ANALYSIS
Taiwan: the price of a balance no one wants to break
September 2026 — Taipei · Beijing · Washington
The facts
Since 1949, when the Kuomintang, defeated in the Chinese civil war, retreated to Taiwan, the island has never been governed by the People's Republic of China. UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971, which gave Beijing China's seat at the United Nations, does not mention Taiwan — yet the UN Secretariat has in practice treated it as “a province of China,” excluding it from the UN, WHO, ICAO and Interpol. In 2005 Beijing made the use of force in the event of formal Taiwanese independence a matter of law.
Since 2022, what several observers call the “Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis” has been underway. In 2026 Chinese pressure changed shape more than intensity: during the May Trump-Xi summit, daily air sorties fell to an average of 3 (against 7.5 for the rest of the half-year), but from June the China Coast Guard began permanently patrolling Taiwan's eastern waters for the first time, and in August Chinese vessels detected around the island hit a record 244 — nearly eight a day. In the same period Trump delayed signing a $14 billion arms deal already approved by Congress, calling it “a good bargaining chip” with Beijing: the backlog of undelivered US arms to Taiwan now stands at nearly $30 billion.
Legal comment
Beijing's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan remains a political position, not an established fact of international law. China's 2005 law threatening force in the event of secession is relevant under Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter — the same standard this site applies elsewhere.
And it is precisely by applying that same standard, without exceptions, that the picture gets more complicated: this site has already documented, in What Are We Rearming For, that in the same window of time the United States captured Venezuela's president by force, bombed Iran while declaring regime change as a goal, and threatened the military annexation of Greenland, a NATO ally's territory. To that trio is added a more recent pattern never covered here before: the unilateral renaming of shared geography — the Gulf of Mexico renamed the “Gulf of America” in 2025, Lake Ontario renamed “Lake America” in August 2026 amid a trade dispute with Canada. “We have a gulf and a lake, now we need an ocean,” Trump remarked.
Neither power holds up under a standard applied symmetrically. The arms sales to Taiwan, presented as pure defense, are the same ones Trump openly treats as a bargaining chip — not an automatic commitment.
Implications
Taiwan has never threatened anyone, does not rename other people's geography, does not capture heads of state. It is the only actor in this story that controls neither the pace of Chinese pressure nor America's negotiating priorities — and remains formally excluded from the multilateral system that should give it a seat at the table.
Sources: Al Jazeera · CRS/Congress.gov · CFR Global Conflict Tracker · The Diplomat · Taipei Times · AEI/ISW · CNN · NPR