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Only one decade ago, on May 20, 2012, Taiwan’s president Ma Ying- jeou talked at length about peace in the Taiwan Strait as he delivered his second inaugural address. The relationship between China and Taiwan had been quite tense in the years before Ma entered office in 2008. Although the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never governed Taiwan, the PRC government claims Taiwan as rightfully part of China. PRC leaders feared that Ma’s predecessor, Chen Shui- bian, was maneuvering the self- governing island of Taiwan toward formal independence from China, or at least undermining the prospects for future unification. Beijing’s rhetoric at the time was quite threatening— warning of a willingness to pay any costs to prevent Taiwan’s formal independence— and in 2005 the PRC’s National People’s Congress passed an antisecession law, which warned that China would use “nonpeaceful means” in the event of “major incidents of Taiwan’s secession from China.” Ma had campaigned in 2008 on a platform of détente with the PRC, promising to stabilize the cross- strait relationship. Looking back at his first four years in office, he observed in 2012 that his government had “resumed institutionalized cross- strait negotiations, signed 16 bilateral agreements [with China] and made cross- strait rapprochement a reality.” Cross- strait relations, Ma proclaimed, were at their “most peaceful state . . . in 60 years.”1 The speech was not an exaggeration. The Taiwan Strait was indeed characterized by unprecedented détente during the eight years Ma served as Taiwan’s president. The PRC and Taiwan governments engaged in regular dialogue, the cross– Taiwan Strait economic relationship was normalized, and Taiwan opened its doors to tourists from the PRC. For the first time since the end of the Chinese Civil War, it became convenient to travel back and forth between Taiwan and the mainland. The cross- strait rapprochement culminated in an unprecedented meeting in 2015 between the top leaders of the two sides, when Chinese president Xi Jinping met with Ma in Singapore. The improved cross- strait atmosphere, however, proved to be fleeting. In 2016 Taiwan elected a new president, Tsai Ing- wen, who was less willing than her predecessor to accommodate the PRC on the core sovereignty issues at stake in the dispute. Beijing, in turn, has steadily increased coercive pressure on the island. The PRC halted all dialogue with Taiwan beginning in 2016, and talks have not resumed. More ominously, PRC military activities near Taiwan have increased dramatically over the past few years.2 Chinese planes have often circumnavigated the island of Taiwan, have frequently entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, and— breaking with past practice— have started to cross the midline of the Taiwan Strait more often.