Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Amid the ongoing expansion of ties between Taiwan and nations in central and eastern Europe, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa has emerged as another regional leader advocating for a greater role for Taiwan in the international system.

With Slovenian parliamentary elections in about a month, Taiwan is hardly the only country where Jansa sought to leave a clear footprint.

On Tuesday last week, he joined his Czech and Polish counterparts in Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The world is focused on Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. And outside of Europe, no country has paid closer attention than Taiwan, a fellow frontline democracy also threatened by a nearby revisionist authoritarian power in Beijing. The lessons of the war in Ukraine are relevant to the entire free world. But it is especially crucial that the Taiwanese people learn from them so that the Taiwanese people can secure their own freedom from tyranny.

The first lesson is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, cannot be trusted. Like the Kremlin, the CCP views international treaties and obligations as mere parchment barriers to its own ambitions. The Ukrainian government, and many nations around the world, made the mistake of accepting Russia’s word in the Budapest Memorandum. What followed is Ukraine’s present catastrophe.