Taiwan has lost Trump. Or so a former State Department official and lobbyist would have us believe. Writing for online outlet Domino Theory in an article titled “How Taiwan lost Trump,” Christian Whiton provides a litany of reasons that the William Lai (賴清德) and Donald Trump administrations have supposedly fallen out — and it’s all Lai’s fault. Although many of Whiton’s claims are misleading or ill-informed, the article is helpfully, if unintentionally, revealing of a key aspect of the MAGA worldview.
Whiton complains of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s “inability to understand and relate to the New Right in America.” Many foreign interlocutors have struggled to adjust to the rise of Trumpian politics in the United States. Taiwan’s challenges in this regard are not unique, but Taipei also had great success in managing them during the first Trump term. Taipei was rewarded with a regularized arms sales process, the dispatch to Taiwan of American military trainers, and high-level diplomatic engagements.
Indeed, the Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Lai administrations have made a concerted effort to engage with prominent figures in the Trump orbit. Mike Pompeo has visited Taiwan four times since stepping down as secretary of state. Kelly Craft, Trump’s second ambassador to the United Nations, has delivered two major speeches in Taiwan. In 2023, President Tsai conferred upon Robert O’Brien, one of Trump’s first-term national security advisors and current member of the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, the Order of Brilliant Star with Special Grand Cordon. It welcomed to Taiwan Elbridge Colby and Morgan Ortagus, current administration officials, in 2024 in anticipation of their likely roles in a then-notional second Trump term.
In truth, Whiton’s problem is not that the DPP does not understand the New Right, but that the DPP refuses to become more like it. To reckon with a “new world order” — which goes entirely undefined in Whiton’s telling but which has “at its heart” the American New Right — Taiwan must respond with “its own revised form of politics yet to be revealed.”
In other words, to keep Trump onside, Taiwan must reshape its domestic politics to reflect those of one wing of one American party — Taiwan’s own political realities be damned. This might be a recipe for short-term success but would be a mistake in the long term: The United States is polarized, its major parties are internally fractured, and the likely political contours of the post-Trump era are fuzzy at best.
More importantly, such a reshaping is simply not possible. Taiwan is a very different country than the United States. Taiwan has a relatively minuscule population, different cultural norms and practices, radically different geography, different security concerns … the list goes on.
Despite those differences, however, the two countries have much in common. Both are liberal democracies. Americans and Taiwanese alike cherish their civil and political rights. Both peoples are fiercely defensive of their unique ways of life and of their right to live life as they choose. Those similarities in turn drive shared interests: most fundamentally, a desire to live at peace in a world that is safe for democracies.
Members of the New Right often disparage neocons for seeking to reshape the world in America’s image. It is ironic, then, that Whiton is more concerned with remaking Taiwan in the New Right’s image than he is in making a hard-headed assessment of US interests in Taiwan, which depend little on the ruling party in either country at any given time.
Taiwan is a consistent top-ten trading partner and a front-line democracy in a world under authoritarian assault and occupies key geography in the US forward defense perimeter, which keeps Asian aggressors distant from American shores. Has Taiwan lost Trump? Perhaps it has lost the New Right. If so, it is not because of President Lai, but rather because the New Right cannot perceive a truth that is in plain sight: The United States has an enduring interest in Taiwan’s de facto independence. If Trump loses sight of that, too, the fault will be his and his alone.
Michael Mazza is senior director for research at the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security (formerly the Project 2049 Institute) and a senior non-resident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.
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