On Sept. 1, 2020, long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Czech Senate President Milos Vystrcil stood in the Legislative Yuan and said in Chinese: “I am Taiwanese.”
Vystrcil referred to a 1963 quote by former US president John Kennedy: “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.”
He did this to convey, from one small nation under the shadow of a domineering communist neighbor to another, a sense of solidarity. At the time, Vystrcil would have been more confident in rock-solid assurances of support from the US and NATO.
With Ukraine’s ongoing existential battle with Russia, concerns over delayed US military aid to Ukraine and fears that Russian President Vladimir Putin has his eyes set on further territorial grabs in Europe, Vystrcil’s gesture of solidarity takes on a new urgency.
In April last year, during an interview with French newspaper Les Echos and Politico Europe as he was departing from a state visit to Beijing, French President Emmanuel Macron said he was reluctant to follow the US’ agenda in any way that would sacrifice the EU’s strategic autonomy, including making any moves that would accelerate a crisis over Taiwan.
Macron had called for a “true European army” as early as November 2018, saying that Europe could no longer rely on the US for defense, given then-US president Donald Trump’s “America first” agenda.
While Vystrcil could say, “I am Taiwanese” as a show of solidarity, one could say that Macron has become a “US-skeptic” out of concern that this solidarity is dissipating.
Now, to the consternation of the US and allies such as the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK, Macron has floated the possibility of NATO member states putting boots on the ground in Ukraine.
At this point, from Taiwan’s perspective, the important thing is not whether Macron’s suggestion comes to pass, it is that urgency will always cause a response in security situations forever in flux.
Commentators have said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must be closely watching the response of the West to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, to learn how to proceed with planning an invasion of Taiwan. Many say that the delay getting the latest round of military aid to Ukraine passed through the US Congress would embolden Beijing.
This might well be the case, but it is by no means a simple equation. Beijing would want to avoid a war, and would have seen how the regional situation has changed over the past few years as a direct response to its own increasingly aggressive moves, with Australia, India, Japan, Philippines, South Korea and the US, among others, consolidating stances to meet the threat of a Taiwan Strait contingency.
Concerns over the reliability of US support are undoubtedly damaging, yet they have also elicited a heightened sense of urgency among those affected, as is seen in the debate over security in Europe, as well as in Taiwan and the surrounding region.
The discussion published on this page about the lessons Taiwanese can learn from the war in Ukraine makes for grim reading, but there is nevertheless an increasing awareness of how urgent it is to be prepared for any eventuality.
The tensions surrounding the capsizing of the Chinese fishing vessel in Kinmen’s waters is concerning, not because of its potential to lead to military conflict, but because of the likelihood that the CCP would exploit it to further attempts to establish a “new normal” in the area.
Beijing can be expected to use the situation to bolster its claim that those waters constitute domestic waters and to entice Kinmen residents, already strongly pro-China for historical and geographic reasons, to accept the CCP’s advances.
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