Last week, Domino Theory published an article I wrote titled “How Trump Lost Taiwan.” It attracted unexpected attention in Taiwan and Washington for its criticism of Taipei’s left-leaning government.
Some commentators praised the piece, such as Sona Eyambe. In a video that had 433,000 views by Monday, he noted that my criticism was coming from a longtime supporter of Taiwan and warranted consideration. Among critical outlets, the Taipei Times ran three pieces in opposition, mostly questioning my assertions and personal relevance, but none offering a solution to the problems I identified.
Some friends suggested I should go beyond detailing the evolution of Taiwan’s problems in Washington to outlining possible solutions:
Start with national defense, the first responsibility of any national government. Taiwan should establish a clear concept of Taiwanese independent self-defense. Declare that while Taiwan hopes for allied help in the event of war or blockade, its doctrine is now to fight indefinitely with its own resources if necessary. Follow the model of Israel and say that a Taiwanese president will never ask an American president to sacrifice American lives in Taiwan.
Move the military discussion away from the portion of national economic output spent on defense and focus instead on capabilities that the Taiwanese and American public can understand.
Field the world’s most advanced drone-centric military. A colleague of mine pointed out that Taiwan may have more military drones than the United States. This is believable because the U.S. military’s procurement deficiencies and slowness at updating doctrine are widely known and horrific.
Taiwan should develop this automated drone capability to an extreme, adapting the lessons of the Ukraine War and its lethal marriage of high-tech sensors and distributed networks with relatively low-tech drones, both on land and at sea. Offer to sell the technology in a variety of weapons packages to other countries throughout the Pacific as an efficient way to rapidly bolster defenses against China.
Launch an independent satellite network for peacetime communications and surveillance and wartime command and control of the military. Taiwan is right not to trust SpaceX and its CEO, Elon Musk. Who would trust a man with a car factory in China? The cost of building and launching satellites into low-Earth orbit has dropped significantly in recent years. Taiwan can afford its own satellite constellation with technology easily licensed from U.S. companies. Otherwise, rapid Chinese destruction of undersea communications cables in a crisis will leave us talking by ham radio.
Allow for a militia and defense in depth. While degrading a Chinese invasion at sea or in the air would be crucial to Taiwan’s survival, it is unlikely an invasion could be stopped at the water’s edge. A Chinese invasion would look not like D-Day, but more like the Battle of Dunkirk in reverse: thousands of modest-sized boats and planes each carrying small units of Chinese.
Taiwan should prepare and publicly debate plans to fight throughout the island, even after declaring Taipei and other metropolises as “open cities” to try to prevent their destruction. There is a group of men not currently in the military who are practicing combat tactics with air guns to be able to hopefully use real weapons and aid in defense in war. These patriotically inclined volunteers should be incorporated into a Swiss-like militia, with proper training in weapons, tactics, logistics, command, medicine and other components of an organized military. Taiwan should liberalize its gun laws, especially for qualified militias to keep weapons in dispersed armories.
One of the more common critiques of my article was that I was wrong about Taiwan’s poor political support in Donald Trump’s Washington. Some specifically pointed to bipartisan congressional support, which I also doubt. Each April, I roll my eyes at the annual homages to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which purports to require the U.S. executive branch to sell Taiwan the arms it needs for its defense. There is now a 46-year history of the executive branch not complying with the law. This is not surprising given the U.S. Constitution gives the president of the United States near-plenary power to set foreign policy and control military sales as part of his authority as commander in chief.
I don’t foresee change. But maybe I am wrong about Taiwan’s support in Congress. Taiwan could apply a test and see what happens.
Taiwan should insist that its “friends” in the U.S. Congress do something meaningful for Taiwan. People in Washington joke that the Congressional Taiwan Caucus is one of the largest and its members take no steps related to Taiwan other than joining the Caucus. First, ask these friends to force the executive branch to deliver all of the weapons Taiwan has already purchased. Grok estimates the backlog of arms bought but not delivered to be $21.5 billion. Trump loves big foreign purchases of U.S. weapons. Make him an offer he can’t refuse: Deliver the overdue goods and Taiwan will up the purchase to a total of $40 billion to be delivered before he leaves office.
Next, ask these friends to pass into law via the annual National Defense Authorization Act a requirement that Taiwan be allowed to participate in the biennial U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific military exercise (RIMPAC) and that China be permanently excluded. This should be a no-brainer; why else hold the exercise or have huge allied militaries in the Pacific?
Furthermore, Taiwan should ask its friends to write into that law that the Department of Defense should encourage RIMPAC “secretariats” in each participating country while requiring ones to be established in the United States, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan with the consent of their governments. The official reason will be to engage in persistent, year-round planning for the complex exercise. The unofficial reason will be to create a mechanism for military cooperation in time of crisis.
