Description
The strategic relationship between the United States (US) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) continues to dominate the discourse of power politics in the twenty-first century. Over time, the strategic relationship between the two competing powers has changed from competitive cooperation to strategic rivalry, giving rise to the question of peaceful coexistence. Apart from the great power tussle, the picture is getting more complicated with the growing tension in the Indo-Pacific region, which gave the presence of middle powers like India, consolidating its strategic partnership with the US under the framework of Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD). Despite regional competition between New Delhi and Beijing has intensified, India does not follow in the exact footsteps of the US in countering the PRC. The complex triangular relations among the US, China, and India bring a set of challenges and opportunities for Asia's secondary powers like Taiwan in the era of multipolarity. This paper makes a noble contribution by bridging the US-China-India triangle with Taiwan's strategic navigation of asymmetry in the Indo-Pacific. Borrowing the idea from Putnam's two-level game, this paper instead argues to lever between hegemonic US and China rivalry and regional India-China competition; Taiwan's strategic navigation is based on a unique three-level interaction/ game (International-Regional-Domestic). This research uses the global polarity debate of international relations with the emergence of a multipolar world order system as a conceptual framework to unpack Taiwan's three-level game. As a flashpoint between the US-China competition and the improvement in India-Taiwan relations in the recent past, Taiwan is an ideal case amid this emerging strategic triangle. Twenty elite semi-structured interviews and government documents/ policy papers compose the qualitative data of this paper.
