Scholars of international relations talk a lot about “grand strategy,” which political scientist Barry Posen defined as “a state’s theory about how it can best ‘cause’ security for itself.” Critics of the idea argue that governing is messy, not grand: that governments instead lurch from crisis to crisis, and that the policies of, say, the State Department often clash with those of Treasury.1 Proponents value the concept of grand strategy because it articulates a set of objectives and approaches against which we can evaluate different proposed policies.
The danger of not having a grand strategy comes across loud and clear in the case of contemporary Taiwan. If grand strategy is how states cause security for themselves, or its “theory of victory,” I don’t understand Taiwan’s.
Let me identify three trends.
First, Taiwan is highly threatened —among the most threatened places in the world. The superpower next door, China, declares with some frequency that it owns Taiwan and may use force against it to establish control. China has been improving its military forces for three decades toward this end. (To read more about the gnarly history between China and Taiwan, have a look here.)
The second trend is that Taiwan’s people and government increasingly possess a strong sense of separateness from China: a distinct identity that they value and want to preserve. The sense of separation between China and Taiwan has grown since Taiwan democratized in the 1990s, and has become one of Asia’s most free and progressive societies. China, by contrast, remains governed by an illiberal regime that under Xi Jinping has grown more authoritarian.
The third trend is that as China grew militarily stronger, Taiwan grew more vulnerable. During the 1990s, China’s defense budget soared while Taiwan’s dropped. In 1990, China’s spent $23 billion on defense, compared to Taiwan’s $13 billion. In 2023 those numbers are $309 billion to $17 billion, respectively (SIPRI 2023). Taiwan is obviously much smaller than China, but it’s also devoting a low level of effort to defense, as captured in military spending as a percentage of GDP. At 2.2 percent, Taiwan sits below the global average. Worse, observers routinely describe the way that Taiwan mobilizes and trains its armed forces as inadequate.
When you put these three things together, the math doesn’t add up. I don’t understand Taiwan’s theory of how to protect its autonomy from the high threat it faces.
Democracy and Defense
Taiwan expert Kharis Templeman, based at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, sheds light on Taiwan’s low defense spending. He writes that after democratization, Taiwan’s president Lee Teng-hui campaigned on improving the lives of the people: increasing social programs and building infrastructure. Templeman argues,
Responding to pent-up electoral demands, the central government rolled out a universal health insurance plan in 1995, followed later that decade by more generous and comprehensive social security and unemployment benefits programs. It also poured additional money into the construction of mass transit systems, highways, and a high-speed rail line.
While this was going on, Templeman notes, “Taiwan’s defense budget flatlined. Unlike social welfare or infrastructure, spending on the military was not a vote-winner for presidential candidates or legislators.” Bonnie Glaser and Anastasia Mark noted that at the time cross-strait relations were improving, and the public cared more about “rising unemployment, the widening income gap between rich and poor, growing government debt, [and] the challenges posed by an aging population.”
One might have expected the opposition to seize an opportunity to lambast the ruling party for being soft on defense, but the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) didn’t push for military spending either. Templeman argues that the DPP was “long suspicious of the military’s close association with the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) during the martial law years, was a persistent critic of the [Ministry of National Defense] and favored cuts to the defense budget.” Furthermore, “some in the DPP still viewed arms sales as a waste of money and a sop to politically influential US defense contractors.”
Conscription was also not a winning issue in Taiwan’s new democracy. Whereas the length of conscription had previously been two years, over time the legislature reduced it to eighteen months…then a year…and then to only four months (recently raised to one year).
Koreans Don’t Want To, Either
Ok, so we get that Taiwan’s people don’t like conscription, so this would be a tough sell in a democracy. We get that Taiwan’s young people want their freedom and that its hard-working people prefer butter to guns. But people in highly threatened countries tend to accept sacrifice if the alternative is not remaining a country at all.
