The race to protect Taiwan Republic’s democratic sovereignty, “Taiwan Coast Guard ship docks in Honolulu Harbor,” Taiwan News. Geostrategery, Taiwan Republic 台灣国 and world history classrooms.

The race to protect Taiwan Republic’s democratic sovereignty, “Taiwan Coast Guard ship docks in Honolulu Harbor,” Taiwan News. Geostrategery, Taiwan Republic 台灣国 and world history classrooms. The most important facet of this news is dismantling the decades-long, artificially imposed “ambiguity” on the sovereign status of Taiwan. Next time this ought to be Coast Guard to Coast Guard, routinized, official visits. Barring an unwise push from the Chinese communists and its allies inside Taiwan Republic, the US, Japan, and the Free World will continue to walk up to the edge of fully recognizing Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty in what I have termed “all-but fully normalized.” When the Taiwanese Coast Guard vessel – what could be more official and “sovereign” than that – can publicly sail into an American harbor, then why shouldn’t American and Japanese Coast Guard vessels visit Taiwanese ports? And when that occurs, then why shouldn’t naval vessels, and air force aircraft follow? Rather than thinking of these changes as “message sending” or primarily symbolic, the important element is the ongoing global struggle to generate irreversible “facts on the ground” in the Indo-Pacific by both sides. The Chinese communists, their allies inside Taiwan and the West, are desperately trying to delegitimize Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty – by declaring the Taiwan Strait as they have with the South Sea as “domestic waters,” denying Taiwan has the right to self-defense, in academia and information warfare arguing that “cross-strait tensions” is a continuation of the latest Chinese Civil War which ended in 1949, etc. An important part of this Beijing-led “facts on the ground” warfare is the probing military and quasi-military missions – flying manned and unmanned military aircraft and naval vessels close to Taiwan – crossing the international boundaries, first around Quemoy and Matsu, probing missions near Tamsui, and so on. In this context, the US, Japan, and the Free World must respond by rapidly creating a different set of “facts on the ground” – unlike the Cold War era where tens of thousands of troops were stationed in Taiwan, what is required now are naval port visits, airport layovers, joint training missions, American and Japanese military advisors and liaisons, all concrete ways to demonstrate to the Chinese communists that in reality, the Free World does not require permission from the dictators in Beijing to conduct sovereign-to-sovereign activities with the duly elected national government of Taiwan. At this stage of Chinese imperialist belligerence, these are the only ways to convince dictator Xi that a military invasion of Taiwan will guarantee a military response from the US and the Free World.

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