The following is Rorry Daniel's op-ed in 9DashLine. Rorry is the Managing Director of the Asia Society Policy Institute.

The U.S. election results are clear: American voters have selected leadership that wants to minimise overseas conflicts and invest more at home while expecting other countries to contribute more to their own defence. These interests will, however, be pursued in a style that is tolerant of risk, willing to link issues together, particularly tough on China, and transactional with U.S. allies and partners. Taken as a whole, this mix leaves significant risk of crisis in the Taiwan Strait during the next four years, even as both Washington and Beijing seek to avoid outright conflict with each other.

The second Trump administration is approaching a particularly difficult moment for cross-Taiwan Strait relations. The security situation in and around the Taiwan Strait continues to deteriorate as China’s military modernises, giving it more options to pressure Taiwan through shows of force. As this force posture develops, U.S. and Taiwan defence planners are responding with more arms sales and pursuing asymmetric capabilities — all seen by Beijing as tacit support for what they view as Lai Ching-te’s independence agenda. Beijing’s refusal to talk to Taipei and a sense among Taiwan’s top leaders that there is little to gain through cross-Strait outreach foster a political environment in which Taiwan plays an outsized role in U.S.-China relations, and the security dilemma deepens.

For at least the next four years, downward pressure on the U.S.-China relationship will prevent a breakthrough in cross-Taiwan Strait relations. What is needed now is for Washington, Taipei and Beijing to maintain confidence that time is on their side and pathways to their policy goals remain open — even as uncertainty over U.S. policy rises.

Trump’s initial appointees and resolve on US-China relations

Appointments for the new Trump team suggest that the new administration may have contradictory attitudes regarding the U.S. policy toward Taiwan. Senator Marco Rubio, designee for Secretary of State, has been a staunch defender of Taiwan in Congress and extremely critical of Beijing’s human rights record. As recently as this August, he urged the international community to help Taiwan defend its sovereignty against the Chinese Communist Party. Incoming National Security Advisor, Senator Mike Waltz has publicly called for the U.S. to declare U.S. military support for Taiwan in a contingency, citing the failure of deterrence in Ukraine as a reason to move away from the policy of strategic ambiguity.

However, Trump himself has wavered on offering unconditional support and often promoted a transactional approach to Taiwan, signalling that Taiwan should pay more for its defence. Both Beijing and Taipei are also concerned that President-elect Trump might consider Taiwan a subordinate to broader U.S.-China relations and thus may use U.S. ties to Taiwan as a bargaining chip or a point of leverage. It also remains to be seen how the Trump administration’s trade policy will impact U.S. views of cross-Taiwan Strait tensions — early tariffs on Beijing could be expanded in a Taiwan contingency, but Trump also considers Taiwan’s semiconductor dominance a threat to U.S. economic prosperity and resilience.

Early interactions between Washington and Beijing will likely play a large role in how the Trump administration resolves these internal contradictions. Trump has threatened to slap 60 percent tariffs on Chinese imports immediately upon taking office (among other tariffs). At a time when the Chinese economy is suffering, this opening salvo in a resumed trade war may stiffen the resolve to stand firm against U.S. pressure. At a minimum, the aggressive approach leaves little room in Chinese domestic politics to tolerate pressure in other areas, such as Taiwan.

The key strategic question in U.S.-China relations that will impact Taiwan policy is whether Washington and Beijing can come to a modus operandi that allows issues to be compartmentalised, or at least assessed based on their risks and rewards rather than as part of the overarching calculus of strategic competition. The ability to delink Taiwan from other issues in the relationship would open space for continued dialogue and consultation that could create a no-surprises atmosphere in which the action-reaction cycle of the Taiwan security dilemma — where each side believes they are defending against aggression from the other side — could be paused long enough to foster measured responses to events and incidents.

However, Taiwan is one of the least separable issues at the forefront of U.S. and Chinese strategic assessments. Many areas of disagreement between the U.S. and China touch on issues essential to Taiwan. Competition over technology and values, U.S. regional force posture and its alliance network, China’s territorial integrity, military modernisation, global diplomatic pressure, and maritime territorial claims all cut through Taiwan and its outer-lying islands. Put simply, if Asia is a 3-D chessboard, Taiwan is all at once a king to protect, a pawn to deploy, a bishop or rook making its own complicated moves, and a trophy to be won.

Still, while both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping would never want to be seen as weak or overly accommodating of each other, neither feels confident of prevailing in a conflict. Beijing’s long-term policy objective with Taiwan remains “peaceful unification”, and the U.S. position similarly eschews the use of force or coercion to settle Taiwan’s political status. Moreover, Beijing would like to maintain focus on its domestic political economy, where it faces strong headwinds in moving from rapid economic growth to quality economic growth, and the American electorate is weary of overseas entanglements coming off the debacles of the global war on terror. Meanwhile, Beijing knows that while nationalism can support limited conflicts, there is no sense of how much violence the Chinese people can tolerate to sustain a protracted military campaign against Taiwan.

