Daniel DePetris: Taiwan's president is not having an easy time of it at home or with the US

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

With the exception of Israel, no foreign entity elicits as much bipartisan support in Washington as Taiwan. The self-ruled democratic island is David to China's Goliath, a relatively small pseudo-country (the United States and much of the world don't recognize Taiwan as a state) under constant threat from the Chinese Communist Party that has long striven to reunify the island with mainland China. If anything, Chinese President Xi Jinping is even more intent on reunification than his predecessors, ordering the People's Liberation Army to have the military assets in place to invade Taiwan by 2027.
But that's only the half of it for Taiwan's political leadership. While Taipei's relations with the United States remain strong at an institutional level, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te has faced multiple speed bumps, internally and externally, that have raised alarms among Taiwan experts back in Washington. A highly polarized Taiwanese political scene, coupled with an unpredictable Donald Trump administration, has led to the fundamental question: Can Taiwan afford a business-as-usual mentality?
Internally, Taiwanese politicians are at one another's throats. Lai's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is at loggerheads with the main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT) and the upstart Taiwan People's Party over everything from the defense budget to the basic functions of how the Taiwanese government should work. Despite Lai's support for a hefty increase in military spending, partly due to the urgings of the Trump administration, the Legislative Yuan, dominated by the opposition, has stonewalled the request and in fact voted in January to freeze the defense budget by billions of dollars. Lai has called the parliament's actions a deliberate attempt to block his agenda; the opposition says it's merely an exercise in oversight.
The DPP's frustrations with the KMT have boiled over. Sympathizers of the party organized a recall vote on one-fifth of the KMT's lawmakers, hoping voters will kick them out of office and replace them with DPP representatives. But the effort failed. Every KMT lawmaker survived the recall effort, which means that Lai will either be forced to work with the opposition to get anything passed in the legislature or spend the remainder of his term as a lame-duck leader.
Then there are Trump's tariffs. On July 31, the White House announced a 20% tariff on Taiwanese goods entering the United States, part of Trump's global tariff regime in a bid — so he says — to inject fairness into the global trading system. Although Lai's administration played down the tariffs and called them a temporary aberration on the way to a trade deal, the levies will have at least a short-term impact on the Taiwanese economy. The United States is Taiwan's largest buyer of goods, having imported more than $116 billion in Taiwanese products last year.
While it's likely Washington and Taipei will eventually strike an agreement lessening the tariff rate, it's going to take significant concessions on the Taiwanese side to move past the finish line. Those concessions will include throwing tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars into the United States over a long period of time in the form of investments. This is precisely what Japan and South Korea did to finalize their own trade deals with Washington, and it's something Taiwan will be hard-pressed to avoid. Even then, it might not mollify Trump; whenever he talks about Taiwan, Trump never ceases to remind people about how the island 'stole' America's chip-making business.
Then there's the Trump administration decision to block Lai from traveling to the United States on his way to Central America. Such stops in the United States are quite common, with Lai's predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, doing it multiple times. They've so common that Beijing isn't particularly shocked when they occur. Even so, stopovers in the United States by Taiwanese ministers, let alone presidents, always get China riled up because in Beijing's mind, they connote U.S. recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign state.
Therefore, the White House's veto of Lai's travel schedule, in addition to the Pentagon's cancellation of defense talks with Taiwan's defense minister, will come as welcome signs to Xi. If Joe Biden as president had made a similar move, the Taiwanese political and security establishment would have rested easy, knowing that U.S. support was unquestionable. Can Taiwan assume this is the case now, particularly when Trump's priorities are finalizing a comprehensive trade accord with China and pushing U.S. allies around the world to do more for themselves on the defense front?
Ultimately, the best policy for the United States is to drag out the status quo for as long as possible. This includes a number of key elements: China and Taiwan refrain from unilateral moves that could jeopardize the balance of power and heighten the odds of a cross-strait conflict; U.S. arms sales to Taiwan continue in keeping with U.S. law; Taipei stays away from declaring independence; and Washington makes it abundantly clear to Taiwan's political leadership that unhelpful actions breaking from the status quo could result in a change to U.S. policy.
Regardless of what Washington does, it's on Taiwan — and Taiwan alone — to get its own house in order. The United States may be the best foreign friend it has, but not even a superpower can force Taiwan's politicians to pass legislation, ensure the defense budget is adequate for the times and get the machinery of government working again. Otherwise, nothing else that follows will matter.