While the United States and China spar over the future of Taiwan, political antagonists on the self-ruling island are deploying strategies in parliament to persuade one of the two superpowers to take their side.
President Lai Ching-te and his Democratic Progressive Party want to ensure a permanent separation from mainland China. To accomplish that, Lai believes Taiwan needs to persuade the US to back the policy with both diplomatic and, especially, military help to deter a possible Chinese invasion.
Because current US President Donald Trump demands economic benefits for the US in return, along with signs that Taiwan wants to defend itself, Lai is offering the US trade and the largest-ever purchases of US weapons in Taiwan’s history.
Opposition leader Cheng Li-wun and the Kuomintang, a party that once aspired to rule all of China, argue that close and friendly relations with China, regardless of political differences with the authoritarian neighbor, make more economic and political sense.
China is Taiwan’s biggest trading partner and possesses Asia’s most powerful military, which Chinese leader Xi Jinping threatens to unleash on Taiwan to force it into unification with the mainland. He has told the military to be ready for “reunification” by 2027.
There’s a sticking point in the way of Lai’s plan: democracy. Lai, elected in 2024, needs the Legislative Yuan’s approval for a US$11 billion purchase of US-made weapons, a sum within a pledge to buy $40 billion worth of arms over the next five years.
However, the election that gave Lai executive power also put Taiwan’s parliament in the hands of the KMT and a separate, smaller party. Combined, there are not enough votes in the Legislative Yuan to seal the purchases.
Cheng has called Lai’s proposal a waste of money and said it would only serve to infuriate China, which has been brandishing its military might in the Taiwan Strait.
In effect, Taiwan’s politics has entered a deadlock that is difficult to break: both sides define their positions on weapons procurement as an existential issue, a matter of survival.
“The DPP frames its political tactics vis-à-vis rival parties as the resistance movement against the Chinese external enemy,” wrote Versaffsungblog, a Berlin-based legal and political journal.
“The KMT strategizes its position as the resistance movement against the indigenous (Taiwanese) usurper of the (China-based) constitutional identity,” it said.
The analysis warned that framing the issue in these terms does “not only radicalize the political rhetoric” in Taiwan, “but also permeate social sectors and thus divides society more deeply.”
Trump’s mercantilist attitude toward the value of alliances complicates Lai’s effort. Taiwan’s relations with Washington appear less like a friendship based on common values than like those between a desperate buyer and a ruthless merchant.
In that sense, the relationship mirrors his approach to Ukraine, which was forced into signing rare-earth mineral deals with Trump that gave the US a stake in mining properties, even as the US also insisted that only Europe ought to supply weapons, some of which are bought from the US.
Washington supplies 97% of Japan’s defense imports, 86% of the United Kingdom’s, the same percentage as South Korea, and 81% of Australia’s. The percentage of weapons imported by Taiwan is 98%, according to the China-United States Exchange Foundation, an independent research organization based in Hong Kong.
Taiwan’s possibilities are severely limited because other countries fear offending China by selling arms to a self-ruling island Beijing considers a renegade province. “Taiwan has no other security offering or partner,” wrote Domino Theory, a blog dedicated to interpreting Taiwan’s relations across the globe. “It must dance with the US or submit to China.”
Weapons Taiwan immediately wants from the US include High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known by the acronym HIMARS, and large numbers of Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS.
Both had been supplied to Ukraine for defense against Russian aerial attacks. Other items included in the initial $11 billion purchase include surface-to-air missiles and upgraded training for pilots of Taiwan’s existing F-16 fighter jets.
KMT chief Cheng, who was elected party leader last year, said Lai had become an “ATM” throwing billions of dollars at US arms producers. “We certainly have the determination to defend Taiwan,” Cheng said, “But it’s not a blank check.”
The legislature’s rejection of Lai’s request is not the first time a DPP defense proposal was derailed by the KMT. In 2006, the George W. Bush administration offered then-President Chen Shui-bian the sale of submarines, submarine-hunting aircraft and Patriot anti-aircraft missiles.
The KMT, which, then as now, held a legislative majority with a splinter party, refused the proposal, arguing that it was expensive, unnecessary and improperly secretive.
The Bush administration did not consider the rejection an opening for an invasion. At the time, Beijing’s military forces and equipment were not considered an immediate threat to Taiwan’s. Washington was also too consumed by its post-9/11 War on Terror to focus much on Taiwan.
Until the year 2000, Taiwan itself seemed to worry little. Before then, its army drafted youth for a two-year military service. By 2008, the requirement shrunk to one year, then in 2018, to four months. In 2022, fears of conflict with China prompted the DPP government led by Tsai Ing-wen to restore mandatory service to one year.
China’s President Xi, who rose to power in 2013, has ramped up bellicose rhetoric, insisting that Taiwan must join the mainland, peacefully or by force. Separation could not continue “from generation to generation,” he has said.
Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper that plays strident Harpy to the staid, official People’s Daily, coupled praise for KMT opposition to Lai’s defense plans with a “stern warning” against “colluding with external interference forces” to promote independence.
To show China’s displeasure at Lai’s announced its $11 billion arms purchase, Xi ordered up a massive military maneuver around and over Taiwan.
The two-day event was called “Justice Mission 2025.” It featured a simulated comprehensive blockade of the island, including live-fire artillery and naval, air and rocket forces.
The Trump administration did not respond directly to these threats. On occasion, Trump and his officials fall back on some version of the well-worn “strategic ambiguity” policy, in which they verbally oppose a forced takeover of Taiwan by China but do not specify what the US would actually do if China attacked.
The administration, however, recently issued a new Nationality Defense Strategy document that outlined American security concerns globally. It spoke of preventing China from dominating the “First Island Chain,” a string of island nations opposite China’s coast.
“This suggests continuing strong US support to key allies and partners in the region, including Tokyo, Manila and Taipei,” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington.
CSIS interpreted the statement as generally raising the stakes in the area to keep “China from dominating the Indo-Pacific region.”
Lai’s next effort will be to try to lure the KMT’s ally, the Taiwan People’s Party, to abandon its opposition to arms purchases. Meanwhile, the KMT is sending a delegation to the Cross-Strait Cooperation Vision Forum in Beijing.
Newspapers in China said the meeting will discuss “tourism, industrial development and environmental protection…in the interest of peace.” DPP officials accused the KMT of cooperating with China’s effort to obscure its “relentless campaign of diplomatic and military intimidation” of Taiwan.
DPP are the FIFTH COLUMN. When the time comes, this pack of imbeciles will be sent where they belong and there will be no mercy.
Majority of Taiwanese did not wish to legalize homosexual marriage, DPP went for it anyway. These typically pro homosexual, Ukraine flag waving and pro Woke puppets are American trojan horses.