Taiwan and the Trump Win

How an increasingly isolationist United States is bad for Taiwan. Plus, book club on Ae-ran Kim's My Brilliant Life

Welp. So that happened.  

It’s been nearly a week since Trump won another four years in office; you’ve probably read all of the takes and analyses about why the election broke the way it did, and there isn’t much more we feel like we can add. We didn’t think the Democrats deserved to win, but we don’t want to pile on. Everything we think about the postmortem for the Democrats is basically summed up by the brilliant Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on The Dig podcast. 

In the lead-up to the elections, we kept mum because we felt disconnected from the situation on the ground and didn’t feel that we had any authority to speak. Watching from afar, we were pretty convinced that Trump was on his way to victory. You could feel the shift in some of the Taiwanese American travelers who visited Taiwan. They were largely apolitical (the mythical swing voters that the media often touts), who mostly leaned Democrat but spoke of the cost of living in the United States and their feeling of precarity—even though they are by all objective measures doing well in America. And then they would slip in these comments: Oh, of course we could never vote for Trump, but hey, isn’t he tough on China? Or, Did you know that the Trump presidency was one of the best for Taiwan?

Oh no, we thought. 

Some commenters like Andrew Sullivan said that this time they were prepared for the worst and the Trump victory didn’t feel like a gut punch as it did in 2016. But for us, it somehow feels worse, mainly because of the decisive way that the party of Trump won—winning the popular vote, regaining the Senate, possibly winning the House. Had people forgotten that this was an administration that separated families and put migrant children in cages? Did we so quickly forget the hundreds of thousands of needless COVID deaths as a result of a willful dismissal of all the health information that they had at their fingertips? Or January 6? We know exactly who this person is, his terrible vision for the future, and how he wields power capriciously and maliciously. And yet he still won. 

It’s no secret that the past eight years has seen a growing consensus among the American foreign policy establishment that being friendly to Taiwan is a good thing. Republicans have long supported military aid to Taiwan, but in the past year Trump has consistently signaled that he’s willing to break with this former consensus. He argues that Taiwan needs to pay “protection money” going forward and that Taiwan would be punished for “stealing” the semiconductor business from the United States. Elon Musk, who poured $118 million dollars into the Trump campaign, has proclaimed that Taiwan is part of China and has made plans to move manufacturing from one of his companies, SpaceX, away from Taiwan. Many of the staunch defenders of Taiwan in his first administration are out—Pompeo, Bolton. Both admittedly, are troglodytes, but the Taiwanese government had spent quite a bit of money to woo them to Taiwan. As Noah Smith wrote before the election, Trump is planning on cancelling the CHIPS act; a second Trump presidency, he writes, would “be a gift for Xi jinping.” We agree. The establishment position has been friendly to Taiwan, and an anti-establishment position is bad news for us. 

Here in Taiwan, pundits are already speculating what price the Trump administration might demand for continued support of its defense. Most are already taking it for granted that Trump will make good on the “protection money” comment: the Trump administration will require the Lai administration to buy more arms from the U. S. and shoulder all of the costs of special military training, which the U. S. had previously helped to defray. Taiwan currently spends 2.6% of its GDP on defense, and there’s little doubt that the Trump administration will demand more. (Comparisons: the U.S. spends 3.5%, Israel 4.5%, NATO members have a 2% requirement but not all members meet it.) Even raising the number to 3% would mean major shifts in Taiwan’s domestic policies. We’d either need to raise taxes or engage in some form of austerity, both of which will challenge the domestic legitimacy of the ruling DPP.

Tough choices are coming for Taiwan: funds that could support an aging society and finance nationwide infrastructural projects will instead go to missiles and drones. These are awful choices that we have to make—but this is the fate for those who yearn for Taiwanese sovereignty in a world hostile to that position.

A new Trump presidency also portends a real shift in the way that Americans envision their place in the world. The big foreign policy proposal of the J. D. Vance wing of the Trump faction is U. S. isolationism; Vance and his associates have been intentionally vague on Taiwan when pressed. You can feel the shift across the political landscape—pundits are already arguing that the Democrats lost because of the American interventionist consensus among the foreign policy establishment. All this portends a more isolationist U.S., which will ultimately be bad for Taiwan. 

Look, you all know us: we’re anti-imperialists. But many things can be true at once. The post-9/11 projection of American power has been a force of evil throughout much of the world, but in the case of Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, we’d be deluding ourselves if we only portrayed America’s place in East Asia as imperialist and negative. America’s relationship with Taiwan is complicated. The U.S. poured in economic and technical aid in the 1950s and 1960s. This was vital to Taiwan’s—as well as Japan and South Korea’s—reconstruction in the 1950s and 1960s, while also legitimizing the rule of an authoritarian regime. Many people in the Taiwanese pro-democracy movement date the beginning of their political awakening to the U.S.’s abandonment of Taiwan when the U.S. shifted recognition from Taiwan to the PRC; this unintentionally pushed democratic activists to think more critically of the Chiang Kai-shek regime. At the same time, American pressure on Chiang Ching-kuo’s regime in the wake of the murder of Henry Liu gave pro-democracy voices cover and breathing room. We can’t tell the story of Taiwan’s path to democratization without acknowledging the deeply entangled relationship between America and Taiwan after World War II. 

