Taiwan braces for America’s election
For the opposition, a possible Trump victory is another reason to talk to China
TO THE MEDIA in Taiwan it sounded like a mafia boss demanding protection money. In an interview published in July Donald Trump said that Taiwan “should pay us for defence”. Asked if he would defend it should China invade, the Republican presidential candidate noted that Taiwan is far closer to China than to America. China “could just bombard it…I wouldn’t feel so secure right now, if I was them.” He added that Taiwan “took all of our chip business” and “doesn’t give us anything”.
That last bit, at least, was not true. Taiwan spent over $18bn during the first Trump administration (and $5bn since) on American arms. Until last year, when it authorised $80m in loans and $345m in direct military assistance, America had not given Taiwan defence aid since the 1970s. Taiwan has paid for everything else, including a $20bn backlog of undelivered American weapons. “It has not been in any way charity from the United States,” says Matthew Miller, a spokesman for America’s State Department.
As for semiconductors, Taiwan’s chipmakers dominate just one part of the industry, advanced-wafer fabrication. American firms focus on design, and in 2022 accounted for 40% of the value-added in the chip industry, compared with just 11% for Taiwanese companies. Still, Taiwan’s leading chipmaker, TSMC, is investing $65bn in advanced fabs, or chipmaking plants, in Arizona, to appease American concerns about overreliance on Taiwan.
Rather than rebut Mr Trump’s bombast, Taiwan’s officials have meekly promised that Taiwan will spend more on its defence, and reassured citizens that Taiwan has bipartisan support in America’s Congress. Lai I-chung of the Prospect Foundation, a government-affiliated think-tank, says that Taiwan has maintained close contact with Mr Trump’s advisers since 2020. Mr Trump’s first term was “very positive” for Taiwan, he adds. America stepped up military transits through the Taiwan Strait, approved more arms sales, declassified decades-old American security assurances, and passed laws facilitating exchanges with Taiwan.
In fact, in 2020 Taiwan was the only one of eight countries polled by YouGov, a research firm, where Mr Trump was preferred to Joe Biden. But views have changed. A poll in late July by TVBS, a Taiwanese news channel, found that 46% respondents preferred Kamala Harris as president compared with 15% for Mr Trump (39% had no preference). But only 30% said they were worried about Mr Trump’s becoming president. Another recent survey in Taiwan found that nearly 40% of respondents thought Mr Trump’s re-election would make America more likely to use force in Taiwan’s defence. Nearly half thought the opposite.
Distrust of a Trump-led America has not led in Taiwan, as it has in South Korea, to calls for its own nuclear weapons, which remain taboo. They might provoke Chinese retaliation. When Taiwan tried to develop them during the cold war, the CIA sabotaged the project.
Taiwan will focus more on conventional arms. It nearly doubled its military spending between 2016 and 2024, when the ruling Democratic Progressive Party controlled both the presidency and the parliament, and has proposed a record $19.7bn defence budget for next year. But Taiwan now has a hung parliament, dominated by opposition parties that can veto the budget. Eric Chu, chair of the biggest, the Kuomintang (KMT), has pointed to Mr Trump’s comments as evidence that it is a mistake to rely too much on America and has argued that Taiwan should pursue dialogue with China to reduce risk. Ma Wen-jun, a KMT lawmaker who chairs the defence committee, has suggested America is “colonising” Taiwan and complained that it is pushing Taiwan to spend too much of its budget on arms without making timely deliveries.
Mr Trump’s approach fits China’s portrayal of America as a selfish bully that will exploit Taiwan for its chips and money and then push it into war. Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said last month that the Taiwanese “can see clearly that America will always put its interests first”. Taiwan, she said, is “a pawn” that will eventually be “a discarded piece”. Indeed, many people in Taiwan already doubt America’s intentions. Only a quarter of respondents to a survey in July by the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, thought America a trustworthy ally. Mr Trump’s habitual bargaining strategy, mixing insults with threats, is unlikely to help. ■
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “An offer Taiwan can’t refuse”