Crying foul
Dear Johnny,
I’m afraid Taiwan’s fall into the Dragon’s Mouth of Communist China is going faster than water being flushed. US President George W. Bush has the bragging rights of kicking former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) long before President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took his turn.
Mr Bush and his fellow Republicans decided it was in the long-term interest of their pocketbooks to dump the goal of democracy in the Asia-Pacific. This meant that Taiwan had to go. Not completely, of course — there was still some military equipment they could sell. Also, they needed the threat of intervention to get the best trading terms they could. You gotta remember, it’s not that Bush and friends disliked Taiwan, but money is money.
As for Chen, I don’t know if his sin of using an expense account for unanswerable answers is a bigger sin than Mr Ma’s unanswerable answers, but politics is politics. I do think the Democratic Progressive Party ought to cry foul though: The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) leader got to walk the streets free like a human being while they found him “not guilty.” Of course, the KMT has no history of democracy.
I cried foul and wrote a letter to Bush at the White House, but as expected I got the standard reply: “Thank you, but the White House cannot respond to every message.” I’m sure Mr Ma does the same thing.
I wish the Taiwanese people a lot of luck with the KMT and its rush to communism. I just hope that the next time I take my wife back to visit her family there aren’t armed soldiers on every other street.DALE BUTLER
Johnny replies: With a bit of luck — bittersweet luck — the soldiers you see will be those of the Neihu Freedom Force, posted to protect civilians and essential infrastructure (7-Elevens, KTVs, food malls) from official molestation.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS