China has not invaded yet
Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump has threatened to leave NATO should he become US president. What does this mean for the day-to-day lives of ordinary people living in Taiwan? It probably means very little.
Russia invaded and currently occupies Crimea. Very little has changed here. In the past decade Russia invaded Georgia. They currently still occupy 20 percent of Georgia. Very little has changed here.
What if Trump as US president reduces the US military presence in the Pacific? It seems that very little would change in Taiwan.
Yes, China is building military bases. That does not mean it will invade. China has had missiles pointed at Taiwan for more than 50 years, but it has never used them. Taiwan has a DPP president. China has not invaded. In the year 2000 Taiwan elected its first DPP president. China did not invade.
In 1996 Taiwan re-elected Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) after he said Taiwan and China had a special state-to-state relationship. China did not invade. Both Taiwan and China have prospered economically under the “status quo” which has existed for more than 50 years. There is no economic motivation for China to invade Taiwan.
Andres Chang
Taipei
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers