Funding appropriated for defense projects should be sufficient to strengthen the “resilience shield” before essential assistance arrives, a former Georgian defense minister said at a forum in Taipei yesterday.
Former Georgian minister of defense Tinatin Khidasheli, who heads a think tank fighting the Soviet legacy in Georgia, is a research fellow at the Taiwan Democracy Foundation.
She was asked to comment on the defense budget proposal that President William Lai (賴清德) announced yesterday, in which NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.9 billion) would be spent in the next eight years to hone the nation’s capabilities in fighting asymmetric warfare.
Photo: CNA
“Let me be very straightforward: No amount of money that Taiwan, Georgia, or Estonia can allocate for defense will ever be sufficient — on its own — to counter hybrid warfare when facing a much larger and wealthier neighbor with far greater manpower,” Khidasheli said. “Even if we all die as heroes, Russia would still outnumber us. That is not the issue to think about when you put together a defense budget.”
“The defense budget for countries like us [Taiwan and Georgia] should be sufficient to shore up the ‘resilience shield’ that I was talking about. We need to be ready to be this first shield that is unbreakable before essential help comes, and I believe that should be our target, and whatever fits that scenario is a good answer,” she said.
Khidasheli said that the world is now facing a global arms race, which started with nations not learning from the war in Georgia in 2008 that Russia can act like a bully, and not taking into consideration the warning Georgia sent about Ukraine.
“The lesson was not learned even after Russia took over Crimea in 2014,” she said.
Khidasheli said that she does not have a magic number for Taiwan in terms of defense spending, but there are standards to consider when setting a budget, such as 2 to 5 percent of the GDP in NATO nations.
“We need to fight bullies with soft power, but we need to be smart about it,” she said.
Asked about the lessons that Taiwan can learn from Georgia and the leverage Taiwan can use to counter the threat from China, Khidasheli said that democracy is the biggest source of leverage, adding that maintaining democracy is the way to stand with nations on whom you rely on in case something happens.
“The Georgian reform is often called the miracle of the post-Soviet world, because we managed to defeat corruption that everybody thought was endemic and unavoidable,” she said. “What the West saw in us is that if Georgia can be successful, that would be a great message for Russia and Belarus.”
Aside from being a democratic nation, Taiwan holds greater leverage: microchips, which function as a powerful instrument that makes the nation important, she said, adding that the leverage makes others care about Taiwan.
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