Tag Archives: historical memory

Saw this graph on The Twitters. It fits with a recurring narrative that Taiwan is spending too little on defense, and some of the more obnoxious addendums to this line of thought is that Taiwan is purposely waiting for America to bail it out.

Taiwan should spend at least 3% of its GDP on defense. Taiwan should not have allowed its armed forces to fall below 200,000. I have no idea why a nation like Taiwan, facing the enemy that it has, does not have conscription for men and women for at least a year. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense and national security establishments are overdue for thorough modernization and reform. If the point of this graph is that Taiwan should spend more on its military, and take its own defense more seriously, I am in agreement.

How social media and a graph can easily mislead is this. I don’t think Taiwan’s democratic forces have the wherewithal, without sustained assistance from the US and Japan, to reform its national security establishment – Ministry of National Defense, intelligence, etc. One can pour ten times the cash into this structure and raise the conscription time to three years and still get unsatisfactory results. This graph also does a poor job of capturing the effect of decades of contradictory, unsteady, and self-defeating US policy on how to arm Taiwan, and sometimes, even whether or not to arm Taiwan. A few examples:

The US sabotaged Taiwan’s nuclear weapons program. I have mixed feelings about this policy choice, but even if Taiwan only has a credible not totally assembled nuclear deterrence force, maybe the scaremongering headlines of 2022 would read differently.

For decades the US interfered with and sabotaged Taiwan’s indigenous counterstrike/long-range missile programs.

Did Taiwanese combat pilots fly the venerable F-100s and F-104s well into the 1990s because they love history, or because the US prevented sales of advanced jet fighters for decades?

The billions the Taiwanese were forced to spend by US policy to develop the inferior IDF fighters achieve better result had the US sold the jet fighters it was willing to sell to Israel and Korea.

When the US forced Taiwan to purchase the inferior F-16A/B in the 1990s instead of the F-16C/D, with minimal anti-surface munitions and inferior Sparrow missiles, was this about Taiwanese budget or US policy?

Are the Taiwanese, in 2022, still sailing two 1980s Dutch diesel submarines and two World War II era GUPPY IIs because they refuse to spend on defense?

Are the millions Taiwan is forced to spend to cobble together its own indigenous submarines now the best way to spend defense dollars?

How many years did US policy force the Taiwanese Navy to sail World War Two era destroyers?

Or prevented Taiwan from importing AEGIS/VLS for its navy?

Or interfered with Taiwan’s acquisition of anti-ship missiles throughout the 1970s and 1980s, forcing Taiwan into a costly and fun-filled route importing the Israeli Gabriels, reverse engineering it, and manufacturing its own HFIIs and HFIIIs?

Imperial superpowers have the luxury of selective amnesia and never having to apologize. Might makes right, we get it. If you take every single dollar Taiwan has ever spent on the military from 1960 to 2022, and had the US treated Taiwan as an ally like Israel, or Japan, or Korea, or Singapore – if that amount spent by Taiwan could have avoided decades of US policy detours and delays and the DC “balancing” and “managing” and “de-escalation” and “off ramping” …. Taiwan’s security in 2022 would have been in a far, far better place, and US policymakers would not feel this cornered. So yes encourage Taiwan to spend more and do more, but American policymakers should also take a long hard look into the mirror.

© Taiwan in World History 台灣與世界歷史. This site grants open access for educational and not-for-profit use. Maps and illustrations are borrowed under educational and not-for-profit fair use. If you are the rights holder and prefer to not have your work shared, please email TaiwanWorldHistory (at) Gmail (dot) com and the content will be removed.

[From:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Ronald_Reagan_and_Vice-President_George_H._W._Bush_meet_with_Soviet_General_Secretary_Mikhail_Gorbachev_on_Governor%27s_Island_New_York.jpg%5D

Gorbachev visited Taiwan Republic in 1994, and gave a speech at the Legislative Yuan. I don’t recall any hysteria from western talking heads or Beijing …. Not sure if this was before or after his Pizza Hut commercials ….

Because I never believed the Cold War ended, much less that ‘we’ won, I ignored the incessant arguing in the west over who should get the credit. Though as a subset of the anti-anti-communism in the west, I have been fascinated by the western adoration for Gorbachev, the kind of cult of personality that no mortal human could possibly live up to, and wondered to what degree the adoration is about Gorbachev, and how much is a dig at Reagan. This is where, and not shocking if you have been following closely how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been covered differently in the west versus the less credulous, more realistic Ukrainian, Baltic, and eastern European press, reminders from these victims of Soviet communism with less fond memories of Gorbachev provide a useful antidote.

I think this is a fair assessment. Gorbachev rose through the ranks of a totalitarian communist system, anointed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to be their dictator. So I have never had illusions about how he came to power, and what that meant. However, on a range of behavior of communist dictators that one would reasonably expect, Gorbachev must be given credit for taking the least bloody route while facing the final collapse of the Soviet Union – i.e., by his decisions, lives were spared. This is particularly important when comparing Gorbachev’s decision with that of the Chinese communists.

