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 not have official relations. Another diplomatic device used to great effect recently has been parliamentary diplomacy, or “paradiplomacy” — parliament-to-parliament exchanges in the absence of formal diplomatic relations — which has seen the nation deepen ties with fellow liberal democracies, such as Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Estonia.
Think tank diplomacy has also been used to great effect at the grassroots level in the US. In 2016 in Washington, Taiwanese-Americans founded the Global Taiwan Institute (GTI), a think tank dedicated to ensuring the nation is not drowned out by China’s relentless drive to shut down debate about Taiwan, deepening exchanges and “promoting better public understanding about Taiwan and its people.”
While the GTI is not funded by the government, its success as a think tank dedicated to Taiwan issues — helping facilitate intellectual exchanges and providing a platform to deepen knowledge about the strategic challenges facing the nation — is a public diplomacy template that Taipei should consider emulating.
Although there are some international affairs think tanks in Taiwan, such as the Institute for National Defense and Security Research and the Taiwan Center for Security Studies, these are small-scale and lack adequate funding to compete on the world stage or publish many reports in English.
Other government-funded institutions, such as Academia Sinica’s law institute and its Institute of Political Science, provide cutting-edge, high-quality and independent work in their spheres, but although they are interconnected with global elite knowledge networks, they do not engage in the type of public-facing diplomacy that characterizes think tanks.
In light of the GTI’s success, the government should consider founding a Taiwan-based international affairs think tank that is editorially independent, guided by liberal democratic values and would serve as a host of cutting-edge knowledge production about Taiwan’s strategic challenges and inform the international community about those challenges.
Taiwan is an outlier compared with other liberal democracies in that it does not have a significant national think tank that performs this role.
Lithuania’s Eastern Europe Studies Centre, which publishes in English, is dedicated to analyzing Lithuania’s role in the world and how it can contribute. The Polish Institute of International Affairs and France’s Institut Montaigne are similar. They offer a model Taiwan could learn from.
With China’s increasing belligerence and its seeming determination to burn all bridges with the democratic world, there is plenty of goodwill to learn more about Taiwan and give it the discursive platform that it has been unjustly denied for many years.
The nation has already capitalized on this interest with the founding of TaiwanPlus — an editorially independent platform dedicated to on-the-ground reporting and telling informative stories about Taiwan.
The next project should be an independent, properly funded Taiwan-based international affairs think tank — a host of cutting-edge research on Taiwan’s foreign policy and international role that enhances international understanding and the nation’s status and visibility.
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