China has long used coercion short of war in a bid to make Taiwan fold without a fight, while also readying a military hammer to crush that island democracy if required. Until fairly recently, that strategy was mostly backfiring, by strengthening Taiwan’s will to resist forced unification, while also strengthening its ties to the US. But today, cracks in Taiwan’s morale—and in its relationship with Washington—are starting to show.

I recently traveled to Taiwan, for conversations with government officials, political figures, and analysts, to better understand how that country is navigating a tricky, three-way dynamic with Washington and Beijing. I came away with a strong sense that Taiwan and the US are reaching a crucial inflection point — one that could produce a stronger, more durable relationship, or bring on a destructive crisis.

American actions over the past year have sown uncertainty and anxiety in a government that relies heavily on US strength. Taiwan, for its part, has been tied in knots politically just when unity and urgency are imperative.

The upshot is a knotty tangle of issues — pertaining to trade, defense spending and US President Donald Trump’s negotiations with China — that threatens to destabilize the US-Taiwan relationship, just as Beijing is ramping up its efforts to destabilize Taiwan. The next few months will be critical if Washington and Taipei are to avoid an ugly turn that could ultimately jeopardize Taiwan’s survival and America’s strategic position.


It’s Not Just TSMC
These days, Americans often think of Taiwan as a democratic success story or a semiconductor superpower. It’s both of those things, and yet Taiwan’s importance is geostrategic at its core.

Glance at a map of the Western Pacific. You’ll see that Taiwan controls access to a long, economically valuable stretch of China’s coastline. It is positioned between the two great inner seas of East Asia, guarding the East China Sea from the south and the South China Sea from the north.

Taiwan also sits right in the middle of the First Island Chain, which runs from Japan in the north to Indonesia in the south. In friendly hands, it connects a cordon of features that constrains China’s maritime power. In Chinese hands, it could be used to threaten the Philippines and Japan and rupture the US security system in the Western Pacific.

For Beijing, then, Taiwan is more than a symbol of the so-called Century of Humiliation, when China was carved up by foreign powers. It is not simply an unresolved legacy of the Chinese civil war, where the losing Nationalist side fled to safety. Taiwan is the key to ruling the vital waters off China’s coastline and breaking out into the open ocean beyond.

An American-backed Taiwan, one Chinese analyst has argued, serves as a “lock around the neck of a great dragon.” Beijing has developed a multipronged strategy for taking Taiwan down.

China’s Multipronged Strategy
Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s first preference is to win without a devastating, unpredictable war; his method is encompassing, steadily escalating coercion. Chinese military exercises squeeze Taiwan physically, slicing away at its sovereignty, exhausting its military, and advertising its susceptibility to invasion or blockade.

To drive home Taiwan’s seclusion, Beijing has cut undersea cables that link that island to the outside world. Constant Chinese cyberattacks, disinformation and political meddling roil Taiwanese society. Pressure on Taiwan’s foreign relationships, and its membership in international organizations, constrict the island’s diplomatic space.

This is a classic “Anaconda strategy,” meant to get progressively tighter until Taiwan yields. Isolation and demoralization will ultimately produce capitulation, the thinking goes.

China is simultaneously preparing more decisive options. Thirty years ago, American strategists joked that it would take a “million man swim” for a bloated, antiquated People’s Liberation Army to cross the strait. Now, China boasts a modernized military that is continually improving its ability to blockade or quarantine Taiwan. Beijing has invested massively in missiles and aircraft needed to bombard Taiwan; airborne and amphibious capabilities needed to invade it; and a host of weapons needed to keep the US from coming to its defense.

This buildup gives Beijing a backup plan in case coercion fails. Yet it is also meant to support that coercion strategy — by creating a sense, in Taiwan, that Chinese power is overwhelming; fostering a belief, in the US, that intervention is just too costly; and thereby convincing the people of Taiwan, someday, that their best option is to give up without a fight.

Is the US Dependable?
The Chinese buildup has certainly fueled fears that war is coming. In August 2022, just after Beijing responded to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan with demonstrations of military fury, one US official told me he worried that America and China would be at war in the next five years. But until recently, Xi’s strategy wasn’t demoralizing or isolating Taiwan. It was mostly having the opposite effect.

Chinese pressure was hardening Taiwanese resistance to unification by showing just how much the population had to lose if it came under an aggressive tyranny’s control. The Democratic Progressive Party, the more diplomatically assertive of Taiwan’s two major parties, won three straight presidential elections from 2016 to 2024 — a first in the country’s history — relegating the more accommodationist Kuomintang to the opposition. Polling showed that the population was growing more skeptical of an eventual tie-up with Beijing (even as a strong majority also opposed formal independence); more likely to consider themselves Taiwanese rather than Chinese; and more willing to defend the island’s freedom.

The Taiwanese government decisively reversed a long downturn in defense spending. It adopted a smart, asymmetric strategy meant to use lots of small, relatively cheap weapons — mobile missiles, sea mines, drones — to inflict high costs on a Chinese invasion force until American help arrived. That help seemed ever more likely to come in a crisis (even though Washington technically declines to say what it will do if Taiwan is attacked) because the relationship with the US and other key countries was getting tighter.

Trump’s first administration deserves real credit. Trump himself was always ambivalent about the US commitment to Taiwan. Nonetheless, his 2018 National Defense Strategy reoriented the US military toward defeating Chinese aggression in the Pacific after 15 years centered on killing terrorists and insurgents in the greater Middle East. His administration made record-breaking arms sales to Taiwan.

President Joe Biden increased the momentum. He explicitly pledged, several times, to come to Taiwan’s defense if war erupted (even as his policy of refraining from directly intervening in Ukraine raised questions about whether he really meant it). His administration worked to provide Taiwan with arms taken directly from US stockpiles.

Perhaps most important, Biden’s team worked with friendly countries, in the region and beyond, to strengthen diplomatic support for Taipei. It began cobbling together a coalition — anchored by the US, Japan and Australia — that might fight to defend Taiwan in a war.

Back then, my concern was that all the ways in which Xi’s coercion strategy was failing might drive him to lash out militarily instead. But the situation has lately been evolving, due to developments in the US and Taiwan.

And Then Came Trump’s Tariffs
Trump’s record, in the first term, created a widespread impression that his second presidency would be just as hawkish toward China and just as helpful to Taiwan. But the record, so far, has been a mix of constructive policies along with initiatives that have thrown Taiwan and its president, Lai Ching-te, badly off balance.

On the plus side, Trump’s Pentagon has tried to put the US on something closer to a war footing when it comes to making munitions, and to slash through bureaucratic inertia that hinders America’s ability to prepare for a Pacific fight. The top Pentagon policy official, Elbridge Colby, has long advocated a laser-like focus on deterring a Chinese invasion.

Trump has pushed ahead with important Biden-era policies, like the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, and the search for new basing options from the Philippines to the Central Pacific. He is, rightly, prodding allies and partners to get far more serious about their own defense. Yet Trump has also made moves that foster pervasive, palpable anxiety in Taiwan.

Taiwan wanted a free trade agreement with the US. Instead, it got slapped with high tariffs (initially 32%, now 20%) that make Taiwan’s officials feel that America doesn’t treat its friends much better than its enemies. The Pentagon has repeatedly demanded a level of military spending — 10% of GDP — that Taipei deems politically and economically impossible, especially given that deliveries of American weapons that Taiwan has tried to purchase are already delayed by months or years.

Taiwan’s leaders lament that the Pentagon seems solely focused on the invasion threat, rather than the gray-zone intimidation that erodes Taiwan’s sovereignty and batters its resolve every day. The combination of these policies has put the Lai government under great political pressure at a time when the president (who has also suffered some self-inflicted wounds over the past year) has little capital to spare.

Trump’s policy toward China hasn’t helped much. Over the summer, the White House discouraged Lai from visiting the US, which would have angered China. His administration reportedly paused some US arms deliveries, and downgraded unofficial defense talks, so as not to upset trade negotiations with Beijing.

Taiwan’s audible sigh of relief after Trump didn’t make concessions at its expense in his meeting with Xi last month simply showed just how unnerving the president’s policies had become. Uncertainty about US intentions, in turn, has revived a quiet debate about the wisdom of the asymmetric defense strategy: How can Taiwan adopt a posture that requires hunkering down and waiting for help that may not come?

Taipei’s Political Problems
The problems aren’t just made in America, of course: They come from Taiwan, as well. To its credit, Taiwan has been striving to strengthen its defenses. Its military exercises have become more ambitious and realistic; its government is reforming a conscription and reserves system that has been pretty much useless for years.

Taipei is importing lessons in how to fight subversion and disinformation from Russia’s European neighbors. Taiwanese military outlays are slated to rise above 3% of GDP next year; Lai’s government is soon to introduce a special military budget that could take the number above 5% by 2030.

Yet prospects for passage in the legislature are fraught because the political atmosphere is poisonous. The two main parties attack each other with the fury one might think they would reserve for foreign enemies. The KMT and its third-party ally, the Taiwan People’s Party, control a legislative majority and have often stymied Lai’s initiatives.

