Recent history shows that “weakness is provocative” when facing an aggressor, former US deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger said at a forum in Taipei on Thursday, adding that Taiwan should be equipped to push back against aggression and bullying.
Pottinger, a visiting fellow at the Stanford, California-based Hoover Institution, was answering a question from Forward Alliance director Enoch Wu (吳怡農), who moderated the session, regarding common misconceptions about the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and potential consequences.
Drawing on The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, a new book he edited, Pottinger said that contrary to what many believe, state-to-state relations are distinct from interpersonal relations in which people tend to be more willing to extend an olive branch.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
“The weaker a dictatorship thinks we are, and the more that we try to appease them or reassure them, the more aggressive they become,” Pottinger said.
China is “an aggressive state across the Taiwan Strait that is becoming more and more aggressive primarily because it believes it can get away with that aggression because we’ve fallen into this sense of self-doubt or the fear we might be provoking” aggression, he said.
Pottinger delved into recent history for examples, linking the US’ failure to deliver on its word that it would retaliate against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if his regime used chemical weapons against its own people to the invasion of Crimea by Russia in 2014.
Similarly, when the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government and the US retreated from Afghanistan, Russia began a new phase of its war with Ukraine six months later, he said.
Not long ago, the US lifted sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who is now amassing troops on the border of Guyana, threatening to invade and annex part of the country, Pottinger said.
“So there’s a pattern here,” he said. “We need to be strong, sometimes uncomfortably strong, in order, paradoxically, to achieve peace itself.”
Beacon Global Strategies vice president Ivan Kanapathy, who wrote two chapters of the book, said that Taiwan — separated from China by the Taiwan Strait, the figurative “boiling moat” — should invest in more missiles and drones, especially “lethal” loitering munitions.
Taiwan should “have those in extremely large quantities, orders of magnitude more than we currently find here” as part of reform efforts it should undertake to build up its defense capabilities, said Kanapathy, a senior associate at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Asked by Wu why he had alluded in a chapter that Taiwan’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program was a “misallocation of resources,” Kanapathy said that it is a matter of cost-benefit analysis.
Taiwan’s gross domestic income is about 5 percent that of China’s, while the US government estimates that Beijing allocates a defense budget of US$700 billion — about three times what China reports, he said.
In addition, Taiwan’s geography makes submarines “too vulnerable,” and although they would be critical in a potential war with China, “they’re going to come to this fight from well outside when the time comes, because that’s how they will be used most effectively and how they have the most survivability,” he said.
Pottinger said that Taiwan should have put the money it spent on the submarine program into, for example, building a large fleet of uncrewed submersible vehicles, which would be “more effective” against and “very dangerous” to China’s navy.
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