The United States has yet to come up with a viable strategy to deal with multipolarity in international relations. How will this affect its confrontation with China around Taiwan?

Given that the U.S.-China rivalry has become a long game, what is key here is how and when the intensity of Washington’s stance toward Beijing ebbs and flows.

America’s hard-line shift emerged with the first Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy, which labeled China and Russia as “revisionist powers.” The following year, then-Vice President Mike Pence made a speech expressing disappointment in and strong opposition to China — reminiscent of wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech, which signaled the beginning of the Cold War.