President-elect William Lai (賴清德) is to accede to the presidency this month at a time when the international order is in its greatest flux in three decades. Lai must navigate the ship of state through the choppy waters of an assertive China that is refusing to play by the rules, challenging the territorial claims of multiple nations and increasing its pressure on Taiwan.
It is widely held in democratic capitals that Taiwan is important to the maintenance and survival of the liberal international order. Taiwan is strategically located, hemming China’s People’s Liberation Army inside the first island chain, preventing it from threatening US military bases that have been the bedrock of prosperity and security in the Asia-Pacific region since the end of World War II.
Taiwan is a democracy with shared values with the West, and a lesson of history is that liberal democracies must bind together to defend their way of life.
Since coming to power in 2021, US President Joe Biden’s administration’s policy on Taiwan has been to build collective support from US allies and partners. This strategy — the US plus its allies, partners and Taiwan — marks a change from previous US administrations which have treated Taiwan’s security as primarily a bilateral issue. The collective strategy reminds China that Taiwan is about more than US-China relations and it concerns a concert of democracies willing to defend the rules-based order.
However, despite Taiwan’s importance, the nation has been conspicuously absent from US-led institutional initiatives. Taiwan has not been included in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) or the AUKUS agreement. While the democracies have made great strides in rhetorically supporting Taiwan, more could be done to facilitate Taiwan’s more substantial participation in regional affairs.
In a recent article titled “US-Taiwan Relations and the Future of the Liberal International Order” published in the US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, Academia Sinica Institute of Political Science research fellow Christina Lai (賴潤瑤) offers a suite of policy prescriptions for how Taiwan can make more substantive contributions to the US-led international order in the Asia-Pacific region. Of course, outright membership might risk conflict with China, but the US could better navigate China’s red line by facilitating a Taiwanese regional presence through participation as a dialogue partner.
For example, Christina Lai said that the US could encourage Taiwan to become a dialogue partner of the Quad. No longer only about security, the Quad has expanded its scope to address emerging technologies and COVID-19 vaccines, and Taiwanese excellence in health and technology could help boost the group’s expertise. To get around any Chinese complaints, she says the US could draft a white paper elaborating on the legal basis for Taiwan’s participation. Taiwan could also make a huge contribution to trade cooperation in the IPEF, whose members value connection, cleanness, technology and resilience.
On the security front, Christina Lai said a “trilateral security network” could be built on existing US-Japan relations and the Quad to help address policy coordination issues. This could start with Taiwan’s involvement as a “dialogue partner” for contingency planning and logistics support. Moreover, the Quad could consider inviting Taiwan to join Quad-plus meetings and initiatives to help improve economic resilience in the Indo-Pacific region.
“The more Taiwan participates in US-led institutions and the more diplomatic presence it enjoys in Asia, the more likely this strategy is to prevent Beijing from starting a military conflict or attempting to occupy Taiwan by force,” Christina Lai said.
When William Lai takes office on May 20, leveraging the nation’s strengths and promoting its meaningful participation in the liberal international order should be a top priority.
Jan. 1 marks a decade since China repealed its one-child policy. Just 10 days before, Peng Peiyun (彭珮雲), who long oversaw the often-brutal enforcement of China’s family-planning rules, died at the age of 96, having never been held accountable for her actions. Obituaries praised Peng for being “reform-minded,” even though, in practice, she only perpetuated an utterly inhumane policy, whose consequences have barely begun to materialize. It was Vice Premier Chen Muhua (陳慕華) who first proposed the one-child policy in 1979, with the endorsement of China’s then-top leaders, Chen Yun (陳雲) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), as a means of avoiding the
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
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
On today’s page, Masahiro Matsumura, a professor of international politics and national security at St Andrew’s University in Osaka, questions the viability and advisability of the government’s proposed “T-Dome” missile defense system. Matsumura writes that Taiwan’s military budget would be better allocated elsewhere, and cautions against the temptation to allow politics to trump strategic sense. What he does not do is question whether Taiwan needs to increase its defense capabilities. “Given the accelerating pace of Beijing’s military buildup and political coercion ... [Taiwan] cannot afford inaction,” he writes. A rational, robust debate over the specifics, not the scale or the necessity,
RSS