Author's Preface
A transit is an astronomical phenomenon in which a celestial body, usually a planet, passes in front of a star such as the Sun from an observer's perspective. For example, a transit occurs when Mercury or Venus crosses the face of the Sun as seen from Earth.
In The Three-Body Problem, the transit carries a deeper metaphorical meaning. The planet inhabited by the Trisolaran civilization moves around three stars. Unpredictable, complex orbital changes periodically expose it to extreme heat or cold, making civilization's development uncertain and even causing recurring extinctions. This setting reveals a central idea:
When a small civilization is caught in a vortex of immense forces it cannot control, its fate is to adapt passively, without commanding the rules of its own survival.
Taiwan lies at the center of competition among three major global powers—China, the United States, and Russia. Like the planet of the three-body world, pulled by three stars and unable to maintain a stable orbit, it may be drawn into turmoil or crisis at any moment.
Unpredictable change: Taiwan cannot unilaterally determine its external environment, but its policies, industries, and social choices can still influence its future. Great-power relations constrain its room for maneuver; they do not eliminate its agency.
Recurring crises: just as Trisolaran civilization periodically faces destruction, Taiwan has repeatedly experienced changes of regime, economic fortunes, and international relations. Each time, it seems compelled to accept arrangements made by outside powers. Yet people on the island repeatedly forget this recurring fate and make short-sighted choices.
Chapter 1 | A World of Three Powers: China, the United States, Russia, and Taiwan's Fate
“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.”
—Romance of the Three Kingdoms
At last, world affairs are returning, in a startling way, to a classical logic. From the post-Cold War unipolar world, through the brief dream of multipolarity, to today's realities: within the military-security perspective of this essay, I take the United States, China, and Russia as the principal vertices of a triangular analysis. This is a choice of analytical frame, not a claim that other countries and regional powers have lost their agency. Yet however large their economies or advanced their military technologies, other countries struggle to escape the dominance of these three powers.
Today, the sounds of revelry and deal-making from the White House have awakened geopolitical scholars from the pastoral dream they carefully wove after the Cold War. So-called multipolarity was merely a temporary shift in the posture of immense power. The real players never changed.
A World of Just Three Powers
The Reshaping of Global Power: A New Romance of the Three Kingdoms
In this age of upheaval, Taiwan's fate is entwined with the global order. The Russia–Ukraine war sounded an alarm: a conflict once thought distant can erupt before our eyes. The Taiwan Strait, a narrow waterway long counted among the world's most dangerous potential flashpoints, is becoming the eye of the storm in US–China rivalry.
Nuclear deterrence is an important variable in this essay's analysis of great-power security, but economic strength, industry, alliances, and institutions also confer influence.
China, the United States, and Russia possess substantial strategic nuclear and conventional military capabilities. Yet their global deployments, expeditionary support, and alliance systems differ greatly; a single label of “full-spectrum” power cannot make them equivalent. By full-spectrum, I mean strategic nuclear arsenals, long-range power projection, worldwide military deployments, and independent defense industries. European economies are strong but remain dependent on the United States for security. India's military is rising but lacks global reach. Powers such as Japan, Germany, and Britain may have economic advantages, yet their military strategies remain constrained by other countries' policies.
Only China, the United States, and Russia can truly determine the direction of the international order.
During the Cold War, US–Soviet competition created a bipolar world. Afterward, the United States briefly regarded itself as the sole global superpower. China's economic rise and Russia's militaristic return have produced a new configuration of three powers. This is the realist judgment adopted here: the United States faces stronger competitive constraints and cannot determine every international outcome on its own.
Unlike the US–Soviet confrontation, however, today's world resembles a chessboard of shifting alignments. Russia stands alongside China geopolitically, and their relationship deepened after the war in Ukraine. Yet China and the United States remain interdependent in certain areas of economic and technological competition. The world is no longer a simple bipolar confrontation, but a continually adjusting three-body problem.
Taiwan stands at the intersection of these three suns.
Taiwan's Geopolitical Predicament: An Unresolved Legacy of the Cold War
Taiwan's special position is both a historical contingency and a geopolitical consequence. During the Cold War, it served as an important American bulwark against mainland China. Since then, US–Taiwan relations have undergone a subtle shift from strategic ambiguity toward a recent, gradual clarification. Washington maintains the Taiwan Relations Act while steadily strengthening military cooperation with Taiwan, yet has not crossed the red line of recognizing Taiwanese independence. For the United States, Taiwan is an important part of its Indo-Pacific strategy, but Washington does not wish to become directly involved in a cross-strait war. The geographic, military, and alliance conditions of Taiwan and Ukraine differ; one cannot simply apply the same trajectory of war to both.
Geography determines Taiwan's role. At the center of the first island chain, it can militarily constrain the Chinese navy's access to the open sea. Economically, it holds the world's most advanced chipmaking capabilities. Its distinctive value far exceeds the scale of its population of 23 million. For Beijing, Taiwan is central to national unification; for Washington, it is an important piece in containing Chinese influence.
Yet when the game becomes extraordinarily complex, the pieces are in the greatest danger.
Taiwan is no longer merely a matter of China's internal affairs; it has become a variable in the global strategic balance. The United States values Taiwan in its Indo-Pacific strategy, but whether it would intervene militarily in the future cannot be treated as settled. Mainland China regards Taiwan as a nonnegotiable part of unification and will not accept outside intervention. Both sides' bottom lines run along the red lines.
This recalls Poland's predicament before the Second World War. In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in succession and partitioned it. Battlefield defeat did not end Polish resistance, nor can it be reduced to the claim that a country completely vanished after a fixed number of days. Could Taiwan face a similar fate?
Lessons from the War in Ukraine: What Can Taiwan Learn?
Do not become a pawn. This answer must be stated loudly so readers do not miss the central point.
War broke out in Ukraine in 2022. Early in the conflict, a popular question circulated internationally: “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow?” But can that war really provide a template for the Taiwan Strait? Several points deserve reflection.
1. The United States will not send troops unconditionally.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed for direct NATO military intervention, the United States chose to provide aid rather than send troops into combat. This is one possible American approach to the Taiwan Strait: military assistance and sanctions, without direct deployment.
2. Taiwan's economic and strategic value is greater, but so are the risks.
Ukraine has abundant agricultural and mineral resources. Taiwan's strategic resource is TSMC. A conflict in the Taiwan Strait would severely disrupt the global chip supply chain, making other countries more reluctant to see war break out. Yet that very economic value could also make Taiwan a focus of competition.
3. External commitments are not dependable guarantees.
Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine received security assurances from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia in connection with its accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state. France was not a signatory. These assurances were not a collective-defense treaty requiring automatic military intervention. And the result? When war broke out, the commitments proved as ineffective as scraps of paper. Taiwan lacks Ukraine's strategic depth. If conflict erupts, how long could its so-called security guarantees last?
Two Possible Futures: Taiwan's Choice
Taiwan's future strategic choices will determine whether it can secure a place in a turbulent international environment rather than become a casualty of great-power rivalry. Historical experience suggests two broad paths to survival.
1. Join an Empire, Shape Its Core: Use Distinctive Strengths to Become an Engine of Great-Power Success
Within a world of great-power systems, Taiwan could stop positioning itself outside the international power structure and actively use its high-tech industries, military-strategic location, and regional influence to become a valuable participant in great-power competition rather than a passive pawn.
Postwar Britain and the American System
After the Second World War, Britain lost its empire. Yet by participating deeply in the US-led global order, it retained its position as a financial center and a voice in important international affairs. During the Cold War, it became a major NATO member, played significant roles in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, and influenced key American decisions. Following this model, Taiwan could bind its technological, military, and diplomatic capital closely to a major power in exchange for greater political security.
Taiwan's Practical Challenge
Does Taiwan possess enough industrial and strategic influence to secure genuine decision-making power within a great-power system, rather than merely become a dependent? If its politics remain captive to short-term electoral incentives and lack long-range strategic planning, it may become an imperial asset rather than a player directing the game.
Most importantly, can Taiwan's existing political and cultural institutions produce leaders with a long-term international strategic vision?
2. Navigate the Chessboard to Survive: Singapore's Model or North Korean Deference to Great Powers
Another path would be an exceptionally flexible foreign policy, moving adroitly among major powers to preserve room for survival while maintaining a degree of autonomy.
Singapore's Multilateral Balancing
The core of Singapore's model is deep economic integration with globalization as a center of international trade and finance, combined with a carefully balanced foreign policy that avoids simply choosing a side in US–China competition. Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasizes judgments based on long-term national interests and principles, rather than neutrality for its own sake or equal distance from great powers. This approach depends on credibility and may require paying a price for particular positions. Singapore maintains close relations with the United States, China, India, and others without becoming wholly dependent on any one of them.
North Korea's Accommodation of Great Powers: The Other Extreme
North Korea's approach is another survival strategy worth analyzing. It exploits differences among the United States, China, and Russia, using nuclear deterrence and diplomatic maneuvering to induce continuing assistance and protect itself from absorption. Taiwan would struggle to reproduce this strategy because it lacks North Korea's bargaining chips. Without nuclear weapons as a deterrent, political maneuvering alone is unlikely to secure lasting strategic safety. If Taiwan cannot become a precise balancer in Singapore's mold, yet also loses its strategic initiative, it risks becoming a North Korea without nuclear weapons—its fate entirely arranged by great powers.
Can Taiwan reproduce this model? Or will it become a North Korea without nuclear weapons, ultimately losing all strategic initiative?
The Limits of Taiwan's Politics: Short Horizons and a Lack of International Vision
Neither becoming an engine of great-power competition nor maintaining a dynamic balance is a simple choice. Taiwan's present political culture may struggle to support either. Its politicians are accustomed to short-term electoral politics rather than building a long-term national strategy. Their thinking focuses more on manipulating opinion within the island than on securing a genuine foothold in the international order.
Taiwan's leaders appear better at stirring national sentiment through the media than at developing strategies that stand up in the real world. Historically, small countries either integrated into great-power systems or became kingdoms in the gaps between empires. Yet Taiwan's politics lack a great-power-level strategic vision and remain trapped in a simplistic logic of taking sides, unable to grasp the real meaning of balanced diplomacy. Singapore might offer a possible model, but Taiwan's political arena has cultivated electoral fighters with short-term goals rather than genuine realists. They see immediate political points, not the art of diplomacy.
For Taiwan to survive, someone must break out of the island's political cycle and place its future on the global chessboard. Do its politicians have that breadth of vision, or will they remain absorbed in one short-sighted electoral contest after another?
Conclusion: The Game Is Unsettled, but Taiwan Cannot Remain a Pawn
The world has entered a new cycle of great-power competition, with Taiwan at its center. Taiwan today closely resembles the countries that historically stood between major powers: their fates were often decided by others unless they had the wisdom to choose a path of their own.
The game is not settled, but Taiwan cannot merely be a pawn. It needs more than promises from allies; it needs strategic vision and judgment of its own. This three-power contest is only beginning, and Taiwan's fate remains unresolved.
References
United Nations Treaty Collection, Memorandum on security assurances in connection with Ukraine's accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, December 5, 1994. https://treaties.un.org/Pages/showDetails.aspx?objid=0800000280401fbb