vice President while under surprise attack, and to prepare for extensive continuity of government as a means of defense.
“This should include a new challenge to the CCP’s “One China Principle” by convincing friendly governments that still bow to China’s dictat but oppose a PLA invasion; to tell China upon a PLA attack they are prepared to formally recognize Taiwan and, if necessary, host Taiwan government-in-exile representatives. And at long last, Taiwan must begin the training and arming of a militia force in the millions equipped with sniper rifles and cheap anti-air/armor weapons to give Taiwan’s defense far greater depth.”
China spent decades helping Iran to design its drone fleet and has supplied critical guidance and engine systems components while also — according to unofficial sources — integrating the PLA’s space surveillance and navigation satellite architecture to guide Iran’s ballistic missile and drone strikes.
“For its own part, the PLA has perhaps the world’s largest drone and unmanned weapons development sector, and the PLA is close to, if not ready, to deploy joint air, sea, and ground unmanned formations to precede and assist manned invasion forces,” Fisher wrote. “So it’s imperative that Taiwan follow through on initiatives to begin co-production of cheap, autonomously guided, and long range loitering munitions like the US Anduril 500km range Baracuda-500, and to consider coproduction of the long-range Anduril Copperhead autonomously guided torpedo.”
Taiwan needs to quickly build a very large number, Fisher added, “so enough survive the initial PLA air-missile assault and remain able to sink the PLA invasion fleet, be it hundreds of PLA Navy (PLAN) militia roll-on-roll-off barges or 10,000 PLAN militia fishing ships. With enough long-range loitering attack drones, Taiwan can also plaster PLA invasion forces gathering along the coasts of Fujian and Guangdong provinces. But the KMT’s latest defense budget initiative announced on March 5 delays the funding of such ‘private sector’ sourced weapons.”
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Lessons both China and Taiwan can learn from this year’s major U.S. military operations added by Editor Two on
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