The Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995-96 was not an accident. It should be examined in the broad framework of post-Cold War international politics, in which the United States, China and Taiwan, in the process of bargaining over Cold War dividends and redefining their positions in the new strategic structure emerging in the Asia Pacific, had unavoidably come into conflict.

Lee Teng-hui's United States visit was obviously not simply a personal trip. It reflected Taiwan's intensified effort to change the status quo in the strategic structure in the Asia Pacific that had been in place for the previous two decades during the Cold War. Taiwan felt that it had been deprived of its former international status as member of the United Nations, as well as diplomatic recognition by the United States and most other countries, because of U.S. efforts to seek China's strategic support at the expense of Taiwan. The collapse of communism in Europe and the former Soviet Union dramatically reduced China's strategic weight in the eyes of the United States and encouraged Taiwan's eagerness to redress what it perceived to be the wrong it had suffered during the Cold War.

To China, Taiwan's efforts posed a serious threat not only to stable China–United States relations but also to the established strategic structure in the Asia Pacific, which already accepted the “one China” principle, a condition China insisted on for every country wanting to establish diplomatic relations with it. Taiwan's efforts were also a serious threat to China's vision of the future strategic structure in the Asia Pacific which, as China firmly demanded, should not go against the “one China” principle.

China also wanted to reap dividends from the Cold War. As a matter of fact, China had played a significant role in containing Soviet expansion and in its collapse. In hindsight, without China's de facto strategic alliance with the United States and its efforts in forming an international anti-hegemonic united front in the 1970s–80s, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed so easily.