The night time earlier than boarding a flight residence, on the finish of a visit that had taken me from D.C. to Taiwan, Japan, Macedonia, Turkey, and again once more, I got here throughout a tweet that succinctly crystallized lots of the fleeting impressions I had gathered on the Pacific leg of my journey. The tweet was from Tanner Greer, a superb and iconoclastic China scholar, citing a quote about Taiwan typically attributed to Kurt Campbell, years earlier than he grew to become President Joe Biden’s chief Asia adviser on the National Security Council: “I thought I was going to find a second Israel; I found a second Costa Rica.”
“Whether Campbell ever said such a thing is beyond the point,” Greer wrote, explaining that he’d heard it from a Taiwanese think-tank affiliate. “What mattered was that this retired Taiwanese nat/sec official believed he could have said it, and believed the description accurate.”
The level of the anecdote is that the Taiwanese don’t appear to take the threats to their safety almost as significantly as most observers in Washington do. The Taiwanese fear, after all. It’s not possible to not, particularly as a result of China has altered the established order within the Taiwan Strait after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s go to earlier this yr by repeatedly sending fighter jets and frigates far into Taiwan’s territorial waters. But the temper on the island is far more relaxed than the temper in Israel, a rustic that equally faces implacable hostility from a few of its neighbors. Indeed, the distinction couldn’t be extra pronounced.
So what’s going on with Taiwan? The two-day convention on nationalism I attended at Sun Yat-sen University, within the southern metropolis of Kaohsiung, offered some clues. In my discussions with Taiwanese students, I rapidly apprehended that Taiwanese identification continues to be in flux. This is to not recommend that Taiwan’s identification has not diverged considerably from China’s. Taiwan was lengthy a Chinese backwater, with a definite frontier tradition, earlier than it was ceded by the Qing dynasty to Japan in 1895. Half a century of Japanese colonialism left its mark, as did the following brutal (and solely semi-successful) re-Sinification insurance policies of China’s nationalist chief Chiang Kai-shek. The introduction of democracy in Taiwan in 1996, and its entrenchment since, has solely deepened the variations with the mainland.
But the variations are usually not so cut-and-dried. Spend a while speaking with Taiwanese enterprise leaders or coverage specialists within the extra affluent north, and Taiwanese identification takes on different valences. Almost nobody totally identifies with mainland China, however folks imagine they perceive mainlanders nicely—actually higher than the panicked West does. There is not any approach that China’s chief, Xi Jinping, would order an invasion, my fellow guests and I have been repeatedly assured. Such a transfer wouldn’t solely be fratricidal; it could be counterproductive—destroying an important hub in international provide chains that may in any other case fall into China’s lap ought to peaceable unification occur. One protection skilled I spoke with even ruefully floated the concept Taiwan is a buffer state prone to be drawn right into a tragic spiral of escalating tensions between China and the United States as they compete for regional hegemony. He was not fairly blaming us Americans for the conflict that many in Washington suppose is inevitable—however solely simply not.
Young folks have markedly ambivalent attitudes, too. One researcher on the convention mentioned preliminary survey information suggesting that the TikTookay era is creating some cultural affinity for China, particularly by way of a renewed dedication to Mandarin (though it’s the island’s official tongue, it competes with a number of minority languages). Taiwan stays a web exporter of popular culture to the mainland, I used to be instructed, however affect is just not a one-way road. Dexter Filkins’s latest essay on Taiwan in The New Yorker features a profile of two Taiwanese college college students who began a preferred satire present on YouTube poking enjoyable at China. As one in all them instructed him: “We don’t feel connected to China, but there is no way that we can say that we are not related to China, because many people’s ancestors are immigrants from there.”
As somebody who rigorously watches the Russia-Ukraine wrestle, I’m struck by the parallels. Taiwan is, in some ways, the place Ukraine was earlier than the 2014 battle began solidifying its nationwide identification nicely past the legacy of the nation’s lengthy and complex historical past. Like Taiwan, Ukraine has distinguished itself from its antagonistic neighbor by being a liberal democracy. And simply as Taiwan’s enterprise class was conflicted about its ties to China, so too did Ukraine’s post-Soviet oligarchs really feel equivocal about their hyperlinks to Russia. And certainly, just like the Taiwanese, many Ukrainians have been in deep denial in regards to the menace from subsequent door till it was virtually too late; regardless of all of the proof, even President Volodymyr Zelensky was typical of his compatriots who couldn’t deliver themselves to imagine that Russian President Vladimir Putin would go all in and invade, as he did earlier this yr.
Maybe, as in Ukraine, an all-out conflict with China would make the Taiwanese coalesce in ways in which would shock a customer to the island at the moment. But the issue for Taiwan is that, not like Ukraine, it doesn’t have the opportunity of buying and selling territory for time, retreating and ready till the enemy is overextended earlier than delivering lethal counterpunches. Taiwan is extra densely populated than anyplace else I’ve ever seen. The seemingly separate cities just about represent a single interlocking megalopolis that hugs your complete shoreline going through China. Behind the cities loom steep mountains. There is not any equal of Poland for Taiwan—nowhere for refugees to flee, and nowhere to stage weapons deliveries.
So the Achilles’ heel of pluralistic democracies like Ukraine and Taiwan could also be their lack of ability to see what’s staring them within the face, particularly when that factor is just too horrible to behold. Many Ukrainians (and several other Russian liberals I do know) discovered the thought of a fratricidal conflict just like the one Putin unleashed merely inconceivable. Or perhaps liberal democracies, which unshackle folks to enhance their particular person lot above all else, simply discover it onerous to cost within the half that primal, atavistic impulses play in worldwide relations.
At any fee, this can be a actuality that the United States faces in Taiwan. Americans, too, should not flinch and suppose that issues are aside from they’re. Despite what many diplomats, politicians, and pundits say, the U.S. wouldn’t struggle for Taiwan as a result of it’s a democracy. Taiwan would in all probability be value defending even when Chiang Kai-shek have been nonetheless ruling it with a bloody fist. Whether the island typically appears ungrateful for American largesse, or is even suspicious that the U.S. will drag it right into a battle it doesn’t need, makes no distinction.
To proceed with the parallel, the U.S. helps Ukraine not as a result of it’s a democracy, however as a result of it is smart for us to take action. Ukraine is weakening one of many important revisionist powers in Europe at comparatively low price to us, and is thus serving to lay the groundwork for a long-lasting safety order in Europe. Taiwan is of better strategic significance to the U.S. than Ukraine will ever be. And not like aiding Ukraine, defending Taiwan could possibly be far more painful.
What is America’s cost-benefit calculus? I’m up for that debate. But spare me the democratic sentimentalism.
This article was initially revealed by The Wisdom of Crowds.