US Lawmakers See ‘Maximum Danger’ After Staging a China War Game

  • Committee’s chairman calls for arming Taiwan ‘to the teeth’
  • An earlier war game concluded a Chinese invasion would founder

Soldiers stage an attack during a military drill in Hualien, Taiwan.

Photographer: Mandy Cheng/AFP/Getty Images
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A group of US lawmakers gathered around maps spread out on tables in a committee room on Capitol Hill Wednesday night, pretending to advise the president after a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

The members of the House’s new China committee spent more than two hours gaming out possible scenarios, working through the first month of imagined fighting. Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who leads the committee, said the war game demonstrated “disastrous economic consequences” for the global economy if China attempts to seize the self-governed island by force.