Following US President Donald Trump’s airstrikes on Iran’s three major nuclear facilities — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — on June 22, analysts have been questioning what the decision, seemingly signaling a more active US military role in shaping the Middle East security landscape, means for the global strategy of the US.
The Trump administration had declared that the Indo-Pacific region and Taiwan would be its “priority theater.”
However, the strikes should not be seen in isolation. As Johns Hopkins University Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs Hal Brands wrote for Bloomberg, Israel’s war against Iran was about three overlapping conflicts: a war for the future of the Middle East, a war for nuclear non-proliferation and a war that squeezes the axis of aggressors — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and its proxies — by pressuring its weakest link.
Trump’s bombing of Iran — something Israeli leaders had long requested from former US presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump in his first term and Joe Biden, but were denied — has not only shown that Trump is willing to act decisively in theaters he believes to be of primary interest to his administration, but also demonstrated the centrality of unpredictability to his foreign policy strategy. By giving Iran a two-week deadline to negotiate, only to order strikes just days later, the administration showed that it views ambiguity and unpredictability as a key tool to enhance US leverage over allies and adversaries.
This approach has deeply unnerved China.
Trump’s departure from the predictable patterns of previous US presidents, under whom Beijing believed it could secure incremental gains with minimal consequences, might force Beijing to reassess its assumptions. In the Indo-Pacific region, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot be sure of Trump’s threshold for escalation, or confident in how the US might respond if China raises tensions around Taiwan.
“The Trump administration sees the previous US strategy — which aimed to build and maintain a global order led by the United States — as a misguided effort that has sapped US power,” academics Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine. “Instead of trying to create global order, the Trump administration now appears to be pursuing a more focused strategy: prioritization.”
Trump’s decisiveness in the Middle East, coupled with his willingness to scale back US commitments in regions deemed secondary — such as Europe — while urging allies to take greater responsibility for their own defense in their region, reflects a strategy of prioritization. If implemented with strategic discipline and translated into sustained, tangible policy, this approach would improve global security and bolster the collective defense of democratic nations, benefiting Taiwan and its partners by keeping authoritarian expansionism in check.
However, even with the US’ strategy of prioritization, Taiwan must not rest on its laurels, and should demonstrate that it takes its defense seriously and fully grasps the severity of the threat posed by China.
Taiwan this year plans to raise defense spending to about 3 percent of GDP through a special budget, up from the initially earmarked 2.45 percent. While this would mark the highest defense allocation in Taiwan’s history, with NATO nations such as Poland already spending nearly 5 percent of GDP, it might still fall short of meeting the expectations of the Trump administration’s “peace through strength” doctrine.
The global trend among democracies is shifting toward significantly higher defense spending and it is important for President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration not to appear to be getting left behind.
A failure by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to respond to Israel’s brilliant 12-day (June 12-23) bombing and special operations war against Iran, topped by US President Donald Trump’s ordering the June 21 bombing of Iranian deep underground nuclear weapons fuel processing sites, has been noted by some as demonstrating a profound lack of resolve, even “impotence,” by China. However, this would be a dangerous underestimation of CCP ambitions and its broader and more profound military response to the Trump Administration — a challenge that includes an acceleration of its strategies to assist nuclear proxy states, and developing a wide array
Eating at a breakfast shop the other day, I turned to an old man sitting at the table next to mine. “Hey, did you hear that the Legislative Yuan passed a bill to give everyone NT$10,000 [US$340]?” I said, pointing to a newspaper headline. The old man cursed, then said: “Yeah, the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] canceled the NT$100 billion subsidy for Taiwan Power Co and announced they would give everyone NT$10,000 instead. “Nice. Now they are saying that if electricity prices go up, we can just use that cash to pay for it,” he said. “I have no time for drivel like
Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers are facing recall votes on Saturday, prompting nearly all KMT officials and lawmakers to rally their supporters over the past weekend, urging them to vote “no” in a bid to retain their seats and preserve the KMT’s majority in the Legislative Yuan. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had largely kept its distance from the civic recall campaigns, earlier this month instructed its officials and staff to support the recall groups in a final push to protect the nation. The justification for the recalls has increasingly been framed as a “resistance” movement against China and
Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), former chairman of Broadcasting Corp of China and leader of the “blue fighters,” recently announced that he had canned his trip to east Africa, and he would stay in Taiwan for the recall vote on Saturday. He added that he hoped “his friends in the blue camp would follow his lead.” His statement is quite interesting for a few reasons. Jaw had been criticized following media reports that he would be traveling in east Africa during the recall vote. While he decided to stay in Taiwan after drawing a lot of flak, his hesitation says it all: If
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