Has a porcupine called Ukraine saved the world?

Picture this view from Taiwan’s Taichung City in April 2025: Hundreds of Chinese warships emerge from the horizon with hundreds of warplanes in the skies above them. And the missiles arrive soon after from Kaohsiung in the south to Taipei in the north of the tiny island.

China ended up failing to conquer Taiwan but the US and its allies suffers tens of thousands of casualties and the devastation of Taiwan’s economy. The Chinese also lose heavily and Chinese Communist Party rule is destabilized.

Without the global factory of China and the loss of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, the world falls into a deep recession plunging hundreds of millions of people from Nigeria to India into prolonged poverty.

But thanks to the people of Ukraine, the Chinese invasion of Taiwan never happened.

The way in which tiny Ukraine fought and beat the invading Russians made the Chinese realize the enormous cost they would pay for an inevitable defeat at the hands of Taiwan and its US, Japanese and Australian allies.

Ukraine eventually defeated Russia by the sustained use of the Porcupine Strategy — defeating a predator bigger than itself by using widely dispersed smaller weaponry in the same way that the tiny porcupine defends itself by raising its needle-like quills when confronted by a natural enemy.

Most importantly, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership saw the overthrow of Putin in late 2024 and realized that the price of an invasion of Taiwan in blood and treasure might also include the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party.

Victory for Ukraine ended up saving the world, all thanks to the pluckiest porcupine in the world.