Support for Taiwan’s future
Most people mellow over time, tempering whichever fires burned within them (revolutionary or counterrevolutionary) in their youth. These are fires that are soothed by ordinary things, family, career, education, competition, pleasure, pain, maturity, clarity and pedestrian lives.
Looking back, I feel I have come almost full circle, from revolutionary to revolutionary. This might sound like a contradiction, but remember that the circle begins and ends in the same place, and the distance from the edge of left to the edge of right is minuscule, so that in the end they almost merge. This is why sometimes politics creates strange bedfellows, since occasionally issues attract support from totally opposite sides.
I find myself angry most of the time at things one might consider unusual considering my mostly liberal background. While I despise evil regimes, like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — the people of China are victims of Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) treachery — North Korea, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, totalitarian Cuba, Venezuela’s “socialist” dictators, a host of barbarian Middle Eastern regimes, Iran, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, and a variety of other regimes and stateless actors, such as the Islamic State, Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, I also find myself despising with almost equal fervor leaders of democracies who fail to act, fail to confront these evils, except to stand on the side throwing pebbles at them.
Confrontation does not always solve problems and often creates more, yet doing nothing in the face of evil is evil itself. As Irish statesman Edmund Burke said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.”
I believe this describes US President Barack Obama, a visionary with a case of terminal hesitation, paralyzing propriety, timidity and overthinking, reducing greatness to mediocrity — in announcing opposition to evil, and then standing aside for others to act, he rendered the power of the world’s strongest democracy impotent, a fatal flaw of political correctness. And this is the crux of the problem.
Evil does not hesitate, unless it is to avoid its own destruction (lessons from Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu (孫子) about not facing a battle which cannot be won). Putin does not hesitate. Neither does North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, or Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), or the Islamic State for that matter.
I am not lauding them, because their decisiveness leads to horror, but I am criticizing the overly passive, the tendency of mature democracies and societies to turn a blind eye to treachery and evil in order to keep themselves safe and corpulent, or to please pacifists who clamor for liberal freedoms, but loathe the conflict necessary to achieve those freedoms.
Had pacifism or isolationism prevailed during World War II instead of heroism and decisiveness (while former British prime minister Winston Churchill was the primary opponent to the Nazi threat from its onset, former general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin’s opposition was for survival, but became opportunistic), then-US president Franklin Roosevelt needed to be dragged into a war far away, in Pearl Harbor which provided the impetus for the US to support the war; Japan’s fatal error. Germany and Japan would be leading a horrible version of the world, which would extend from China to Europe to the Americas.
However, since World War II and the inception of the UN, sitting on the sidelines has become the norm, and the UN has become a toothless fool when faced with infamy, such as China’s invasion of Tibet and the ensuing 50 years of cultural genocide, and China’s 60 years of enslavement of Chinese and suppression of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, or the rise and fall of Soviet Communism, and the rise of “Putinism” (witnessed in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria), and debacles in Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Cambodia; the list goes on. The UN should be called the “After the Fact Institution for Not Dealing with Anything Until After it is Too Late To Stop It.”
This leads me back to China, which during Obama’s eight years of isolationism (I say this because although Obama talks the talk, he most certainly does not walk the walk and his timidity and foolish red lines have only encouraged evil to flourish, because such regimes know there is no downside except economic tongue lashing — US$1.5 billion in cash on an airplane to Teheran as evidence) has become ever more aggressive and hegemonic, realizing the US under Obama might say much, but do little, the overflights in the South China Sea and patrols by US warships there notwithstanding.
The collateral damage affected by doing nothing are struggling fledgling democracies, like Taiwan, which looks to the US for its survival as such because no one else on Earth will protect them in the face of China, yet US presidential foreign policy for decades has been feeble and contradictory at best.
Some of this is the fault of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), because of the uncertainty of dealing with a Taiwan run by the KMT that has most of the time looked too much like the CCP’s little brother, as opposed to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the CCP’s greatest opponent. It is hard to trust the KMT with military secrets because it is just as likely that tomorrow eight KMT representatives will travel to China to give favors in exchange for economic tidbits. Who could trust such people?
