Systemic shifts: How US-Israel-Iran conflict exposes structural vulnerabilities in US-China-Taiwan power dynamics

Indigenous Taiwanese voices—particularly from the Austronesian majority—are erased in this framing, despite their deep historical ties to the land and distinct cultural identity that challenge both Chinese sovereignty claims and Western militarisation narratives. The Hoklo, Hakka, and indigenous peoples of Taiwan have long resisted assimilation, with movements like the 2014 Sunflower Movement demonstrating how grassroots mobilisation can shape geopolitical outcomes. Their perspectives highlight the land itself as a non-human actor in the conflict, with ecological degradation and militarised zones (e.g., Orchid Island) serving as silent witnesses to power struggles.

The Iran war’s parallels to historical conflicts like the 1956 Suez Crisis or the 1991 Gulf War reveal a pattern: asymmetrical actors (e.g., Iran, Vietnam) exploit Western overconfidence in conventional military superiority, while great powers underestimate the resilience of local resistance. China’s calculus on Taiwan must be situated within this broader history of imperial overreach, including the Opium Wars, the 1949 Civil War, and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, where military adventurism often backfired. The US-Israel-Iran dynamic also echoes Cold War proxy conflicts, where superpowers misread local actors’ agency, leading to prolonged stalemates.

In Confucian and Daoist traditions, conflict resolution emphasises harmony over dominance, with Sun Tzu’s *Art of War* advocating deception and indirect strategies over brute force—a framework that may inform China’s approach to Taiwan. Meanwhile, in the Global South, non-alignment movements (e.g., Bandung Conference) offer a model for navigating US-China tensions without succumbing to binary choices, as seen in countries like India or South Africa. Islamic geopolitical thought, which frames resistance to oppression as a moral duty, provides another lens to understand Iran’s actions, though this is rarely integrated into Western strategic analysis.

The US military’s overwhelming force in the Iran war is undermined by cognitive biases (e.g., overconfidence effect) and the fog of war, as documented in RAND Corporation studies on military miscalculations. Asymmetrical warfare research (e.g., Andrew Mack’s 1975 *Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars*) demonstrates that weaker actors often win by exploiting domestic political constraints and global public opinion, a dynamic visible in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The Iran war also highlights the role of cyber warfare and drone strikes, which shift the balance of power toward non-state actors—a trend China is already adapting to in its military modernisation.

Artistic expressions from the region, such as Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films (*A City of Sadness*) or Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad’s works, reveal the human cost of geopolitical games, framing conflict as a violation of collective memory and cultural heritage. In Chinese martial arts traditions, the ideal warrior embodies both martial prowess and moral restraint, a contrast to the US military’s emphasis on technological dominance. Meanwhile, Indigenous Taiwanese oral histories, such as those of the Amis people, frame the land as a living entity with agency, challenging the commodification of territory in geopolitical narratives.

Scenario modelling suggests that a US-China conflict over Taiwan would likely trigger a prolonged economic decoupling, with semiconductor supply chains fragmenting and energy markets shifting toward Russia and the Global South. The Iran war’s disruption of global oil flows could accelerate China’s pivot to renewable energy and its Belt and Road Initiative in the Middle East, while also intensifying cyber warfare and AI-driven disinformation campaigns. Long-term, the US’s declining relative power may force a multipolar world order, where Taiwan becomes a bargaining chip rather than a flashpoint, as seen in historical precedents like the 1972 Nixon-Mao rapprochement.

Taiwanese civil society, particularly youth movements like the 2014 Sunflower Movement, has repeatedly demonstrated that military posturing is not the sole determinant of cross-strait relations, yet their voices are excluded from this analysis. Uyghur and Tibetan communities, whose homelands are militarised under China’s security state, offer critical perspectives on the human cost of great-power competition, but their narratives are suppressed in both Chinese and Western media. Global South nations, such as those in ASEAN, navigate US-China tensions through non-alignment, yet their agency is erased in favour of a binary US vs. China framing. The voices of Iranian civilians, whose lives are disrupted by sanctions and proxy wars, are similarly absent, reducing the conflict to a strategic chessboard.