There will never be an equivalent to the NATO alliance in the Pacific, but this secretariat would be a back-door avenue to one important part of an alliance: a joint military command on standby that can effectuate “force multiplication” in time of war. There would be no treaty and no explicit or even tacit mutual defense requirement by the members, but military leaders would at least have the ability to operate jointly with Taiwanese forces if leaders of the countries involved so direct during a crisis. It would give them options, not obligations.
Next, return the money given by the U.S. government to Taiwan in recent years. Literally add up the amount and drop a check in the mail to the U.S. Treasury — which helpfully has a post office box for “gifts.” For decades, Taiwan has funded its own defense. In recent years, war hawks in Congress like Senator Lindsey Graham added funds for Taiwan to spending bills without Taiwan’s request. This has done more harm than good. For what is a relatively small amount in defense terms, Taiwan gave up the power of telling Americans it was a rare ally that didn’t need or want American dollars. It can get this important distinction back.
Redefine Taiwan as Taiwan. Without declaring formal independence, Taiwan should continue to evolve an independent identity that its own people and foreigners can grasp. That identity will always have some roots in China in the same manner that America’s will always have some roots in England. But any political lineage should be severed. Taiwanese should remove the portrait of Sun Yat-sen from the Legislative Yuan and from Taiwanese currency. The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial should be recast as a museum to those who brought about real democracy in Taiwan from the 1980s onward with Chiang’s statue moved elsewhere.
Rename Taoyuan Airport after Lee Teng-hui. Taiwanese companies like China Airlines and China Steel should be implored to change their names to something else. Taiwan should send the pieces of art removed from China during the Chinese Civil War back to China. All of this would ease confusion about whether Taiwan is a culture in its own right and a de facto separate country that intends to remain such at any cost. Just as conquistador Hernan Cortes burned his ships in Mexico in 1519 to eliminate the concept of returning to Spain in the minds of his men, Taiwan should intellectually sever itself from the Republic of China concept.
Next, Taiwan should change its image from a floating semiconductor factor to a much more fulsome bastion of economic freedom and power. Comprehensive reform and deregulation of the banking and insurance industries will spur domestic growth and attract foreign capital. Taiwan should welcome funds from Chinese nationals provided they do not result in control of a company receiving the investment or any transfer of technology. Be more like Singapore or Dubai. Financial power and foreign investment will give foreign governments and institutions reasons to discourage China from attacking. Free people elsewhere will be more inclined to stand up for a true symbol of freedom — and that symbol might be seen as useful to Americans hoping China itself chooses freedom one day.
In the wake of failed globalist institutions and arrangements like the World Trade Organization and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Taiwan could launch an economically focused grouping of governments and institutions. This grouping would recognize that the era of growth by attracting manufacturing capabilities and jobs from the United States and relying on export-driven economic activity is over. Free-market, pro-capitalist domestic economic reforms will hold the key for what used to be called the Asian tiger economies to regain their high levels of growth. The point of the group would be to give those involved the political and intellectual cover necessary to make difficult but important domestic reforms. Taiwan could open a gathering with a plan to lower the cost of energy (and therefore the cost of just about everything from food to housing) by building modular nuclear reactors around the country.
Allow Taiwan’s currency to appreciate and then peg it to the U.S. dollar. Strengthening the currency will ease inflation by lowering the cost of imported goods and services. This will improve the quality of life for Taiwanese and lower Taiwan’s trade deficit with America. Pegging the New Taiwan dollar to the U.S. dollar will remove currency risk and further enable growth in finance and trade.
Finally, increase ties with Americans and other natural allies by making life easier for them if they want to live and work in Taiwan. Americans and Japanese should get automatic long-term work visas upon request. Citizens of poorer countries like the Philippines may need to face a quota, but it should be a generous one. Taiwan should create reasonable paths to citizenship for long-term economic migrants who are committed to the nation. Taiwanese banks should start using U.S. FICO scores and other measures of creditworthiness to ease access to credit for Americans who want to live or do business in Taiwan.
The net result of these reforms would be to dispense with theatrics and what has repeatedly proven to be ineffective, to embrace reality even when painful, and to get on with life. Taiwan’s future would not be decided in Washington or Beijing. It would be decided in Taiwan.
Christian Whiton was a State Department senior advisor in the second Bush and first Trump administrations. He advised the Secretary of State and other senior officials about public affairs and East Asia matters. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a principal at Rockies Aria LLC, a public affairs and government relations firm. He previously worked for KPMG LLP, Fidelity Investments and Oppenheimer & Co. He is the author of “Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War” and edits “Capitalist Notes” on Substack. He has appeared on Fox Business, Fox News, BBC, CNBC, Newsmax, NHK, Sky News Australia and numerous other outlets. Mr. Whiton has a BA from Tulane University and an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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