Concerns are rising that the United States can no longer deter China from taking over Taiwan by force, as a strategy of ambiguity it has adopted for years to keep the peace is breaking down, the Economist magazine warns.

Taiwan is an arena for the rivalry between the mainland Chinese and the Americans, the article says. If China launched an assault and “the Seventh Fleet failed to turn up, China would overnight become the dominant power in Asia. America’s allies around the world would know that they could not count on it. Pax Americana would collapse.”

The dire conclusion to be drawn from that scenario is that Taiwan is “the most dangerous place on Earth,” according to the Economist’s latest cover story.

Washington has been professing recognition of Beijing’s “one China” principle, which considers Taiwan a rebellious breakaway region that has to be reunified with the motherland. And yet under its ambiguity strategy, the U.S. has spent the last 70 years ensuring there are two Chinas by protecting the self-ruled island from Chinese aggression, the article says.

U.S. Admiral Philip Davidson, head of the Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress in March about his worry that mainland China would invade Taiwan in six to seven years.

The current state of affairs had been 25 years in the making, the Economist article noted. China had launched 90 major ships and submarines in the past five years, four to five times as many as the U.S. had in the western Pacific. The mainland Chinese churned out more than 100 advanced fighter jets a year and deployed space weapons and missiles so precise they could strike Taiwan, U.S. Navy ships and its bases in Japan, South Korea and Guam.

“Military superiority will sooner or later tempt China into using force against Taiwan, not as a last resort but because it can,” the article said, citing a view by American analysts.

A war initiated by Beijing would test Washington’s military might and its diplomatic and political resolve, the article said, and in war simulations of an attack on Taiwan, the Americans had started to lose.

However, the article went on to qualify that this analysis was overly pessimistic. Chinese President Xi Jinping had not yet begun preparing his own people for a war that would wreak great casualties and economic losses, the article noted.

The Chinese leader had instead been consolidating his power on prosperity, stability and China’s regional and global status as the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party looms this July.

“All that would be jeopardized by an attack whose result … comes with lots of uncertainty attached, not least over how to govern a rebellious Taiwan. Why would Mr Xi risk it all now, when China could wait until the odds are even better?” the article said.

It advised Taiwan to allot fewer resources to big, expensive weaponry that was vulnerable to Chinese missiles, and to focus on tactics and technologies which would frustrate an invasion.

Citing China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, the article suggested that the dispute be “left to wiser generations.”

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