Taiwan is being held up as a model for how democracies can resist authoritarian pressure, a positive signal for Taiwan ahead of a US-China summit that is expected to change little for the island.

• Trump and Xi are set to meet in Washington, but no major breakthrough is expected and US policy on Taiwan should stay as it is.
• Both leaders are boxed in by their own domestic and foreign pressures, so neither is likely to shift on key issues like the Taiwan Strait.
• China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are cooperating more closely, turning separate regional conflicts into one linked threat stretching from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific.
• Authoritarian states are using generative AI and large language models to scale up infiltration and disinformation aimed at open societies.
• Taiwan's decentralized, bottom-up civil defense, seen in its recent disaster drills, echoes Ukraine's adaptive resistance against Russia and gives it hard-won experience most countries lack.

Outlook: The US-China summit is likely to leave the Taiwan status quo untouched, while Taiwan's resilience playbook gains weight as a reference for other democracies facing Chinese and Russian pressure.