Interesting too, to think of different global examples of this cruel and inhumane Leninist party-state – Gorbachev’s Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-Kuo, and Lee Teng-hui’s China Kuomintang, and the Chinese Communist Party. And to compare similar Leninist reflexes – authoritarian, paranoid, corrupt, secretive, bloody. And to see different paths chosen by different leaders at key historical moments. The China CCP chose in 1989 to murder students and civilians. And their subsequent policies of techno-authoritarian control were reflections of the Chinese communists not wanting to repeat Gorbachev’s “mistakes.” Whereas Gorbachev’s CPSU and Lee’s China KMT in the 1990s accepted democratization and electoral competition relatively peacefully. The China KMT after Lee and Russia after Gorbachev both had adjustment problems, too complicated to get into here. Though thus far Taiwan-the-democratic-nation has fared far better than Russia’s stillborn democracy. At key historical moments, a brave and clear-eyed leader is needed to prevent a bloody massacre – that part of history is basically luck. What would have happened had Gorbachev accepted the institutional impulse of his CPSU and resorted to a bloody crackdown in Eastern Europe and USSR? Or had he tried to engineer a war against NATO to save his communist empire? What might have happened if Dr. Lee coveted wealth and power more than he did and engineered a way for his Leninist China KMT party-state to operate a Singapore-style ‘soft’ authoritarian technocratic state?

Other world history cross currents and sidenotes on the Leninist party-state. Without Sun Yat-sen turning to the Soviet Union for aid the re-engineered China Kuomintang may not have survived. And without the military academy that the Soviets sponsored, which produced so many early China KMT and CCP military leaders, the latter-day anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek probably would not have been able to seize leadership of the China KMT. Chiang’s eldest son Chiang Ching-Kuo, the last dictator over Taiwan, was sent to study in the USSR and briefly held hostage by Stalin. And Lee Teng-Hui was rumored to have flirted with Marxism during his college years as a Taiwanese subject of the Japanese empire. One should also note: that the two shrillest, most narrow-minded, hardliner extremist ethnonationalist political parties of modern China, KMT and CCP, are both products of an alien, Leninist ideology-structure. Ironies of history abound ….

Which got me thinking about Nelson Mandela. Not quite the same storyline as the Leninist parties, but with a lifetime of suffering and cruelty wherein when he came to power historical precedence would have easily predicted something far more vengeful and bloody. And I have always marveled at and pondered on how Mandela managed to do the exact opposite – to have the discipline and moral-ethical fortitude to choose to use his credibility to spare his long-suffering nation decades of chaos and violence. To lead his people to a path of peace and reconciliation.

This is why history and studying human behavior are so much fun. One can track data, one can study patterns – yet history is full of these blink of an eye, contingent on personality and luck choices individuals make. What would China and the world be like now had the students of Tiananmen survived and if some of them are now leading their nation? What might have been. 1.9.2022

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The solo visit by Blackburn was the fourth US delegation to Taiwan since Pelosi’s landmark visit, coming a few days after Indiana governor Eric Holcomb and a cross-party Japanese delegation, and just weeks after an 11-member delegation from Lithuania … Shortly before his arrival, Keiji Furuya, a member of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party, tweeted: “China’s military provocations and other erratic behaviour pose a risk to the peace and safety of not only Taiwan, but east Asia as a whole.” … “A lot of what’s happening is symbolic. I don’t want to suggest it’s not important – it can have substantive effect,” said Raymond Kuo, a political scientist at the Rand Corporation. … “But in terms of Taiwan’s ability to defend itself [and] diversify its economic ties away from China … those policies haven’t been put in place yet. They’re coming down the pipe which is positive, and I think China’s action has spurred on unity in Congress and support from other countries.”

If whoever from the Biden administration did not overreact and unwisely leaked Speaker Pelosi’s planned visit to Taiwan to selected press, and then tried to mobilize the chorus of talking heads generating weeks of ever more hysterical punditry against the visit. And if the Chinese communists did not respond to this routine, nothing out of the ordinary visit with their ballistic missile tantrum (and to deliberately choose to include the Japanese EEZ in this belligerent overreaction ….). Given what we know about the global news cycle, the fixation of the Euro-American centric English language press on domestic and Euro-American news, honestly, how many people would have noticed that Speaker Pelosi or any of these subsequent delegations visited Taiwan? So was this a “Pelosi effect”? Or, is it a “Deliberate and unwise White House leak, DC foreign policy establishment, and the Chinese Communist Party” effect?

It is fair to think of the Pelosi effect as having reframed how the many parties – democratic Taiwan, its neighbor Japan, US national interest in the region, and the Chinese communists are discussed and covered in the west.

