For the last 15 years, China has relied on gray zone operations to advance its territorial ambitions across Asia. And for 15 years, the US has struggled to respond. But the open door on which China has been pushing may finally be closing. Gray zone operations involve the assertive use of a variety of tools in ways that create conditions that can be described as neither peace nor war. Military forces might act provocatively — even dangerously — while carefully avoiding violence, whereas law enforcement employs nonlethal violence as a first resort. Such an approach creates difficult calculations for its targets.
EDITORIAL CARTOON
President William Lai (賴清德) late last month received a delegation of Polish members of the European Parliament at the Presidential Office — the first single-party, single-nation delegation from the EU legislature to visit Taipei in nearly two terms. The group, led by former Polish prime minister Beata Szydlo, also met Legislative Yuan Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), a gesture spanning Taiwan’s political divide. For most Taiwanese observers, this was a pleasant, if minor, diplomatic event. It was much more than that — and the timing matters. Within the same fortnight, Hudson Institute senior fellow Ken Moriyasu said in the Washington Examiner
It was shocking to hear Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) say that the legislative branch is somehow now under the control of “dark forces.” Frustrated at the glacial pace of the passage of the government’s annual budget for this year — it was finally passed at 6:08pm on Friday after a record delay of 266 days — Han had lost his temper during a cross-caucus negotiation meeting on Tuesday. The target of his ire was Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崐萁), who was absent that day. Fu had failed to attend the cross-caucus negotiations on a total of
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