Taiwan Under Pressure to Bolster Defense Amid Trump-Harris Race

Taiwan is under increasing pressure to strengthen its defense and deterrence capabilities against China, amid uncertainty surrounding the U.S. election scheduled for November, according to political and security analysts.

Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung told reporters last month that the self-governing island must rely on itself for defense and will likely continue to spend and modernize its military in the face of threats from China, which views the island as its own.

The minister’s comments came in response to presidential candidate Donald Trump suggesting that Taipei should pay Washington for military protection. Trump said the country “gives us nothing” and has taken “100% of our chip business.”

Experts said Trump’s remarks highlighted the unpredictability Taiwan faces, especially after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who has relatively less foreign policy experience.

While Biden has been “more consistent in his Taiwan policy,” Trump has proven to be “volatile and unpredictable” since the start of his first term, said Stephen Nagy, a professor of politics and international studies at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan.

This is largely due to a difference in strategy between the two leaders. While Biden has said on several occasions that the United States would intervene to defend Taiwan, Trump has opted for “strategic ambiguity,” Nagy added.

Just days after taking office, Trump became the first U.S. president in decades to communicate directly with Taiwan’s president.

Shortly thereafter, he suggested that the United States might change its long-standing position that Taiwan is part of “one China.” However, he reportedly backtracked on that position during a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping in February 2016.

In any case, Trump’s tough stance on China has led many in Taiwan to believe he would substantially support the island, according to Lu-Chung Weng, a political science professor at Sam Houston State University.

Similar to 2016, the candidate is running with a tough policy towards China and has already proposed a strong push for his trade war against the country.

According to Muhammad Faizal, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, a tougher stance on containing China by Trump 2.0 would be welcomed by Taiwan’s ruling party and other Indo-Pacific partners.

However, he added that they also fear that Trump’s “short-sighted, transactional approach” to foreign and defense relations – exemplified by his comments about Taiwan paying the United States for defense – could lead them back into his geopolitical target.

Meanwhile, while experts who spoke to Vscek agree that a second Trump administration will likely be filled with China hawks who make Taiwan’s defense a top priority, it remains unclear to what extent they will be able to shape policy.

“I think anyone who says they are sure of where [the administration] “What would happen is out of their minds… I think the degree of unpredictability would be greater than ever,” said Richard Heydarian, a political consultant and professor of international affairs at the University of the Philippines.

On the other side of the ballot is presumptive Democratic nominee Harris, after Biden bowed to pressure to withdraw from the race due to age concerns.

According to analysts, it is expected to remain fairly consistent with Biden’s agenda and foreign policy.

“I see [Harris] “as a continuity play in terms of broader foreign policy trends over the last few decades,” Tina Fordham, founder of Fordham Global Foresight, told Vscek’s “Worldwide Exchange” last month.

Dewardric McNeal, managing director and senior political analyst at Longview Global, said it was unclear exactly what Harris thinks of Biden, and that her first 100 days would be closely monitored by Beijing if she wins.

As vice president, Harris expressed support for Taiwan and met with the island’s new leader, Lai Ching-te, in 2022. However, she would enter office with significantly less foreign policy experience than President Biden.

“While I foresee some continuity [with Biden] “In its China policy, it is essential to recognize the powerful influence that personalities have on policymaking, design, and implementation,” McNeal said.

“Vice President Harris is not Joe Biden and her approach to politics will be different,” he added.

With both candidates posing a major uncertainty for Taiwan, political experts said the island nation is under increasing pressure to speed up efforts to strengthen its deterrence.

According to Ava Shen, who covers Taiwan and China foreign policy and domestic politics at Eurasia Group, these efforts have already begun to gather pace since Lai’s election in January, and the U.S. election has only added urgency.

Lai, a member of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, is considered a separatist by Beijing and has continued his predecessor’s efforts to build relations with Washington, despite intensifying military and political pressure from China.

His inaugural speech stressed the importance of aligning with democracies and strengthening national defense. Around the same time, a one-year extended mandatory military service for men came into effect, an initiative announced by former DPP President Tsai Ing-wen.

Meanwhile, Taiwan has increased total defense spending in its annual budgets to 2.6 percent of GDP this year and is proposing another increase for 2025, local sources said.

The defense buildup has meant buying more weapons from the United States. As of February this year, the country was waiting for a backlog of about $19 billion in American weapons it had already purchased, according to the Cato Institute.

A bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers met with Lai in May, promising that they would send weapons and a $2 billion support package for Taiwan’s military.

According to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations, China’s latest official defense budget was $224 billion, about 12 times that of Taiwan.

“Generally speaking, Taiwan’s government and society feel a certain degree of uneasiness or anxiety,” said Kwei-Bo Huang, a diplomacy professor at National ChengChi University in Taiwan and secretary-general of the Taiwan-based Foreign Relations Association.

He added that if Trump won, Taiwan would have to continue increasing its defense budget to at least 3 percent of its GDP, a figure that would be in line with what the former president’s advisers are considering asking NATO members to do.

According to Professor Lu-Chung of Sam Houston State University, while the US election is certainly putting more pressure on Taiwan to step up deterrence, this is to the country’s advantage as it faces harsh realities.

“As for the self-defense plan, Taiwan will continue to do what it is doing, but filling the gaps across the Taiwan Strait is not easy,” he said.

— Vscek’s Zenith Wong contributed to this article.