Walk through central Taipei in the evening and the malls are full, designer shops crowded, and teenagers with boom boxes perform K-pop dance routines in the street.
There’s little outward sign that Taiwan is an island at the nexus of global tensions between the US and China.
Presidential elections next month will go a long way to determining just how acute those strains become.
For all the outward calm, the threat of conflict is real.
China is “expanding military capabilities at scale,” according to Taiwan’s annual defense report. That includes constructing airfields along its eastern and southern coastline and stationing new fighters and drones there to “seize air superiority” in any engagement across the Taiwan Strait.
China claims Taiwan as its territory, although President Xi Jinping has said Beijing isn’t preparing for war.
For his part, President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that the US would come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of Chinese aggression. In addition, Taiwan’s world-leading chip industry makes it vital to global industry and society, enabling everything from iPhones to AI.
Yet, as Cindy Wang and Peter Martin report, Taiwan itself remains strangely unprepared for the worst-case scenario. Government officials openly concede that more needs to be done to deter any invader.
Issues include the size of Taiwan’s military, its training, and the kind of weaponry being purchased. Polls suggest almost half of Taiwanese are unwilling to defend their island if China attacks.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown that preparations need to go beyond the military field to areas including critical infrastructure, civil resilience and cybersecurity.
Taiwan is actively discussing efforts to beef up its defenses with the US.
Beijing and Washington have made efforts to dial down the enmity, and Xi hasn’t done or said anything to suggest war in the Taiwan Strait is imminent.
But in a world of geopolitical volatility, Taiwan remains arguably the greatest threat of all. — Alan Crawford