Key takeaways from Russia’s war in Ukraine

Alongside leadership and public sentiment, there are other key unanswerable questions about how each side would fare in an outright conflict. In fact, to make a good assessment of how a conflict would play out, both sides would need to be assured that they know the other’s rules and limits on how far such a conflict would spread — both in terms of geography and involvement of third parties, as well as with the suite of emerging technology and strategic tools that are presumably in development and deployment in space, cyber and other domains.

Russia’s war in Ukraine may be instructive in examining scenarios for a Taiwan conflict. First, Russia’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion was preceded by nearly a decade of probing the limits of Ukraine’s defences and Western support for Kyiv. This process built confidence in Moscow that the U.S. and the Europeans wouldn’t fully enter the conflict — an assumption held through events — but also built overconfidence that victory could be rapidly achieved, likely before the West’s economic leverage could cause serious pain to the Russian economy.

In short, Moscow underestimated how much risk and pain the U.S. and Europe would take to deny it an easy victory. At the same time, it overestimated just how easily that victory could be achieved. Miscalculation may have been exacerbated by skewed incentives in Russia’s political system to placate the whims of the leader by presenting favourable information and downplaying information that contradicted Putin’s views.

However, Moscow’s error was not fatal for two reasons. First, an assumption that the U.S. and Europe would be deterred from entering the conflict with their own troops proved correct. No matter how much the U.S. and Europe arm and provide material support for Ukraine, none of these countries have declared war on Russia on Kiev’s behalf and Russia has not crossed the ultimate red line of using nuclear weapons. This keeps conflict escalation manageable (though it may conversely draw out battlefield engagement if neither side can sustain a competitive advantage).

Second, a more multipolar global system provides Russia with options to keep its economy afloat despite extreme pressure from the West. Non-aligned countries, including China and India, but also large parts of the so-called Global South are not fully participating in the economic pressure campaign. Russian energy and food exports continue to find buyers. In this way, the conflict in Ukraine has both a ceiling — a threshold that won’t be exceeded — and a floor or a basis for the Russian state to rest without full economic, social or political collapse.

Currently, Washington, Beijing, and Taipei cannot be confident that a conflict over Taiwan will result in a floor or a ceiling. China’s economy remains heavily dependent on goods exports to developed countries, which could immediately cease in a contingency without enough available capacity in “friendly” countries to absorb the excess. China is quite dependent on energy and food imports, some or perhaps much of which can be disrupted by the U.S. global military presence. China’s options in a contingency might not deliver what it needs to the same degree as Russia’s did over the last few years.

Meanwhile, Washington sees its commitment to Taipei quite differently than its commitment to Ukraine or European defence, partially because it sees China’s goals as much more expansionist than Russia’s and because it believes China’s capabilities can support revisionism. This is partially structural — Europe has its own nuclear deterrent, while U.S. allies and partners in Asia are dependent on U.S. extended deterrence commitments for their survival. Moreover, the geography of the conflict could inform key decisions. The U.S. public is already on board with supporting Taipei through arms transfers, but without land borders, weapons deliveries may have to break through encirclement or blockade — an impossible task without direct military involvement. In short, Washington may feel it has no choice under its current security commitments but to maximally support Taiwan.

Looking ahead

These uncertainties are a limiting factor for conflict and are likely to persist throughout the next few years. However, the process of probing these uncertainties is already underway and likely to ramp up as U.S.-China relations deteriorate. With relatively risk-tolerant leaders in all three capitals, Taiwan is likely to be front and centre of the U.S.’ Asia risk assessments.

More public attention to Taiwan is not always helpful in maintaining peace and stability. The leaders have staked out stark red lines — and while there is little expectation that these positions will fundamentally change, there is also little trust that these positions will be respected by the other players. In this environment, high-level authoritative channels of communication are the best method to manage mistrust by ensuring that no leader is taken by surprise. If these channels are private and consistent, as between State Councillor Wang Yi and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in the Biden administration, they disincentivise overreactions on both sides. Likewise, quiet but robust unofficial interaction between the U.S. and Taiwan has maintained confidence that the U.S. position opposing the use of force has not changed.

However, Beijing and Taipei will need to find their own methodology for creating an environment of ‘no surprises’ with the Trump administration when much of the risk of surprise — and overreaction — comes from the president himself. The question ahead is whether this risk will limit the potential for crisis because of uncertainty over U.S. policy choices or create more opportunities for miscalculation. While much may depend on the specifics of events to come, avoiding conflict by muddling through some disruptive ups and downs is the most likely and reasonable path forward.