In a recent article, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute praised the U.S. for announcing the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and actively laying out the Indo-Pacific region, and analyzed the four main reasons why Taiwan is important.
On April 14, the U.S. government announced that U.S. troops in Afghanistan would begin an orderly withdrawal on May 1 and be completely withdrawn by September 11.
On April 16, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) published an article praising this. In the article, the ASPI cited at length the four main reasons why Taiwan is important.
The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan is a powerful statement that the United States has reordered its priorities for the next decade, the article said.
The article notes that last week, the U.S. government sent an “informal delegation” to Taiwan to announce the end of its military presence in Afghanistan and to push the Strategic Competition Act of 2021 through Congress. To stop the military adventurism of the Chinese Communist Party in Taiwan.
According to the article, Taiwan is important to both the United States and Australia, far beyond the scope of written statements of commitment such as the U.S. Taiwan Relations Act.
There are at least four compelling reasons why Taiwan is important, and they are bound to attract the time and attention of leaders and governments in the Indo-Pacific region and NATO countries.
These reasons are a combination of strategic, economic, and technical themes.
The first reason is geographic. Taiwan’s location gives those who own it the ability to project military power into mainland China and complicate the Chinese Communist Party’s military planning and power projection. (Had) the Chinese (Communist) state owned Taiwan, it would have removed this limitation and made it easier to project force into Japan and South Korea and beyond the ‘first island chain’.
The second reason is that Taiwan is a democratic island nation of 23 million people in the Indo-Pacific region. Whether it will be conquered by an authoritarian Chinese Communist government is important to any other democracy on the planet, and it is certainly important to Australia, a democratic island of 26 million people in the Indo-Pacific region, and to the United States.
There is also the economic and technological importance of Taiwan, which has most of the world’s semiconductor industrial capacity. This high-tech sector is at the center of the future U.S.-China competition for economic and strategic power. Despite the billions of RMB spent and decades of effort, China (the Communist Party) still lags behind the United States and Taiwan in this area. Taking over Taiwan would close the apparent technological gap in Chinese (Communist) domestic and military technology, while providing Beijing with a powerful additional tool to coerce us economically (remember that Beijing tried to do this to Japan over rare earths).
A final reason is that momentum matters in strategic competition, and Taiwan must be at the center of U.S. and allied priorities for decades to come. U.S. and allied analysts and commentators tell themselves, the administration and anyone else who will listen that China’s island-building in the South China Sea and the establishment of military bases there only gives it control over “a pile of rocks.
Instead, Beijing’s militarization of the South China Sea has altered the strategic position of the Chinese Communist Party, put Southeast Asian countries at a great disadvantage, and weakened the United States and its allies. Had Beijing controlled Taiwan, what would have been the more far-reaching implications?
So while the Afghan decision seems far from Taiwan… But it is necessary and timely.
Recent Comments