Following Lai Ching-te’s victory in Taiwan’s presidential election on Saturday, U.S. officials and experts are faced with one major question: Will the newly elected leader see the need to address the threat of a possible Chinese invasion with the same degree of urgency that the United States does?
Following Lai Ching-te’s victory in Taiwan’s presidential election on Saturday, U.S. officials and experts are faced with one major question: Will the newly elected leader see the need to address the threat of a possible Chinese invasion with the same degree of urgency that the United States does?
It’s an open question—and one that has tangible consequences for the future of the U.S.-Taiwan relationship.
As FP’s James Palmer has written, within Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), “Lai has a reputation as a so-called deep green politician for his strong advocacy for an independent Taiwan. Yet he has also said there is no need for Taiwan to declare independence since it is already effectively a sovereign state and that he wants to keep the status quo with China.”
How that stance will translate into actual policy—especially when it comes to defense matters Washington sees as critical, such as keeping Taiwan moving toward fielding the kinds of weapons that would make China think twice about a cross-strait invasion and greatly expanding troop levels—is what experts and U.S. officials are now trying to assess.
For the last several administrations, the United States has tried to get Taiwan to more singularly focus on the threat of deterring a Chinese invasion with coastal defenses, barricades, long-range missiles, and hardening the population to prepare for block-by-block fighting if troops do come over the Taiwan Strait. Under outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s defense budget hit record highs—jumping by more than 13 percent in 2023 from the previous year. Taiwan beefed up air and sea combat capabilities, fielding stealth vessels and mobile missile batteries on shore. But its spending was dwarfed by Beijing, and even Japan and South Korea, and not enough troops were ready to fend off an invasion.
The era of Tsai still featured a fair bit of arm wrestling between Taiwan and the Biden administration over how Taipei should defend itself. Tension is likely to remain between Washington’s push for smaller platforms that can deter the Chinese and large-scale weapons that could help Taipei revitalize its military industry.
Even as Tsai—and, to a lesser extent, Lai—has advocated for the porcupine strategy, her administration also championed for next-generation frigates, corvettes, and a $16 billion indigenous diesel-electric submarine program over cheaper fast-attack missile boats that might be able to do deterrence in the Taiwan Strait on the cheap. The Biden administration has gone as far as to reject certain requests, such as for anti-submarine helicopters, to get Taiwan to focus more intently on fielding weapons that will have a direct impact on deterring China, or bloodying Beijing’s nose if it can’t.
“What will be interesting to see is will the progress that has been made—increasing the length of conscription, more realistic training, including unit-level training in the United States, the trend of spending more on defense as well as buying the right type of capabilities—is that going to continue,” said Heino Klinck, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia.
Even if Lai agrees with Washington 100 percent and wants to pursue the exact policies the U.S. thinks are best, he’ll still have to grapple with Taiwan’s bureaucratic politics.
The DPP does not have a deep bench of like-minded national security leaders who can embed in the Ministry of National Defense (MND) and oversee Taiwan’s push toward a porcupine strategy. More often than not, they have to hope that military leaders—who have historically favored buying larger weapons systems such as tanks, submarines, and fighter jets—retire and change their minds when they’re in civilian clothes.
And though there’s the potential of Lai bringing in mavericks like Lee Hsi-min, Taiwan’s former top military officer who championed a defense concept that saw the island playing into its asymmetric advantages to repel a cross-strait invasion, it’s not yet evident that Lai will have the appetite to clear bureaucratic dead weight. The current minister of national defense, Chiu Kuo-cheng, has a reputation as a classic army guy, a former senior U.S. official said—meaning he’s likely to advocate for the big, expensive weapons that Washington thinks Taiwan doesn’t need.
Lai’s team has talked privately with experts about breaking through the old guard by using a model like the Pentagon’s Office of the Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s headquarters-level staff that makes the agency’s big decisions. With the MND seen as stalling implementation of porcupine-like initiatives, Taiwan’s National Security Council, directly under Tsai’s nose, has been ramming through most of the changes. But without friendly officials working the file in the ministry, some of the changes are unlikely to stick.
“I have seen nothing to suggest the upper echelons of the Ministry of National Defense itself are on board with any of these changes,” said Michael Hunzeker, an associate professor at George Mason University who frequently travels to Taiwan.
But as it extends compulsory military conscription to one year, Lai’s DPP also has to convince Taiwan’s young population, who are more concerned with trying to pay their bills than preparing for war, that the threat of an invasion is real, and that they will need to be the first line of defense. And Team Lai doesn’t want to talk about the threat too much, or else risk destabilizing economic confidence.
“They face a difficult political balancing in that they have a population that does not want asymmetry for very understandable reasons,” Hunzeker said. “This idea that you should absorb this blow and basically become ground zero to fix the Chinese in place while the United States gets its act together and comes in is not appealing on any level.”
What’s more, though Lai will be president, the opposition Kuomintang party (KMT) will hold a plurality of seats in the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s 113-member unicameral parliament, potentially allowing it to impede the DPP’s agenda, while Ko Wen-je’s Taiwan People’s Party can be a potential kingmaker on close votes.
The opposition ranks of the KMT have shifted with public sentiment, to a degree. Adm. Richard Chen, a former Taiwanese deputy minister of defense, who is seen as more of a new-school hawk, was one of those elected to the Legislative Yuan on Saturday. “There’s growing unity in terms of what Taiwan needs to do to defend itself,” said Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who traveled to Taipei in September.
Unlike a U.S. president, who takes office only about 70 days after the election, Lai has almost twice that time until his May 20 inauguration. U.S. officials, who are typically circumspect when it comes to talking publicly about Taiwan, are being uncharacteristically blunt about the potential for Chinese military provocation between now and then.
“I expect some demonstration of force [by China] against Taiwan in the near term,” Adm. John Aquilino, the top U.S. military commander in the Indo-Pacific, said in a speech in Honolulu on Tuesday. Around Washington, the watchword is not to expect the kind of reaction from the Chinese that accompanied former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan—which saw Beijing launch military exercises that effectively surrounded the island—but perhaps something close.
In some circles in Washington, even the DPP’s hawkiest hawks are getting the reputation for not moving quickly enough. The Pentagon believes that China could commit more than a million ground troops, 1,900 fighter jets, and more than 2,000 missiles to an invasion, raising fears that the Chinese military could overwhelm Taipei before the fight starts in earnest.
“It is not clear that they will move with the urgency required,” Alex Velez-Green, a senior policy advisor at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, said of the DPP.
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