The KMT cozied up to the US for its survival, hoping against hope that the CCP would perish and it would return to its beloved China to rule once again. It did not cozy up to the US because it loved democracy. More than 60 percent of the time it reigned over Taiwan it ran a totalitarian government rivaling China in its ruthlessness.
I spend time perusing the Taipei Times pages daily and reading news from around the world. I am looking for evidence that something will change, that the US will come to its senses and realize that a free and democratic Taiwan is its greatest ally in Asia, anathema to the CCP (which together with Putin’s Russia are perhaps the two greatest enemies of the free world at the moment). Imagine treating a great ally as a pariah.
Asking the Dalai Lama to use the back door and asking Taiwan to visit the US in surreptitious ways, “unofficially,” an example of cowardice in the world’s greatest democracy. Imagine allowing China to dictate this to the US. Oddly, this does not apply in the US Congress, which supports Taiwan almost unanimously.
Now, we are at the outset of a new paradigm. The liberal democracy of Taiwan is set to take a new path to be charted by DPP President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文). Although there is much ridiculous clamoring for decisiveness in her first four months, she is first building a strong foundation for the future of Taiwan from the inside out, which is the best approach for a strong democracy and government. Her predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), sabotaged Taiwan’s foundation and structure with KMT and CCP land mines, devices he improvised to prevent Taiwan from disentangling itself from China’s orbit, and he set Taiwan on a path toward the darkness that is the CCP.
It is at this moment that the US must step up and toss out its China-centric policies toward Taiwan and help the nation climb out of the past and into the future as a full partner to the US in its pivot on Asia. With the world going to hell in a handbasket, the US must help those countries which serve as a counterbalance to evil, the whining, moaning, umbrage and saber rattling by aggressors such as the CCP notwithstanding.
Tsai deserves our patience to allow her to formulate the strongest possible strategies to take Taiwan ahead into the democratic future, to protect itself from China’s aggressive hegemony and subversion using the KMT as its pawn, to help start to build a society founded on the greatest democratic principles and peace and to allow Taiwanese to stand up in the world proudly and take their place with the world’s free peoples with heads held high.
If the US does not protect and assist such things as a free and democratic Taiwan, what possible purpose does it serve in the world and how can its leaders sleep at night?
Longhwa Lee
Los Angeles
Enhancing military relations
The recent proposal to remove the travel ban of senior US officials to Taiwan highlights a serious issue (“Reshaping military relations with the US,” Sept. 22, page 8). The Taiwan Travel Bill would allow senior military officers to visit Taiwan, but this alone would not encourage the full-scale return of US military operations on Taiwan.
There is a tendency by the US Congress to micromanage the Taiwan relationship, but then Taiwanese still refuse to raise their defense budget to 3 percent of GDP.
US Senator John McCain has pressed this issue, but President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) still remains politically non-committed to these defense spending objectives. (“Is Taiwan investing enough in its security?” Sept. 14, page 13). Meanwhile, McCain has sponsored defense budget appropriations for Taiwan to jointly train with the US military.
US taxpayers are footing the bills for new joint training exercises with the Republic of China (ROC) military, but the tight purse strings of the Taiwanese politicians caused a potential loss of face by McCain. They should, however, support military negotiations of the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) for Taiwan, because the US military faces increasing budget cuts under fiscal sequestration.
The new ACSA negotiations could provide Taiwanese base support and logistical services for the US military to train with the ROC military.
ACSA provisions offer a “bartering” mechanism, if needed, and bilateral exchanges of logistical services (eg, billeting, fuel, security, etc.) can be physically exchanged with no governmental cash expenditures during training missions. During times of fiscal austerity, the ACSA negotiations would open the door for more joint operations with the ROC military, but Tsai effectively impeded the congressional efforts on behalf of Taiwan by McCain.
The DPP legislative majority should take bold action by supporting ACSA negotiations under the Taiwan Relations Act. Horse trading is the political art of the deal, and ACSA bartering provisions enable a grand political bargain for the future return of US bases to Taiwan.
Tom Chang
Alhambra, California
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