US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Thursday spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, saying that the US was seeking stronger economic and military ties with India to balance an increasingly defiant China.
“The United States seeks constructive relations with China, but we will not shrink from China’s challenges to the rules-based order and where China subverts the sovereignty of neighboring countries and disadvantages the US and our friends,” he said.
The remarks were the culmination of a year fraught with conflict in the two nations’ relationship, starting with US President Donald Trump in April accusing China of “currency misalignment,” which he said was more significant than “currency manipulation” as a cause of trade deficits. In the following month, two Chinese aircraft conducted an unprofessional intercept of a US Navy surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea, and in July, Trump blasted China on Twitter for doing nothing about North Korea despite making “hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade” from the US.
Tillerson at the time said that relations between the two nations had reached a “pivot point,” while Orville Schell, the head of the center on US-China relations at New York’s Asia Society, said that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had missed the chance for convergence and that Trump was “starting to turn on him.”
In a hearing in Washington on Oct. 12, the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs unanimously passed the Taiwan Travel Act, which seeks to encourage visits between Taiwan and the US at all levels.
The move immediately drew criticism from China, with Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai (崔天凱) urging US leaders to use their power to block the bill. US Representative Eliot Engel, a ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, responded by saying that “the letter stood out because of its threatening tone” and that “it is interesting to me that they [China] now feel that they can get away with these kinds of threats and vague pressure tactics with the US Congress.”
Meanwhile, US military officials on Monday allegedly inspected the Republic of China (ROC) Navy’s fast combat support ship Panshi to evaluate its capacity for battlefield medical support. Sources said that the inspection was to prepare for potential conflict with North Korea, but the choice to work with the ROC Navy instead of China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy, which has five hospital ships, the largest of which houses 300 beds, is evidence of the deteriorating US-China relationship.
Taiwan will become increasingly important to the US, both militarily and politically. The US has a tradition of continuously shifting geopolitical alliances to maintain balances of power, and Taiwan will once again be important in facilitating this strategy as it applies to China.
The US maintained relations with Taiwan and India in the 1960s, under the administrations of presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, as a bulwark against communist China and Russia. However, under former US president Richard Nixon’s administration, the US switched alliances to Pakistan and China to counter the greater threat of Russia.
Relations between the US and Pakistan began to sour from the early 2000s with the US accusing Pakistan of harboring terrorists, and Pakistan accusing the US of doing nothing to control security in Afghanistan.
In seeking to strengthen ties with Taiwan and India, the Trump administration should remain cordial with Pakistan and China, while asserting its right to define its own foreign relations despite protests.
The US is highly unlikely to stop recognizing the PRC, but it might refuse China’s insistence on the so-called “one China” principle. Taiwan should stress with US lawmakers its intention to restructure its Constitution and to assert its sovereignty, whether under the ROC framework with a redefined national territory or as a newly named nation.
The US Senate’s passage of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which urges Taiwan’s inclusion in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise and allocates US$1 billion in military aid, marks yet another milestone in Washington’s growing support for Taipei. On paper, it reflects the steadiness of US commitment, but beneath this show of solidarity lies contradiction. While the US Congress builds a stable, bipartisan architecture of deterrence, US President Donald Trump repeatedly undercuts it through erratic decisions and transactional diplomacy. This dissonance not only weakens the US’ credibility abroad — it also fractures public trust within Taiwan. For decades,
In 1976, the Gang of Four was ousted. The Gang of Four was a leftist political group comprising Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members: Jiang Qing (江青), its leading figure and Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) last wife; Zhang Chunqiao (張春橋); Yao Wenyuan (姚文元); and Wang Hongwen (王洪文). The four wielded supreme power during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but when Mao died, they were overthrown and charged with crimes against China in what was in essence a political coup of the right against the left. The same type of thing might be happening again as the CCP has expelled nine top generals. Rather than a
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmaker Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) on Saturday won the party’s chairperson election with 65,122 votes, or 50.15 percent of the votes, becoming the second woman in the seat and the first to have switched allegiance from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to the KMT. Cheng, running for the top KMT position for the first time, had been termed a “dark horse,” while the biggest contender was former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), considered by many to represent the party’s establishment elite. Hau also has substantial experience in government and in the KMT. Cheng joined the Wild Lily Student
Taipei stands as one of the safest capital cities the world. Taiwan has exceptionally low crime rates — lower than many European nations — and is one of Asia’s leading democracies, respected for its rule of law and commitment to human rights. It is among the few Asian countries to have given legal effect to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Social Economic and Cultural Rights. Yet Taiwan continues to uphold the death penalty. This year, the government has taken a number of regressive steps: Executions have resumed, proposals for harsher prison sentences
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