Taiwan’s political system may prove too fractured, too polarized, to deliver results when the island desperately needs them. At the same time, Lai’s tendency to push the line rhetorically in dealing with Beijing has annoyed some US policymakers, who fear he is inviting a crisis that could embroil America.

The US-Taiwan relationship underpins peace and stability in the Western Pacific. For months, it has been plagued by doubt and frustration on both sides.

Expanding the Defense Budget
This isn’t unprecedented, or even particularly unusual. Even the closest strategic partnerships hit bumps from time to time. The US-Taiwan relationship is inherently hard to manage, because the lack of official diplomatic ties makes even routine communication more challenging. Taiwan perpetually craves American reassurance, because it perpetually fears aggression from the hostile giant across the strait.

Crises are a normal feature of such a partnership, and it’s possible that all this turmoil could ultimately put the relationship on a firmer footing.

Taiwanese officials say they have put an attractive trade deal on Trump’s desk. They’re offering to make big purchases of US farm products and weapons, and big investments in US semiconductor production and other industries, in exchange for lower tariffs. Once that deal is done, Taiwan can claim that it is aiding America’s re-industrialization and building a more resilient free-world tech stack.

The DPP government knows that the special budget is a make-or-break moment for Taiwan: If it can win enough support among moderate KMT legislators, the country will be on the path to 5% military spending. That would make Taiwan an Indo-Pacific standout and ease doubts about its commitment to its own survival.

Lai, for his part, has recently toned down his rhetoric, less to appease Beijing than to reassure Washington. Trump, notably, has approved two arms sales totaling roughly $1 billion in the last two weeks, despite Beijing’s vocal displeasure. And if the US-China trade truce collapses sometime in the next year under the weight of an intensifying rivalry, a more hawkish mood in America might once again boost Taipei.

If this scenario materializes, Trump could claim credit for building a better partnership and a stronger Taiwan. But events could also take a more perilous path.

Beijing Has Supporters
After all, the special budget could fail. The new party chair of the Kuomintang, Cheng Li-wun, has said defense spending is already too high. She has railed against the DPP for allegedly fawning over Trump.

Cheng comes from the most China-friendly wing of the KMT and has mused about starting a direct dialogue with Xi. Early analysis hints that Chinese disinformation may have aided her surprise victory in the contest to lead her party last month. If the special budget stalls or is slashed by the legislature, America Firsters will point to Taiwan as a poster child for free riding.

That outcome would empower critics who don’t believe the US should defend Taiwan if it won’t defend itself, as well as those who are simply looking for a reason to cut the island loose. It would also feed a perception in Washington that one of Taiwan’s two major parties is just not serious about national security, which would create a toxic diplomatic dynamic if the KMT reclaims the presidency in 2028.

On the US side, there’s the danger that Trump might once again throttle support for Taiwan so as not to upset ties with China. One possibility is that Beijing will seek changes in US policy on cross-strait relations — for instance, a shift from “not supporting” to “opposing” Taiwan’s independence — at a follow-up summit with Trump next spring. Or Beijing could subtly tighten export controls on rare-earth minerals if Trump approves more arms packages or seals a trade deal with Taiwan.

China’s goal would be to freeze key elements of US-Taiwan relations, and to show that Trump is now subordinating his dealings with Taipei to his détente with Xi.

If this happened, it could well crater Taiwan’s confidence. There could emerge a vicious cycle in which leaders in Washington and Taipei lose faith in each other, just as Chinese pressure grows.

The result might not be immediate disaster or surrender. But the longer-term risks would rise considerably as Taiwan suffers just the demoralization Xi’s strategy is meant to sow.

Precarious Balance of Power
The neo-isolationist members of Trump’s coalition might welcome this: Washington’s ambiguous commitment to Taiwan is precisely the sort of arrangement they worry might drag the US into unwanted wars. But that’s the wrong way of looking at it.

Taiwan isn’t some international charity case. It anchors technological supply chains and the First Island Chain. It connects the northern and southern halves of America’s alliance system in the Western Pacific. Japanese leaders understand this: Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi recently announced that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would imperil her country’s vital interests. (In response, a Chinese diplomat threatened on social media to behead her, and Beijing stepped up its military pressure around the disputed Senkaku Islands.)

As mutually vexing as it can be, America’s ties to Taiwan have helped preserve the peace in the Taiwan Strait for many decades, while also preserving a balance of power that favors Washington and its democratic friends. A strong US-Taiwan relationship is a cornerstone of security in the world’s most vital region. The next few months could determine how strong that relationship will be in the years to come.