Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Time for Taiwan’s global inclusion

Ben Goren

Over the past few months, various media outlets, think tanks and lobby groups have published numerous opinion columns and reports about the implications for Taiwan given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

About a week ago, the Taiwan Policy Centre, a non-partisan research and advocacy group, complemented this coverage with the publication of its launch report, “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow?”

As the center’s director of communications, I have worked with colleagues across party lines to produce a paper that refocuses the conversation around the unique circumstances of the nation’s current security context.

US forces would defend Taiwan: Biden

Taipei Times

President Joe Biden speaks during a news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at Akasaka Palace, Monday, May 23, 2022, in Tokyo.
Photo: AP

US President Joe Biden yesterday vowed that US forces would defend Taiwan militarily in the event of a Chinese attack in his strongest statement to date on the issue.

Beijing is already “flirting with danger,” Biden said following talks with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo, in which the pair agreed to monitor Chinese naval activity and joint Chinese-Russian exercises.

Unification extremism cannot go unchecked

Mike Chang 張昭仁

On May 14, an 18-year-old white American man gunned down people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, killing 10, eight of whom were black.

The perpetrator, a white supremacist, selected an area he knew black people gathered in.

The following day, David Wenwei Chou (周文偉), a 68-year-old Taiwanese-born Chinese-American pro-unification nationalist extremist entered a luncheon for Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in southern California, sealing the entrance with superglue and chains to make sure the Taiwanese congregation would have no means of escape, and began shooting, intent on killing the people trapped inside.

Give Taiwan what it thinks it needs – just in case

Walter Lohman

Will the US come to the defense of Taiwan if and when China makes its move? Like most friends of Taiwan, I’ve been saying “yes” for a couple decades. But the truth is that none of us, in or out of government, really know. This is precisely why we all need to show humility in our advice on how Taiwan should prepare itself for such an eventuality.

After all, it’s their country, and they have no choice but to live with the consequences.

A couple weeks ago the New York Times published an article that put this reality in stark relief. As detailed there, the Biden administration is seriously committed to constraining the choices Taiwan can make in its choice of weapons purchases. This is not completely new. The US and Taiwan have consulted on Taiwan’s capabilities for decades. It does not always get what it wants.

Indo-Pacific: Taiwan not included in trade pact

Taipei Times

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan speaks at a daily press briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington on Wednesday.
Photo: AFP

US President Joe Biden is expected to unveil a list of nations today who would be joining a long anticipated Indo-Pacific region trade pact, but Taiwan will not be among them.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that Taiwan is not among the governments included in the launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a trade pact that is meant to allow the US to work more closely with key Asian economies on issues including supply chains, digital trade, clean energy and anticorruption efforts.

China proves Fukuyama wrong

Parris Chang 張旭成

As the Soviet Union was collapsing in the late 1980s and Russia seemed to be starting the process of democratization, 36-year-old US academic Francis Fukuyama had the audacity to assert that the world was at the “end of history.”

Fukuyama claimed that democratic systems would become the norm, and peace would prevail the world over.

He published a grandiose essay, “The End of History?” in the summer 1989 edition of the journal National Interest. Overnight, Fukuyama became a famous theorist in the US, western Europe, Japan and even Taiwan.

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