Taiwan Cannot Win if the U.S. Does Not Help Strengthen Taipei’s Will to Fight
By Julian Spencer-Churchill
August 26, 2023
Taiwan will not be able to resist a Chinese invasion without first resolving a paralyzing political crisis over its identity, for which the Taiwanese need Washington’s helpful intervention. U.S. leadership has been wasting its scarce political capital, trying to convince Taiwan to improve the relevance of its armaments purchases, when it should instead be focused on resolving Taiwan’s crisis of self-confidence, which will impact more immediately on Taiwan’s will to prepare and fight. The findings of The Dupuy Institute have consistently shown that intangible political and cultural factors have a bigger impact on combat outcomes than any other variable, as is now self-evident in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This surprisingly pessimistic and provocative conclusion is the result of a three-week research trip in May-June of 2023, in which I interviewed over 75 persons from every major city, north to south, in Taiwan. Equipped with an ethics certificate from my university and a translator, this author drove over 3,000 km, passing through every city with a population greater than 40,000. I approached persons while they were walking, and asked them a simple open-ended question: would they fight, did they expect their fellow citizens to fight, and what, if anything, do they want America to do? Interviews varied between 10 minutes to several hours, and included retired officers from the Taiwanese air force, army and navy, and a quarter of the interviews took place on the campus of National Taiwan University, the country’s top-ranked institution of higher learning. Only two individuals refused to participate, both university professors. The advantage of in-person open-ended conversations over formal surveys, revealed that Taiwanese insecurity is primarily the result of a lack of open political discussion about the security of Taiwan, rather than the impact of Beijing’s propaganda.
Washington’s apprehension of interfering in the domestic affairs of another country emerges out of the anxiety of provoking a local nationalist blowback, which it fears could further divide Taiwanese society, paralyzing its preparations for war, or even push it closer to Beijing. Chinese propaganda already portrays the U.S. as a “hegemonic” Western imperialist power, seeking to divide an originally united and brotherly Chinese community. However, these fears are unfounded. Instead, Taiwanese recall a sense of abandonment and insecurity when the U.S. departed in 1979.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/08/26/taiwan_cannot_win_if_the_us_does_not_help_strengthen_taipeis_will_to_fight_975534.html
