Taiwan Fires Warning Shots at Chinese Drone
Tensions are high in the Taiwan Strait after Taiwan fired warning shots at a Chinese drone for the first time on Tuesday, the latest flash point in a geopolitical firestorm that has only intensified in recent weeks.
The exchange underscores just how much Beijing’s pressure campaign against Taiwan—which it sees as Chinese territory—has escalated since U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial trip to the island earlier this month. In its aftermath, China has held large-scale military exercises, deployed drones and fighter jets, and launched missiles nearby.
On Tuesday, President Tsai Ing-wen urged Taiwanese forces to remain calm yet ready for countermeasures. “I want to tell everyone that the more the enemy provokes, the more calm we must be,” she said. “We will not provoke disputes, and we will exercise self-restraint, but it does not mean that we will not counter.”
As China ramped up the pressure, the United States and Taiwan moved forward with formal trade talks and continued routine U.S. warship transit operations in the Taiwan Strait despite Beijing’s warnings. Washington is also planning a $1.1 billion weapons sale to the island, its biggest in nearly two years, according to Bloomberg.
Like Pelosi, several U.S. lawmakers have since traveled to Taiwan in a show of support, enraging Beijing. A group led by Sen. Edward Markey touched down in the island in mid-August, while Sen. Marsha Blackburn arrived last Friday. This week, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is set to meet with Tsai and representatives of semiconductor companies.
Other leaders in the Indo-Pacific are much less enthused, with the majority of the region actually backing Beijing over Taiwan, as Derek Grossman argued in Foreign Policy. Many of their responses “predictably and overwhelmingly upheld Beijing’s ‘One China’ principle—that Taiwan is part of mainland China,” he wrote.
But as tensions over the island continue to heat up, policymakers and political commentators are asking the wrong questions, as FP’s Howard W French argued. The focus, French wrote, should be on how to prevent conflict over the island—not who would be the champion.
“There are no guarantees in any of this, of course, except that the future of China and Taiwan will keep the world on a knife’s edge,” French wrote. “That makes working smartly to avoid a conflict as important as preparing for one.”