Recent news reports said the US and Japan are planning to station military on Yonaguni Island in response to demands from local residents following China’s military expansion. A closer analysis, however, shows that it is more likely that such a military deployment would be the result of US and Japanese questions about the future strategic direction of Taiwan. In other words, the move is aimed at Taiwan rather than China.
Yonaguni lies almost on the same latitude as Hualien, and when the weather is good, it is possible to see Hualien from the island. Yonaguni residents often go to Hualien for shopping on weekends, and some Yonaguni children study in Hualien. It is the Japanese territory closest to Taiwan. Taiwan shields Yonaguni from China, and it lies quite a distance away from the Philippines, so there can only be two reasons for stationing troops there.
The first reason is that the US and Japan believe there is a very high risk of conflict in the Taiwan Strait, and that after an outbreak of war, it is very likely that Chinese military would enter and leave Taiwan on the east coast, which would be the reason for strengthening the military presence on Yonaguni.
This implies that the US and Japan do not buy into the claim by Taiwan’s government that cross-strait tensions have fallen and that the situation has stabilized, and that they are stationing military east of Hualien to prepare for all eventualities.
The second possibility is that the US and Japan feel the accession of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration has brought about a fundamental change in the direction of Taiwanese strategy and the two countries are therefore preparing for the possibility that Taiwan would side with China in a hypothetical future conflict between the US and Japan on the one hand, and China on the other.
The fact is that after Ma hinted at the possibility of war with Japan over the Diaoyutai and that he would tolerate calls within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to side with China against Japan, after the National Security Council’s advocacy that Taiwan abandon its passive sea and air defense, and after the recent refusal to meet with Japan’s representative to Taiwan, Tokyo is questioning the government’s strategy direction, while the US is beginning to worry over the possible Finlandization of Taiwan.
These concerns prohibit the US-Japanese alliance from treating Taiwan as an ally. If Taiwan were to cooperate with their opponent, Hualien would no longer function as a shield from China and Yonaguni would be on the front line of the conflict and it would also be used to monitor Taiwan’s actions.
Regardless of whether the US and Japan station troops on Yonaguni because they are worried about Taiwan or because they want to monitor Taiwan, such action does not coincide with what the Ma administration has said.
Late this year, Japan will announce its defense strategy outline, and next year is the 50th anniversary of the US-Japanese alliance. By that time, the plans of the two allies will become clearer.
However, the fact that the promise to let Taiwan assemble P3-C anti-submarine aircraft fell through tells us that Taipei has become a strategic uncertainty factor.
As a result of the government moving closer to China, distancing itself from the US and opposing Japan, Taiwan has gone from being a friend that cooperates with the US and Japan to a country that the two allies must defend themselves against. The stationing of troops on Yonaguni will be the first step in this change.
Lai I-chung is director of foreign policy studies at Taiwan Thinktank.
TRANSLATED BY PERRY SVENSSON
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