As the US military lays down its weapons and completes a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, thousands of kilometers away in Taiwan, media personality and Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) tossed a grenade into Taiwanese politics by saying that the nation has become overreliant on the US for defense.
Jaw, who is one of Taiwan’s most prominent pro-Beijing cheerleaders, added that Taiwan would follow in the footsteps of South Vietnam and Afghanistan in eventually being betrayed by Washington, and called on Taiwanese to take the calamity of the fall of Kabul as an object lesson.
Is Jaw correct? Can Taiwan really be lumped together with Afghanistan?
One crucial difference between the nations is that while the US has spent 20 years and spilled the blood of 2,300 American soldiers in Afghanistan, Taiwan is not a warzone, nor has it entered the preparatory stages for war, and there are no US troops stationed in the nation.
Taiwan’s situation could not be more different from Afghanistan’s.
The US has poured more than US$2.5 trillion into Afghanistan. This eye-watering military expenditure is the motivation for the pullout.
In contrast, Taiwan has been a long-term purchaser of US military equipment, and is therefore well and truly embedded into the thinking of the three elements that constitute the so-called “US military industrial complex”: arms manufacturers, defense officials and the US Congress. In other words, Taiwan’s security guarantees are embedded at a systemic level within Washington.
Additionally, from a geopolitical perspective, Taiwan’s pivotal position within the Pacific Ocean’s first island chain shows its immense strategic value to the US. The US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security and other regional security agreements to which the US is a signatory also mean that if a war between Taiwan and China were to break out, the US would not be able to throw Taiwan to the wolves, even if it were inclined to.
Taiwan’s prowess in state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing places the nation at the heart of global supply chains. The global chip industry has been elevated to a first-tier strategic industry, first as a result of a US-China trade dispute and, second, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Any upheaval or instability in Taiwan would affect the entire global technology industry, initiating a domino effect through Europe, the US, Japan and other advanced economies.
Anyone who argues that today’s Afghanistan is tomorrow’s Taiwan is conflating two entirely separate situations and ignoring the factors at play. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan is simply the latest chapter in Washington’s strategic pivot to the Indo-Pacific region. Far from losing relevance, Taiwan’s strategic value is on the rise.
Fan Shuo-ming is a senior administrative specialist at National Chengchi University.
Translated by Edward Jones
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
A report by the US-based Jamestown Foundation on Tuesday last week warned that China is operating illegal oil drilling inside Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Island (Dongsha, 東沙群島), marking a sharp escalation in Beijing’s “gray zone” tactics. The report said that, starting in July, state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp installed 12 permanent or semi-permanent oil rig structures and dozens of associated ships deep inside Taiwan’s EEZ about 48km from the restricted waters of Pratas Island in the northeast of the South China Sea, islands that are home to a Taiwanese garrison. The rigs not only typify
A large part of the discourse about Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation has centered on conventions of international law and international agreements between outside powers — such as between the US, UK, Russia, the Republic of China (ROC) and Japan at the end of World War II, and between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China at the UN. Internationally, the narrative on the PRC and Taiwan has changed considerably since the days of the first term of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic
RSS