The conceptual framing of ‘symbolic’ v ‘ substantive’ is fascinating. When journalists cover foreign dignitaries visiting the White House I don’t recall ever seeing this framing. On the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine when western leaders visited Moscow, were those trips symbolic or substantive (most likely, as with most visits, both ….) I agree with Dr. Kuo that given the scale and immediacy of Chinese communist belligerence, these important foreign visits must be matched with sustained, multidomain, concrete action. And while imperial powers often are slow in reflection, an honest appraisal is that the US has been decades late in understanding the threat posed by the Chinese communists, distracted and navel-gazing for decades – urgent changes from the US are required in ensuring its West Pacific alliance system will survive the Chinese communist challenge.

An important reason why foreign dignitaries visiting Taiwan Republic is critical is that for decades the China Communist Party and the China KMT have tried to frame the “Taiwan Problem” as a domestic, end of the most recent Chinese civil war issue. Once Taiwan started electing its presidents and national legislators in 1996, the Chinese civil war-domestic problem could no longer stand. This is why President Lee and President Tsai’s seemingly mild and intuitive focus on democratic sovereignty bothers both China parties so much. The Chinese communist’s recent claim that the Taiwan Strait is “domestic, territorial water” is just another facet of this line of thinking. Speaker Pelosi and others, flying official aircraft, using their official titles, landing in a dual-use civilian/military air base in Taipei, visiting democratically elected national leaders in the Taiwanese executive and legislative branches, all without receiving permission (visas, flight clearance ….) from Beijing, punctures the positions held by the Chinese parties.

There is also much to be said for expanding the level of official contact between Taiwan and its democratic allies, including higher officials and military leaders. Given the gravity of the geostrategic threats posed by Beijing, isn’t it odd that the US Secretary of State doesn’t speak with the Taiwanese Foreign Minister on the phone, the Secretary of Defense, or the Joint Chief of Staff? Why shouldn’t the elected presidents of both nations speak regularly – to coordinate, clarify, to understand one another’s priorities and preferences? Such a breakthrough would be symbolic but also address glaring substantive problems. And given the innovations in online communications brought about because of the pandemic, one hope for greater creativity between DC, Taipei, and Tokyo. If it is too much still for President Tsai to fly to DC and visit the White House, why should she be prevented from attending Congressional and Executive branch-hosted online forums and meetings? And vice versa.

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據指出，面對中國軍事上步步進逼，台美已有共識，在有限的國防預算上，除了要調整建軍戰備在建構不對稱戰力上，例如陸軍改變預算項目，將A6自走砲車預算取消，將其預算額度移去採購「海馬斯」多管火箭系統（HIMARS），從原來的11套增加到29套，並採購射程300公里的「陸軍戰術飛彈系統」（ATACMS）；再者，將擴編的後備旅所需要的個人武器、通訊以及夜戰裝備在2023年要快速補充後進行訓練，讓後備旅在動員後能真正發揮支援的戰力。另外，要提升各軍種主戰裝備的妥善率，也將大幅調高各軍種作業維持費的額度。

One. I find this report reassuring. Taiwan cannot afford to domestically develop too many weapon systems – and for historical, diplomatic, political, and psychological reasons, this is the impression one gets, that for a modest-sized nation, with limited funds, with a very acute national security threat, Taiwan’s domestic military research institutions (mostly military and quasi-government controlled) have tried to cover too many projects. An important cause of this has been ambiguous and self-defeating US policies – forcing Taiwan to waste time and resources on the IDF jet fighters, the long-delayed Taiwanese submarine program being two of the many examples.

Two. As a part of Taiwan’s democratizing there are three pillars of “normalization” required – normalizing Taiwan’s international presence/alliance arrangements as a democratic nation-state; normalizing Taiwan’s domestic civilian-led democratic political institutions to include the military and military adjacent planning; and normalizing the process wherein domestically developed weapon system coheres with Taiwan’s overall national security, geostrategic, and geoeconomics objectives. Again, Taiwan’s national security transition faces two legacies – transforming the military from a dictatorship preservation entity into a national protection military while at the same time waiting for the US to update its previously unhelpful security assistance policies towards Taiwan.

Three. A critical area of reform is the democratization and “Taiwanization” of the national security apparatus – using Ukraine as a role model – so that the total national power of Taiwan can be harnessed by its military. Cyberwarfare and drone technology are the two glaring areas where Taiwan has world-class talents in its civil society, yet an insular and slow-to-transform national security apparatus has been unable to absorb these national advantages fully. For the last few decades, one cannot see a concerted effort to invest in intelligence and electronic warfare – surprising for a small nation facing a giant enemy. The delay by many decades of effort to develop a domestic AEGIS/VLS-ish capacity for the Taiwanese Navy is another example of structural, and institutional challenges.

Four. Many encouraging signs these last few years that Taiwan’s ruling party, as well as its democratic allies, and reform-minded Taiwanese officers understand these areas require rapid transformation. It may not be the most exciting area of discussion compared with flashy weapon platforms – I am thrilled that Taiwanese and US officials are focusing on logistics, spare parts, munitions, and vital strategic stockpiles. They may not be newspaper headline material nor look good for parades. Still, one hopes serious preparation will convince the Chinese communists that a war of annexation would be too costly for their dictatorship. 30.8.2022

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