The terrorist attacks in Paris are reverberating around the world. At the closing ceremony of the APEC summit on Wednesday last week, all APEC leaders vowed to fight against terrorism by facilitating more international cooperation. However, because of China’s perpetual attempts to isolate Taiwan, the country has been marginalized from the international security regimes. Without Taiwan’s participation, there is a major blind spot in international cooperation in this area.
According to a report published in January by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a well-known think tank in the US, Taiwan’s absence from international counterterrorism regimes would diminish the effectiveness of the initiatives and pose risks to other countries. Moreover, Taiwan is an important international transportation hub and economic center; its exclusion constitutes a significant loss for the international community.
For example, millions of people visit or pass through Taiwan every year. However, Taiwan does not have full capacity to discover and act over suspicious people and international criminals since it does not have access to the Interpol database, which provides a continually updated list of such people.
That being so, Taiwan can only build its own database by collecting information from other friendly countries, meaning such information is often late and incomplete. Meanwhile, Taiwan cannot share its information with the family of nations through this channel. This makes Taiwan a blind spot in international counterterrorism initiatives and poses risks both in Taiwan and across the globe.
In addition, as an international economic hub, Taiwan needs to work with international organizations to combat the financing of terrorist organizations and money laundering. Taiwan has participated in two regional organizations — the Asia-Pacific Group on Money Laundering and the Egmont Group — and has played an active and important role in regional cooperation therein. However, Taiwan has been excluded from the Financial Action Task Force, which is the most important international body on this issue, and hence it can only acquire information through its foreign counterparts.
At the international level, the UN has established a complex and multi-layer structure to strengthen the coordination and coherence of counterterrorism. The UN Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force plays a coordinating role; it hosts several working groups that seek to bring together stakeholders and partners and provide most up-to-date information on these issues. However, Taiwan’s lack of membership in the UN impedes it from accessing these resources.
At the regional level, organizations like APEC have established a few counterterrorism mechanisms as well. In response to the events of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the US, APEC established the APEC Counterterrorism Task Force to enhance counterterrorism cooperation. However, although Taiwan is a long-standing APEC member, its participation in these mechanisms has also been blocked by China.
Members of the international community have become aware that international security cannot be fully achieved without Taiwan’s participation. For instance, the US just passed legislation to promote Taiwan as an observer in Interpol.
However, if the international community wants to enhance safety and security in the region, its needs to move forthwith toward acceptance of Taiwan in international organizations, and particularly those that deal with safety and security.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Chen Po-wen is a student at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Center for the Study of Human Rights.
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
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS