In a Taipei Times editorial published almost three years ago (“Macron goes off-piste,” April 13, 2023, page 8), French President Emmanuel Macron was criticized for comments he made immediately after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing. Macron had spoken of the need for his country to find a path on Chinese foreign policy no longer aligned with that of the US, saying that continuing to follow the US agenda would sacrifice the EU’s strategic autonomy.
At the time, Macron was criticized for gifting Xi a PR coup, and the editorial said that he had been “persuaded to run like a jilted lover from the US’ arms to the demonstrably fickle embrace of the Chinese Communist Party.”
In November 2018, Macron had warned that Europeans could not be protected without a “true, European army.” That idea, given that Europe was covered by the US security umbrella, was similarly criticized.
It seemed perfectly reasonable to levy those criticisms of Macron’s stance at the time. Given the international situation today, and in the context of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s much lauded speech at Davos on Jan. 20, delivered only days after Carney himself had met Xi in Beijing, Macron seems if not visionary then at least in good company all of a sudden.
This is not to say that the conclusions of the 2023 editorial should be dismissed entirely, but we can use the present reality as a measure of how much things have changed. The relationship of many countries with the US, and in particular those that have traditionally considered the US to be a staunch ally, has become more complicated, such that Carney could speak of a “rupture,” not a “transition” in the international world order. Much of what Carney expressed so eloquently was on the minds of many other world leaders. Not everyone would share his characterization of the changes as a “rupture,” but he is not the only leader of Western middle powers to make a trip to Beijing to reset the relationship with China, hedging against uncertainty caused by US President Donald Trump: Macron was in Beijing on a state visit in December last year and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was in Beijing from Jan. 28 through 31.
It was interesting how when Carney spoke of great powers using “economic integration as weapons… and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” many interpreted this as a thinly veiled dig at the US: An informed listener would know that these observations could equally apply to Beijing. Still, Carney’s trip to Beijing, even if he were aware of the contradiction, certainly gave Xi his PR boost, as did Starmer’s and Macron’s. Xi’s uncharacteristically smiling visage in the official handshake photographs with these leaders said as much.
Taiwan’s situation runs in parallel to the predicament that Carney outlined in his speech. There is no need to dissect the speech, but he used phrases that resonate in Taiwan: that “the middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”; that “you cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination”; that accepting the great powers’ dictates “is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination”; and that “the powerful have their power…” but the middle powers have “the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home and to act together.”
Taiwan is a middle power that depends on one of the great powers for its security. This is the root of the tensions outlined in the two articles on this page, “Taiwan must pass defense budget” by Yuichiro Kakutani and Allen Zhang (張安倫) of the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center, and “Foreign-run domestic politics” by Howard Shen (沈正浩).
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs news release on Starmer’s visit said that “on Taiwan, the UK’s position is long-standing, well-known, and unchanged.” It is disappointing, though not surprising, to see Starmer’s visit manipulated in this way.
To square the national security circle, Taiwan relies on the hard power of the US and on the soft power of like-minded middle powers that would stand with it, stop pretending and name realities.
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