Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang are working closely together in an effort to undermine the rules-based international order, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) told a forum in Berlin on Wednesday during a low-profile visit to Europe.
In the face of growing threats amid ever-increasing collaborations between the nations “with a clear intent to expand, to sabotage the rules-based international order ... we the democracies must unite,” Wu said at the eighth Taiwan Trilateral Forum, hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the US.
Wu said that his visit to Germany is a reflection of the EU’s “Indo-Pacific tilt,” and cited how European states, including Germany, France, the UK, and Lithuania, and the EU itself, have all issued Indo-Pacific strategies.
Photo from the German Marshall Fund Web site
He also cited the freedom of navigation operations conducted by the German, French and British navies, showing that Europe is “waking up” in the Indo-Pacific.
Wu urged the EU to speak out against any unilateral attempt to change the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait, and implored the EU to exercise caution when citing the “one China” policy, which Wu said was being used by Beijing to “legitimize its aggression against Taiwan.”
The concept is what enables China’s expansionism, which poses a threat to the rules-based world order, as the Chinese military constantly holds ad hoc “combat readiness joint patrols” without warning, an act that flagrantly flouts international laws, norms and concerns, he said.
Beijing’s “one China” principle is an enactment of legal warfare and is “no longer a concept subject to interpretation or negotiation,” but rather a goal-oriented strategy to build “a facade of legitimacy for military action, that the conflict is domestic and no others have the right to intervene,” Wu said.
In the same vein, UN Resolution 2758 was being twisted by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to claim sovereignty over Taiwan and exclude it from international forums, when the resolution itself “has no bearing on Taiwan,” he said.
China’s “gray zone” activities — actions that fall below the threshold of a kinetic war — have recently included efforts to sever Taiwanese undersea communications cables with ships flying flags of convenience, Wu said, citing the Baltic Sea cable severance and stating that this is an issue that EU nations could sympathize with.
“Some friends have described that the PRC has already started the war on Taiwan, not by tanks and missiles, but by algorithms and legalese across the cognitive domain,” Wu said.
Wu likened Taiwan to the two Berlins after World War II, stating that Taiwan is “an island surrounded not by bricks and barbed wire, but by diplomatic isolation, gray zone coercion, hybrid and legal warfare.”
When democracies stand together, authoritarians will hesitate, and if Taiwan and Europe remain united in purpose, Taiwan would one day be a story of freedom and survival, rather than one of fear and surrender, he said.
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