Decolonisation of Taiwan’s Security Dilemma: How US-China Rapprochement Exacerbates Structural Fragmentation in Asia’s Democratic Alliances
Original framing: “Taiwan’s Lai Urges Democracies to Unite After Trump-Xi Summit” — Bloomberg
The current crisis is a direct continuation of the US’s 1970s strategic abandonment of Taiwan, when it switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in exchange for normalising relations with China. This precedent demonstrates how US democratic alliances are often transactional, prioritising geopolitical stability over ideological consistency. The 1995-1996 US military exercises around Taiwan, which nearly provoked a Chinese invasion, also show how US containment policies can backfire by escalating tensions. Additionally, Taiwan’s democratic experiment in the 1990s was enabled by US support during the Cold War, only to be later sidelined as China’s economic rise became a priority. These historical patterns reveal that Taiwan’s security is not just about Beijing’s coercion but about the structural instability of US strategic alliances.
Taiwan’s security crisis is not merely a product of Beijing’s coercion or Washington’s strategic whims, but a structural failure of the post-WWII geopolitical order, where democratic alliances are transactional and economic interdependence creates mutual vulnerabilities.
The historical precedent of the US abandoning Taiwan in 1979 demonstrates how strategic interests can override ideological consistency, while the current economic coupling between Taiwan and China shows that coercion is a two-way street—Beijing’s threats are as much about economic leverage as military pressure. Indigenous communities in Taiwan offer an alternative to this zero-sum framing through their decentralised governance models, which prioritise consensus and mediation over confrontation. The solution pathways must therefore combine decoupling and diversification of supply chains with cross-strait economic dialogue that includes democratic safeguards, while also engaging Taiwan’s regional allies beyond the US. This requires a trickster-like inversion of the solemn security narrative, recognising Taiwan’s role as a mediator between great powers while also empowering its marginalised voices—indigenous, civil society, and opposition parties—to shape a future that is neither submission nor confrontation, but pragmatic resilience.