Tomorrow is the 78th anniversary of the 228 Incident. On Monday, at a meeting with the Overseas 2-28 Survivors Homecoming Group at the Presidential Office, President William Lai (賴清德) spoke of the importance of protecting the nation’s freedom and sovereignty.
The 228 Incident is in the past, but the generational trauma exists in the present. The imperative to protect the nation’s sovereignty and liberty from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aggression will remain for the foreseeable future.
The chaos and budget cuts in the legislature threaten the endeavor. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have worked together to slash the central government’s budget, including the national defense budget, severely restricting its ability to make the required increases in defense spending.
As Masahiro Matsumura writes on today’s page: “The current state of Taiwanese politics is a deviant outlier in the sense that the nation as a whole is playing with fire when its own national security is in jeopardy.”
Even though the KMT recognizes the importance of national defense and working closely with the US in deterring CCP aggression, its continued obstruction is difficult to square with its purported position. The KMT says it does not want to provoke Beijing. It prefers to pander to the CCP, while China continues to provoke Taiwan unchecked.
The standoff between the governing Democratic Progressive Party and the opposition parties goes beyond domestic politics; the cuts and the wavering are being watched closely by Beijing and Washington. Last month, when Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) led a cross-party group of legislators to attend US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, they were questioned by members of the US Congress and think tanks about the budget cuts, including the freezing of funds for the indigenous submarine program.
On Tuesday this week, US House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the US and the CCP member Raja Krishnamoorthi and committee chairman John Moolenaar spoke at the Brookings Institution to discuss how Congress would approach relations between the US and China. Specifically on Taiwan, Krishnamoorthi said that enabling Taiwan to have a strong defense was integral to the US’ ability to deter CPP aggression; Moolenaar added that the debate within Taiwan itself about defense, although a sign of a robust democracy, was concerning and sends the wrong message, both to the CCP and to the US.
Nobody wants to help someone who shows little regard for helping themselves. If the KMT and TPP want to know what Trump might think about the cuts, reducing the percentage of GDP allotted to defense, they only need to look at what is happening in Europe.
Increasing defense spending and preparedness has never been as urgent as it is now, especially with uncertainty in the international order. The government needs to look at ways to achieve its ends within the constraints of the domestic political situation, until such time as it once again has a legislative majority.
On Jan. 14, Lai held a national security meeting announcing key priorities on national defense spending, with the promise of seeking a special budget to ensure national defense spending reaches at least 3 percent of GDP, among other initiatives. The special budget would be a workaround, and yet it still needs to get past the opposition.
Matsumura suggests other ways of working within the constraints imposed by the KMT and TPP, essentially by prioritizing where the budget is to be allocated, in particular to short-term and asymmetric capabilities, not medium-term, big-ticket programs or long-term research and development projects. An example of this would be to emphasize drone capabilities and to sacrifice further development of the indigenous submarine program.
While the government makes these adjustments, the KMT needs to stop pussyfooting around before a crouching tiger.
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