Before the October summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Busan, South Korea, China’s President Xi Jinping was reportedly “chasing his ultimate prize”: to press Trump to formally announce his opposition to Taiwan independence. Despite his professed admiration for powerful authoritarians, Trump declined to grant Xi’s wish. 

Although the second Trump White House has, thus far, stayed low-key on Taiwan to avoid derailing trade negotiations with Beijing, the administration’s latest National Security Strategy (NSS) is notable for failing to reiterate the United States’ “One China” policy, an anomaly from previous NSS papers – even the one released by the first Trump administration in 2017. This deviation may suggest Washington’s tacit move away from a half-century old declaratory formula that has governed the tenuous Taiwan Strait equilibrium since the Nixon-Kissinger era. 

This may be Trump’s clearest signal yet to Xi about U.S. relations with Taiwan.  

Between Competition and Accommodation

Since his second inauguration, Trump’s nonchalance on the United States’ security commitments to allies and partners has been consistently observed. He appears to be more interested in reaching some type of “great power concert”  with China’s Xi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. This arrangement calls for Washington to treat strong autocracies not merely as peer competitors but as working partners to preserve order and stability in their respective regions or spheres of influence. 

The NSS clearly advocates a “predisposition to non-interventionism” guided by “flexible realism” in which U.S. foreign policy would act pragmatically based on “what is possible and desirable.” The “timeless truth” of great power politics in international relations requires the United States to maintain good relations with other great powers to address challenges and threats to their common interests. Under the NSS, the post-Cold War endeavors of promoting democratic values and institutions universally should be curbed while U.S. military alliances are expected to assume primary responsibility for their own defense, with more spending and contributions to rectify the “enormous imbalances accrued over decades” at the expense of the United States. 

Unlike the 2017 NSS from Trump’s first term and the

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