Israelis also like butter, and their twenty-year olds want to have careers and hang out with their friends; most of them probably dread being yanked from their lives to march around the Golan Heights or somewhere and learn about artillery. (Let alone fight and die in the streets of Rafah.) But Israel lives amidst countries that routinely declare it has no right to exist—and that have backed up such declarations with repeated invasions. So Israel asks its young people to serve in the military for 32 months (24 months for women) and in peacetime spent about 5 percent of GDP on defense.
Similarly, young people in South Korea enjoy careers and hanging out with friends, and likely dread being dispatched to Yeonmudae to get their heads shaved. But North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests regularly remind the country of the risks of not being militarily prepared. South Korea mandates 18 months conscription and spends 2.7 percent of GDP on defense (actually that’s pretty low but that’s a topic for another post). Relative to those other threatened democracies, Taiwan stands out for its low level of defense effort.
I’ll Be There For You?
Perhaps Taiwan’s government is inadequately mobilizing against the China threat because it is confident that the United States will defend it in the event of a war. But this doesn’t make sense either.
To be sure, the United States has longstanding ties with and a sense of commitment to Taiwan, strongly felt in the U.S. Congress. U.S. foreign policy analysts articulate numerous reasons (related to the military balance, geopolitics, US credibility, semiconductors, and so on) why the U.S. has an interest in protecting Taiwan. Our two nations have deep interpersonal connections - in business, culture, education, science & technology — and I’m sure many Americans join me in admiring Taiwan for the liberal, prosperous, and technologically advanced society it has created.
But reliance on the United States is not an answer to Taiwan’s security problems. Despite attempts by Washington’s foreign policy elites to rhetorically manufacture one, the United States has no obligation to fight a war for Taiwan. It’s not a formal ally. America’s longtime, bipartisan, globalist grand strategy, which would support military intervention on Taiwan’s behalf, is unraveling. Observers are increasingly pointing out that U.S. finances don’t line up with U.S. global ambitions: that with mounting debt and an entitlements crisis, financial constraints will eventually, as the Wall Street Journal recently argued, “sink the empire.”
Furthermore, any country that is counting on the U.S. Congress for its existence should remember that Kuwait exists today because of a U.S. Senate vote of 52-47. Any country whose strategy for survival rides on the U.S. Congress needs to watch some C-SPAN. And any country whose strategy for survival is to hope that people in another country behave irrationally—i.e., fighting a war that creates a real risk of nuclear bombardment of their cities, jeopardizing their country’s survival — would be wise to rethink that strategy.
There’s so much to admire about Taiwan. But I don’t envy it. Over the past few decades its security environment has grown perilous. Its government is struggling to respond without provoking the war it hopes to avoid. But so far, its theory of victory doesn’t add up.
For some good readings on such debates, see Rebecca Friedman Lissner, “What is Grand Strategy? Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” Texas National Security Review, 2018; Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword: the Three Meanings of Grand Strategy,” Security Studies (2017); Daniel W. Drezner, Ronald Krebs, and Randall Schweller, “The End of Grand Strategy: America Must Think Small,” Foreign Affairs (2020). Furthermore, Barry Posen and Andrew Ross’s article, “Competing Visions for US Grand Strategy” is outdated (1996) but models a highly analytic, invaluable approach for comparing grand strategic options.
Hard to argue with. May be best explained by path dependency, political inertia, and a psychology of security dependence on the UD.
This insight is right on the money. Taiwan’s failure to prepare for what is suppose to be the threat of imminent Chinese invasion has been staring at us in plain sight for years. What is this telling us? Either the Taiwanese know something we don’t or maybe they have different ideas as to what they really have in mind to counter China. In the WWII battle to take Okinawa, the Japanese sunk or damaged 368 US ships, more than we have in the whole US Navy today. Maybe the Taiwanese have a different kind of war in mind, or they know that trying to fight off China will not be worth the terrible cost because defeat will be inevitable? —Perhaps it is better for Nancy Pelosi no to make any more trips to Taiwan.