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It’s no secret by now that Joe Biden’s presidency has ushered in a more unstable geopolitical environment. From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, the lack of effective and competent U.S. leadership has given America’s worst adversaries the confidence to act upon their destabilizing agendas — chief among them being Red China.

Throughout the past four years, the Middle Kingdom has significantly upped its aggressive behavior toward the U.S. and its allies in the Indo-Pacific. This has notably included deploying hostile military exercises and other “gray zone” tactics against Taiwan, which Beijing views as Chinese territory and has threatened to take by force, if necessary.

On Friday, Taiwanese authorities reported that a Chinese vessel cut an undersea internet cable connected to the island, a maneuver used by the communist nation in the Baltic Sea in November. According to The Wall Street Journal, the apparent act of sabotage caused “only minimal disruption of service but [sent] a message about the vulnerability of the island and its internet.”

The incident occurred days before Taiwan’s National Security Bureau revealed the island received double the number of cyberattacks from last year, averaging 2.4 million attacks per day. Most of these attacks, the bureau noted, came from China.

[READ: The Biden-Harris China Policy Has Been A Complete Failure]

With Biden riding off disgracefully into the sunset, it’ll be up to President-elect Donald Trump to grapple with the increasingly unstable situation in the Taiwan Strait. While restoring efficiency and lethality to America’s military remains paramount, there a number of actions the incoming commander-in-chief can take to deter China from launching a military offensive against the island nation.

“If we don’t get this right, Chinese socialism will be on the ascendancy throughout the world,” Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow for The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Security, told The Federalist.

The Blueprint to Prevent Bloodshed

During his first term, Trump and his administration were incredibly effective at establishing peace in geopolitical hotspots throughout the world. According to Sadler, the soon-to-be 47th president can maintain this trend in the Taiwan Strait by dissuading China from launching an invasion of Taiwan — and that means flexing America’s military muscle.

The Heritage senior fellow recommended the incoming administration take lessons from a major naval exercise orchestrated during the Cold War by John Lehman, President Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary. Known as Ocean Venture ’81, the demonstrations were conducted by the U.S. and its NATO allies in the Northern Atlantic to display the alliance’s military power and subsequently discourage Soviet aggression. Spanning 250 ships and more than 120,000 personnel, the operation is credited with successfully demonstrating NATO’s ability to move its ships “undetected into the Norwegian Sea and ‘win’ the Atlantic, controlling NATO’s northern flank in the North Atlantic without the Soviets’ being aware,” according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

According to Sadler, while any similar exercise undertaken by the U.S. and its regional allies in the Indo-Pacific wouldn’t look “exactly the same,” the Trump administration can “take a lot” of lessons from Ocean Venture’s success.

“The Soviets were not prepared for that, [and] it signaled that we were ready and willing to take risk and send our fleet into their so-called bastions,” Sadler said. “The message needs to be delivered that way [to China].”

The Navy veteran also advised the administration to carry out “fleet experiments” similar to those the U.S. military deployed in the 1930s “to perfect the type of war that it might have to fight.” Attributing such exercises to America’s success in the Pacific against Imperial Japan, Sadler argued the importance of conducting such exercises to prepare for potential future conflicts with China.

Beijing will “know that we’re sharpening our knife, and that will have a deterrent effect,” Sadler said. “The goal is to deter China, but it’s also to buy President Trump time to make more concerted, deliberate decisions, to take the strategic initiative away from the Chinese — not only in the military [arena], but in the economic and diplomatic arena[s].”

Sadler has previously warned about the need for America to substantially invest in its naval and shipbuilding capabilities to compete with growing maritime powers like China, which boasts the largest navy in the world. Conversely, the size of the U.S. naval fleet has shrunk considerably since the end of the Cold War, putting U.S. maritime dominance and security in jeopardy.

Speaking of the China-Taiwan conflict and geopolitics more broadly, Will Thibeau, director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute, told The Federalist the biggest challenge for the U.S. military moving forward will be managing squabbles across multiple theaters of engagement. He specially noted how the military “is bound by the reality that they cannot fight and be everywhere at once,” and that U.S. foreign policy “has not caught up with that reality.”

“The greatest challenge is to deter multiple, potentially existential threats to the American way of life without being in a position to commit military resources in the same way for each issue,” Thibeau said. “The threat is the assumption that the way that the military has done business for decades is going to be the way that they can continue to do business. It’s not, and we need to change if we’re going to compete on the world stage.”

To read more about the biggest military issues facing the incoming Trump administration, see here.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood