"Bound to Lead: US-Taiwan Relations, Security Networks, and The Future of AUKUS" - by CWP alum Christina Lai

September 05, 2023
US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the AUKUS meeting in San Diego, California, on 13 March 2023

In 2021 the US, UK, and Australia established a trilateral security partnership known as AUKUS. This new security arrangement carries strategic implications for Taiwan's national security and prospects for regional order in Asia. It also leads to empirical puzzles: how will members of multiple alliances respond to rising threats? Under what conditions can a patron state avoid unwanted entrapment and imperial overstretch?

This article contributes to existing scholarship in US foreign policy and alliance management in Asia. It offers concrete thoughts on how a US policy of strategic clarity toward Taiwan and its contingency would enhance AUKUS's resilience, while US allies in Asia and Europe could maintain a collective stance of strategic ambiguity that would lessen internal tensions among the member states. Such an arrangement could not only help stabilize Asia's regional order, but also secure Taiwan's autonomy against Beijing's forced reunification.

Bound to Lead: US-Taiwan Relations, Security Networks, and The Future of AUKUS - Christina Lai

https://doi.org/10.1177/002070202311977

Christina Lai is an associate research fellow in the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She is interested in U.S.-China Relations, Chinese Foreign Policy, East Asian politics, and Qualitative Research Methods. Her works have appeared in the Politics, International Politics, Political Science, Journal of Contemporary China, Pacific Review, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Asian Survey, and Asian Security.

Photo Credit: 

CHRISTINA LAI