In the 21st century, the international system has returned to a bipolar structure and is heading toward a new “Cold War” (Tunsjø, 2018; Ferguson, 2019; Doshi, 2021; Beckley, 2022; Lind, 2024). Countless news reports and commentaries discuss how policymakers in the White House are obsessed with containing China’s economic and technological power, and how Beijing is attempting to break through this containment or undermine American influence. Undoubtedly, the United States and China are already in a situation of mutual confrontation. Conflicts will only proliferate, and the chain reactions of this great power rivalry will destabilize global markets and significantly heighten unpredictability. We have entered an era defined by pervasive risk and crisis.

For states situated in the Asia-Pacific, the sustained expansion of Mainland China’s economic and military power has triggered a perilous logic of hegemonic transition, compelling a strategic response from the United States (Loke, 2021). To be sure, this pessimistic Thucydidean perspective has faced academic challenges (Hanania, 2021). However, considering that the combined aggregate power of the two contemporary titans—the U.S. and China—already far exceeds that of the U.S. and Soviet Union during the previous century, this article contends that the strategic context of the current Sino-American confrontation is significantly more volatile and complex than that of the Cold War (Krickovic & Jaeyoung, 2025). Consequently, several developments merit close attention: First, in today’s international system, states such as Brazil, India, and South Africa exercise greater autonomy and agency than they did during the Cold War. The alignment of these actors is steering an international system—physically bipolar in structure—toward a hybrid order that is institutionally multipolar; this order is expected to persist for the foreseeable future. Second, in the era of Trump 2.0, the United States has markedly marginalized the strategy of containing the Chinese Communist Party through partner alliances, shifting its focus instead to maximizing the reconstruction of American relative advantage on the global stage (Ryan & Burman, 2025). The instruments for achieving this include extracting tariffs from trading partners and emulating 19th-century Concert Diplomacy to constrain the “Axis of Upheaval.”

The pursuit of a hybrid order by middle powers, coupled with the United States’ dogged insistence on its own primacy, has ignited a new round of cooperation and conflict across various issues and spheres of influence. The volatile and complex nature of this shifting landscape has compressed the diplomatic maneuvering room for all American allies—including Taiwan. Constrained by the imperatives of both military and economic security, these actors find it increasingly untenable to avoid making a definitive choice in their foreign policy. However, a recent argument by Cheng Li-Wun in Foreign Affairs (March 3, 2026) posits that Taiwan doesn’t have to choose (Cheng, 2026), advocating for a policy through a series of ambiguous and self-contradictory claims. Such a proposal is deeply concerning, as it is highly likely to exacerbate Taiwan’s security risks and overgeneralize by treating Taiwan as equivalent to typical small states. Consequently, the article titled “Taiwan Doesn’t Have to Choose: Cross-Strait Peace Requires Working With Both Beijing and Washington”—while elegantly written—suffers from several logical fallacies and a misunderstanding of structural constraints from the perspective of International Relations (IR) theory. Survival is an extremely serious matter for a small state, because the international system is anarchic, meaning there is no higher authority or world government to call when a predator comes knocking at your door. Peace is not a normative end in itself; rather, it is a precarious epiphenomenon of the underlying balance of power. When great powers architect a regional order, they do so as a function of their own strategic interests, not out of altruism for small states. To conflate the tactical guarantees of a regional power with a durable security commitment is a profound strategic error. History remains a sprawling necropolis of small states that mistook the transient convenience of a great power for a permanent stability.

Why is the Proposition that “Taiwan Doesn’t Have to Choose” Flawed?

First, the title of Cheng’s article mentioned above may suffer from a clerical error or a conceptual misunderstanding. The countries capable of eschewing a definitive choice are not those like Taiwan, but rather a select few ones that—owing to their specific geographic advantage or unique economic status—are able to engage with the United States while simultaneously interacting with Beijing (Noakes & Tan, eds., 2023), all without ever being compelled by Taiwan to choose between these relationships. In fact, the analytical crux of ‘not having to choose’ should center on whether the ‘necessity’ of choosing exists at all, rather than focusing on the ‘object’ of that choice or whether one can select both sides (or neither). The prevailing discourse on small-state neutralism, exemplified by Cheng’s analysis, suffers from a fatal logical lacuna: it prescribes a policy of non-alignment without first interrogating the structural necessity of choice. In an anarchic system defined by intense polarization, the ‘necessity to choose’ is an exogenous constraint imposed by great power competition, not a subjective preference of the small state. Therefore, any argument advocating for the avoidance of alignment remains analytically void unless it can demonstrate that the systemic pressures demanding such a choice have been neutralized. If Cheng intends to effectively persuade readers that the necessity of choosing is nonexistent, the thrust of her argument must focus on the specific conditions under which it might become possible for Taiwan to avoid such a strategic........

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