Taiwan must learn from Ukraine and formulate a comprehensive and self-sufficient national security framework to defend against Chinese aggression, a British historian told a forum in Taipei on Saturday.
Ensuring a country’s own defense was “the biggest lesson we can learn” from the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia, Wang Hao (汪浩) said at the forum hosted by the pro-independence Taiwan New Constitution Foundation (TNCF).
It is essential for the government to take action to strengthen military training, civilian-based defense, conscription, power grid resilience and information warfare, Wang said.
Photo: CNA
Given that international support has proven to be a boon for Ukraine, Taiwan should also “internationalize” the question of its own sovereignty to counter Beijing’s framing of the issue as a domestic dispute, he said.
The conflict in Ukraine is the “last chapter” of the Cold War between the US and the former Soviet Union, he said, adding that a “new cold war” between Washington and Beijing is likely to dominate global politics in the years to come.
US support for Ukraine and sanctions against Moscow would ultimately lead to Russia’s political, military and economic “defeat,” allowing the US to turn its attention to Asia, Wang said.
Just as Russia is being isolated from the international community, Washington and its allies would seek to exclude China — the US’ largest trading partner and the world’s second-largest economy — from global economics, trade, finance and technology, Wang said.
TNCF deputy CEO Raymond Sung (宋承恩) told the forum that Taiwan’s top focus should be strengthening its expressions of sovereignty to compensate for its lack of formal international recognition.
Meanwhile, Taipei Medical University professor Chang Kuo-cheng (張國城) said that Taiwan’s most urgent task was to reckon with its authoritarian past through a process of transitional justice.
“Imagine if in Ukraine at this moment there were still people memorializing Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, or traveling to Russia to hear speeches by [Russian] President Vladimir Putin,” he said, in a seeming allusion to Taiwan’s past leaders.
The TNCF, founded by independence advocate Koo Kwang-ming (辜寬敏), supports drafting a new constitution and pushes for Taiwan’s normalization as a sovereign country.
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