Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te was sworn in on Monday as he faced tough choices about how to secure the island’s democratic future during a tumultuous time – with fighting abroad and divisions at home over U.S. security priorities and Taiwan’s own security issues. of fragile peace.
Lai Ching-te began his four-year term as Taiwan’s president in a morning ceremony before delivering an inaugural speech outside the presidential palace building in Taipei, the capital, where he laid out his priorities to an audience.
He said he would continue to strengthen ties with Washington and other Western partners while countering threats from Beijing and bolstering Taiwan’s defenses. However, Chinese leader Xi Jinping may also extend a tentative olive branch to Beijing and welcome the resumption of talks if he sets aside his key precondition: Taiwan recognizing itself as part of China.
“We will see national security, cross-strait issues and foreign policy continuity being taken seriously,” said Li Wen, spokesman for the incoming new leader, whose Democratic Progressive Party advocates Taiwan’s independent status from China.
But Lai, 64, faces obstacles as he tries to stick to the course set by his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen.
Unlike Tsai Ing-wen, Lai has little experience in foreign policy negotiations and has made combative comments that could come back to haunt him. He also must deal with two emboldened opposition parties that won legislative majorities earlier this year — a challenge Tsai Ing-wen has never faced in her eight years as president.
When Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016, Xi Jinping’s hard-line policies began to stir Western opposition. But now Western countries are also under pressure from wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Xi Jinping has been seeking to weaken alliances against China. The upcoming elections in the United States have increased uncertainty about the direction of its foreign policy.
“The international environment is more worrisome for Jimmy Lai in 2024 than it was for Tsai Ing-wen in 2016,” said Kharis Templeman, a fellow who studies Taiwanese politics at the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University. The war in Ukraine, China’s shift to harsher domestic repression, deteriorating U.S.-China relations, and the past eight years of cross-strait hostility have put Jimmy Lai in an even more difficult position.”
Beijing has made it clear that it hates Lai more than Tsai Ing-wen. In the coming weeks and months, it is likely to ramp up military and trade pressure on Taiwan in an attempt to weaken his presidency. Xi’s team of officials has also actively courted Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang party, which advocates closer ties with China and won the most seats in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan in this year’s election.
Brent Christensen, former president of the American Institute for Research, said that while Jimmy Lai was not as reckless and demagogue as Chinese officials portrayed him to be, they would not back down from his 2017 comments, calling him ” A pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence.” Taiwan got to know Mr. Lai when he was a rising political star. (Washington has no formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and the institute serves as a de facto embassy.)
“Beijing has had this on his record for a long time and has a lot of distrust of him,” Christensen, now an adjunct professor at Brigham Young University, said of Mr. Lai. “They’re going to continue to test him for years to come.”
Officials close to Mr. Lai say continued U.S. support for Ukraine does not threaten Taiwan’s security lifeline with Washington. Quite the opposite, they say.
“This firm and unquestionable determination to defend democracy will not detract from the defense of places like Taiwan,” Taiwan’s outgoing foreign minister Joseph Wu wrote in a recent article in Foreign Affairs. “In fact, This is a key deterrent against adventurism for Beijing.”
Even so, there is debate in Taiwan over how much the United States can go to help Taiwan build up its military in the coming years while remaining focused on the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, neither of which are expected to end anytime soon.
Eric Gomez and Benjamin Giltner of the Cato Institute, a think tank in Washington, estimate that Taiwan’s backlog of undelivered U.S. arms and military equipment orders had grown to nearly $20 billion by the end of April. Gomez said in an email that the additional funding for Taiwan recently approved by Congress will be “helpful, but not a panacea.”
Lai’s opponents in Taiwan say he risks leading the island into a security dead end – unable to talk to Beijing but unprepared for any confrontation. Kuomintang Fu Kunji, a member of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan who recently visited China, used Ukraine as a warning.
“Since ancient times, the people of small countries or small regions have not fought with the largest neighboring countries,” Mr. Fu said in an interview. “Is a war in the Taiwan Strait really in the interests of Americans? I really don’t think so. Is it possible that the United States is facing three battlefields at the same time?
Last week, Taiwan’s legislature sharply displayed the domestic political divisions that threaten to drag down Lai’s government. Lawmakers from rival parties pushed, shouted and argued over proposed new rules on vetting government officials.
Taiwanese government officials and many experts say an immediate confrontation with Beijing is unlikely after Jimmy Lai takes office. Xi Jinping’s desire to stabilize relations with Washington and focus on repairing China’s economy has reduced his willingness to risk a crisis in Taiwan.
Currently, Xi Jinping is likely to exert military, economic and political pressure on Taiwan. In recent months, China has dispatched coast guard ships near Kinmen, a Taiwan-controlled island close to mainland China, in a move aimed at intimidation while avoiding a potential conflict with Washington.
Several experts said Mr. Lai may be able to begin to curb tensions with Beijing by offering reassuring words in his inauguration speech. That could include underscoring his commitment to the constitution, under which Taiwan is known as the Republic of China. Others close to Lai are skeptical that significant improvements in relations between the two countries can be achieved.
Xi Jinping “wants to push for unification, and he wants to make progress on that,” said Lai Yizhong, chairman of the Vision Foundation, a government-funded think tank in Taipei and no relation to the president-elect. “But Taiwan cannot make more concessions at this point, and this is the dilemma Lai faces when dealing with China.”