The two sides of American entanglement with Taiwan: Dwight D. Eisenhower visiting Taiwan in 1960, riding with the dictator Chiang Kai-shek. Photo credit: Wikipedia

The two sides of American entanglement with Taiwan: USAID helped to support Harvest Magazine, which produced educational materials for illiterate farmers. It also gave financial support to a lot of Taiwanese modernist painters, which we wrote about in this post.

What will an increasingly isolationist United States mean to Taiwan? Most distressingly, a U. S. retreat gives China much more space to maneuver. With Trump at the helm, PRC officials can pretty legitimately claim the mantle of being the “adults in the room.” We believe that the Xi Jinping regime is at heart expansionist and revanchist, and it has clearly made the annexation (whether “peaceful” or not) of Taiwan central to its vision of its world-historical place in the world. An American retreat from the region would give Xi the space to claim the mantle of being the “good guy” in international arena. You know what that means: pro-Taiwan activists are going to be depicted as pesky, de-stabilizing, troublemakers. (Flashback to the Chen Shui-bian years!)  

American isolationism will only give more fuel to domestic actors in Taiwan who have for years depicted pro-Taiwan voices as destabilizing. Already we see the Blue (pro-KMT and often pro-China) media taking the tack that the ruling DPP bet on the wrong horse by putting all of its eggs in the U.S. basket, because it did not “de-escalate” risk with China. This is false information; it’s China that has refused to talk to the DPP government.

In short, it seems pretty clear that for those who believe in Taiwanese independence and sovereignty, we’re in for some rough waters. We’ve felt the tide shift the past six months, and we don’t see it switching back any time soon. 

And you’re probably wondering about the million dollar question: Does this mean China is going to invade Taiwan in the next four years? Maybe not, as signs indicate that China faces enough internal problems and challenges to its domestic legitimacy that it would be disastrous for them to launch a war. But China can do a lot to Taiwan without launching a war. It can continue to expand its gray zone operations and test the boundaries of the status quo. It can continue to cut off Taiwan’s ability to navigate the sphere of international relations. It can punish with economic and geopolitical coercion the pro-Taiwan voices and allies. It can continue to ramp up disinformation and media infiltration campaigns into Taiwan to intensify the polarization within a polarized country. A U. S. retreat will only embolden these attempts.  

Are there any silver linings—anything that gives us hope? Well, the United States for decades has clung to a somewhat hypocritical policy, commonly referred to as “strategic ambiguity.” Basically, they claim to support Taiwanese democracy and regard Taiwan as a partner, but they don’t recognize Taiwan’s claims to sovereignty and full membership in the international community. The Trump moment is crudely clarifying to Taiwanese people: So yes, you always just wanted us for our chips, and oh you’ll still take our money for arms sales. We knew all along you would sell us out. The blinders are off now. 

The upside of everything being transactional is that it takes two to tango. It gives people in Taiwan the opportunity to think about why we’re valuable, what it is that we can offer to the world.

For pro-Taiwan folks who believe that Taiwan is not for sale, that we are more than just a protection racket, how do we articulate that case? For pro-Taiwan people who want to counter the claims of Elon Musk that Taiwan is part of China, what do we say? How do you make the claim that a loss of Taiwan would be an incalculable loss to the global community? That we are more than our chips?

We need creative, new solutions to deal with our current moment. This is the big task for us who are pro-Taiwan and fearful for Taiwan’s place in the world going forward. Thankfully, we also live in a radically different era from the early 2000s; today, pro-Taiwan voices can access a more friendly international media and many more platforms to get their stories heard.  

Here’s one possible way forward for Taiwan. Much post-election analysis has been pointing out that incumbents across the world lost big this year, from the Tories in Britain to the LDP in Japan. One of the outliers in this global story is Taiwan. The incumbent party faced similar problems—low wages, inflation, and the challenge of a populist leader. But the incumbent in Taiwan won with a relatively progressive message. Of course, the United States is not Taiwan, and the political structures here are radically different, but maybe, just maybe, there’s something that Democrats and progressives could learn from Taiwan? In a world of democratic backsliding, media monopolies, and misinformation, progressive groups in Taiwan have organized and sought to break through information bubbles. American progressives can learn from tactics and strategies developed here. Will American progressives be willing to consider lessons from other parts of the world? One can only hope.   

On a personal level, this hurts in a different way. Both of us had our political consciousnesses forged during George W. Bush’s lying and murderous presidency. Both of us had our love of politics rekindled by Obama’s calls to forge a truly multi-ethnic and welcoming America. We are also of the generation that felt the disappointment of the Obama administration particularly deeply: his bailout of Wall Street, his continuation of the forever wars, his expansion of family detention at the border. The successive wins of Trump, predicated on right-wing populism, cannot be seen as anything but a complete repudiation of the Obama years. Instead of hope for the future, we now have an atmosphere of reactionary fear and xenophobia. As young people who were swept up in Obama fever and still cling to the hope and vision of the multi-ethnic America that those years painted for us, we can’t help but mourn the passing of that dream.

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Book Club: Ae-ran Kim’s My Brilliant Life

Thanks to everyone who joined us to talk about Andrea Lee’s Red Island House. For November/December, we’re reading Ae-ran Kim’s My Brilliant Life (translated by Chi-Young Kim) and meeting on Friday, December 6th at 7:00 PM EST / Saturday, December 7th at 7:00 AM Taiwan time. Reply here for the zoom link. Thank you!