The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has struck again. After years of successfully blocking arms appropriation bills in the legislature, the party has now managed to shoot down, before it could even take off, a venture that could have been of tremendous benefit to the nation's ability to defend itself.
As this newspaper has argued before, Taiwan Goal, the semi-private arms manufacturer at the heart of a recent controversy, could have provided the military with the means to develop weapons systems that would have best suited the nation's defense needs and allow it to circumvent many of the barriers to procurement that the nation faces because of its international isolation.
But as a result of the KMT's smear campaign and threat to launch an investigation should the company not be disbanded, that project is now dead.
This raises a number of issues about KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou's (
First, Ma argues that the "offensive defense" philosophy espoused by the Democratic Progressive Party administration -- in which, rather than taking place on Taiwan proper, battle is pushed "offshore" -- is counterproductive. Ma says that the KMT would instead work to strengthen the nation's command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities to ensure that a first strike would not cripple Taiwan's ability to defend itself.
While strengthening one's defenses is a sound strategy, reliance on that alone speaks of a lack of understanding of the concept of deterrence, which involves the threat of force to dissuade an opponent from launching an attack in the first place. This cannot exist if the strategy, as proposed by Ma, is one of homeland defense alone. In other words, deterrence is the promise of punitive action, not merely passive resistance. Security specialists are unanimous on this point: Taking the fight "offshore" is the wisest course for Taiwan.
Second, Ma's defense plan reiterates the need to obtain F-16C/Ds to modernize the Air Force. Again, this makes sense, but it is symptomatic of a policy of reliance on US systems that will be costlier than one of indigenous or semi-indigenous development. The dependence on US weapons is, at best, a short-term palliative and drains national resources that could be better spent elsewhere. One wonders, therefore, if the KMT perhaps does not stand to gain from ensuring that Taiwan continues to buy weapons from the US alone.
Taiwan Goal, while no panacea, would have been a step in the right direction, and unlike what some critics have argued, it would have tapped into the nation's world-class private technology industries -- with or without help from the government.
By shutting it down and by opposing a deterrence strategy, the KMT has demonstrated a total ignorance of what the cost of a Chinese invasion would be for Taiwan. By closing the door on new possibilities for weapons development and acquisition, the KMT has revealed an inability to move beyond the unhealthy reliance on the US as a patron for the nation's defenses, which also imposes a needless financial burden on the taxpayer.
Such an approach to defense could only have been dreamed up by a party that does not believe that China would resort to force to settle cross-strait tensions. But as we saw from the manner in which Taipei's envoys to Seoul were treated last week -- a delegation that included Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
Having lived through former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s tumultuous and scandal-ridden administration, the last place I had expected to come face-to-face with “Mr Brexit” was in a hotel ballroom in Taipei. Should I have been so surprised? Over the past few years, Taiwan has unfortunately become the destination of choice for washed-up Western politicians to turn up long after their political careers have ended, making grandiose speeches in exchange for extraordinarily large paychecks far exceeding the annual salary of all but the wealthiest of Taiwan’s business tycoons. Taiwan’s pursuit of bygone politicians with little to no influence in their home
In a recent essay, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” a former adviser to US President Donald Trump, Christian Whiton, accuses Taiwan of diplomatic incompetence — claiming Taipei failed to reach out to Trump, botched trade negotiations and mishandled its defense posture. Whiton’s narrative overlooks a fundamental truth: Taiwan was never in a position to “win” Trump’s favor in the first place. The playing field was asymmetrical from the outset, dominated by a transactional US president on one side and the looming threat of Chinese coercion on the other. From the outset of his second term, which began in January, Trump reaffirmed his
Despite calls to the contrary from their respective powerful neighbors, Taiwan and Somaliland continue to expand their relationship, endowing it with important new prospects. Fitting into this bigger picture is the historic Coast Guard Cooperation Agreement signed last month. The common goal is to move the already strong bilateral relationship toward operational cooperation, with significant and tangible mutual benefits to be observed. Essentially, the new agreement commits the parties to a course of conduct that is expressed in three fundamental activities: cooperation, intelligence sharing and technology transfer. This reflects the desire — shared by both nations — to achieve strategic results within
It is difficult not to agree with a few points stated by Christian Whiton in his article, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” and yet the main idea is flawed. I am a Polish journalist who considers Taiwan her second home. I am conservative, and I might disagree with some social changes being promoted in Taiwan right now, especially the push for progressiveness backed by leftists from the West — we need to clean up our mess before blaming the Taiwanese. However, I would never think that those issues should dominate the West’s judgement of Taiwan’s geopolitical importance. The question is not whether
RSS