Our results offer a mixed review. Barely a quarter — Clearly, further efforts are needed to persuade Taiwan residents that their military is fully capable of protecting them. Previous studies have found that a key factor in whether Taiwanese people believe they can be successfully defended is whether they think the U. Media and expert reports drawing parallels between Afghanistan and Taiwan have resurfaced the debate over whether the U.
President Tsai has tackled that question head on. Instead of encouraging her people to count on an outside protector, she is emphasizing that Taiwanese people must be able to protect themselves.
To do so, she advocates allocating more resources to defense and also encouraging the military to demonstrate to Taiwan residents that it is capable of defending them.
Taiwanese people recognize the PRC as a threat. But they do not have high confidence in their own armed forces. Still, their pessimism is not preventing them from, for example, investing billions in new semiconductor manufacturing capacity. For Americans who see Taiwan through the lens of strategic conflict, this is hard to understand. Our research suggests that while conflict in the Taiwan Strait is possible, few Taiwanese people believe it is imminent or inevitable.
Nonetheless, it is on the minds of both the Taiwanese government and the Taiwanese people. The silver lining for the Tsai government is that concern about military threat is shared across party lines and age groups. It is rare that civil society converges across these demographics. That finding is a positive sign that there could be political support for strengthening military preparedness.
Persuading Taiwan residents to support the military, however, remains an important challenge for the Tsai administration and its successors. While Taiwanese people may not be panicking, they are far more aware of their geopolitical surroundings than American observers appreciate. The stereotype of the Taiwanese people blithely ignoring an existential threat is simply not accurate. Second, China is a nuclear power with full preparedness for an offshore military struggle.
This makes the US completely unsure of a victory in a cross-Straits war. In fact, the US military and academic communities are pessimistic about the result of a cross-Straits war. If it were to go to war with modern China, it would face a strong enemy it had never experienced before that would consume all its national strength. Third, the DPP authorities are weaker and less motivated than the former Kuomintang authorities, not to mention the political split in the island. That is to say, the Taiwan authorities are lame ducks who are highly dependent on US protection.
Tsai said that Taiwan will not just rely on others to protect it, but that is not heartfelt. The DPP authorities are gambling their fate solely on the condition that the US would not give up Taiwan for the sake of its grand strategy. They had never thought about, nor could they mobilize the whole island to fight and get defeated.
Fourth, what capital does the island of Taiwan have to make it different from Afghanistan? As long as the costs of supporting the Taiwan authorities far outweigh the benefits, the US will abandon the island immediately. In , the US abandoned the Kuomintang as it saw the latter was not worth supporting. Then the US diplomatically abandoned the island of Taiwan in because having diplomatic ties with the mainland better met its interests during the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
When it comes to defending Taiwan in a costly and unwinnable war, the US will choose the lesser of two evils and the American people will not allow their young generations to die in large numbers for Taiwan secession. In turn, the United States has sold advanced weapons to Taiwan and normalized US warship transits nearby.
While past administrations have not made formal commitments to defend Taiwan, the just-completed Chicago Council Survey finds that for the first time, a slim majority of Americans now favor sending US troops to defend Taiwan if China invades. The Chicago Council Survey was conducted July 7—26, , by Ipsos using its large-scale nationwide online research panel, KnowledgePanel, among a weighted national sample of 2, adults, 18 or older, living in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia.
The margin of error is higher for partisan subgroups or for partial-sample items. The Chicago Council Survey is made possible by the generous support of the Crown family and the Korea Foundation. This survey was conducted by Ipsos from March 19 to 21, , using its large-scale online research panel, KnowledgePanel, among a weighted national sample of 1, adults 18 or older living in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia.
Both the United States and China claim to want peace and stability. But keeping the peace will require foregoing zero-sum games, something neither side looks ready to do. Does an increasingly aggressive China mean the United States should maintain its posture of strategic ambiguity or adopt strategic clarity? You are here:. Download Report PDF.
0コメント