The Ministry of National Defense is showing some common sense; it is time that others in Taiwan, especially colleagues in the media, do the same.
Minister of National Defense Feng Shih-kuan (馮世寬) on Thursday announced that the ministry would no longer issue the repetitive, knee-jerk statements it is forced to release every time Chinese military aircraft or ships pass near Taiwan during training missions to the western Pacific Ocean: the ones that say the ministry is closely monitoring the situation, and the required early warning systems and defense measures are in place and ready to be activated.
The increasing displays of China’s growing military are the subject of much attention in Taiwan, Japan and the US, but they are primarily aimed at the domestic audience in China.
Beijing’s bark at present outstrips its bite. These displays are more psychological warfare than a real show of strength.
A similar example of Beijing’s bully bluster and psychological operations was the outrageous assertion at the beginning of the month by a senior diplomat at the Chinese embassy in Washington that the day a US Navy vessel makes a port call in Kaohsiung is the day the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unites Taiwan with China by military force.
That time the intended audience included the US Congress, which was mulling the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018, which included an urging for US Navy port calls in Taiwan.
The warning had little effect on Capitol Hill as lawmakers subsequently passed the bill, which was signed into law by US President Donald Trump last week, although the warning did fill lots of column inches in newspapers, and minutes of airtime at radio and television stations around the world.
Media outlets in Taiwan routinely and eagerly take Beijing’s bait, and demand comments from the ministry, from the Presidential Office and from the Cabinet after each flyby, sail-past or Beijing news conference, only to receive the same platitudes time after time.
Or, even worse, they hype the PLA exercises and go to the same academics and pundits to extrapolate and theorize, while only rarely producing anything new, useful or even intelligent.
It is time to call a time-out on such shenanigans; we have all heard the ready-to-defend-Taiwan message too many times before.
China is a threat to Taiwan, but at this point the threat is diplomatic and economic rather than military. It is more likely to try to launch a diplomatic offensive to convince more of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, such as the Vatican, to switch their recognition from Taipei to Beijing, or to threaten Taiwanese democracy supporters active on the Web or hinder expansion of Taiwanese businesses in third-party countries than the PLA is to launch an assault or invasion on Taiwan.
On a related note, while the defense ministry is in a downplaying mode, it should also consider stopping its own annual psychological operations — the ones aimed at Taiwanese, not across the Taiwan Strait or people in Washington or anywhere else — ahead of the Lunar New Year holidays.
These include the news conferences and press junkets in the run-up to the holidays, when the president visits an outlying island to boost the morale of troops stationed there; the drills aimed at reassuring the public that the military is prepared to counter any threat from China; and the carefully orchestrated interviews with fighter pilots, navy frogmen and others who talk about how they are proud to be working over the holiday to protect the nation.
Of course many in the military will be working over the Lunar New Year holiday, just like police and firefighters, doctors and nurses, media professionals and others; such schedules go with the job.
It is about time that a more common-sense approach is applied to military pronouncements and activities, whether by Taiwan’s defenders or the PLA.
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
As the new year dawns, Taiwan faces a range of external uncertainties that could impact the safety and prosperity of its people and reverberate in its politics. Here are a few key questions that could spill over into Taiwan in the year ahead. WILL THE AI BUBBLE POP? The global AI boom supported Taiwan’s significant economic expansion in 2025. Taiwan’s economy grew over 7 percent and set records for exports, imports, and trade surplus. There is a brewing debate among investors about whether the AI boom will carry forward into 2026. Skeptics warn that AI-led global equity markets are overvalued and overleveraged
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
RSS