The NPR Politics Podcast - Money, Democracy, China: Understand the US-Taiwan Alliance

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

In the landmark bipartisan foreign aid package that passed earlier this year, there was money for two allies in ongoing military conflicts: Israel and Ukraine. But there was also money for the Indo-Pacific region. So why is the U.S. interested in the region and how is Taiwan involved?This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, defense correspondent Tom Bowman, and foreign correspondent Emily Feng.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our intern is Bria Suggs. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hi, this is Rustin at the Medical University of South Carolina, preparing for surgery to donate my kidney. Oh wow. This podcast was recorded at 10 37 a.m on Wednesday, June 5th. Things might have changed by the time you hear this, but I will have one less kidney and the stranger down the hall will be the new owner of that kidney, hopefully extending his or her life by many years. Okay, here's the show.

Wow, what a nice and heroic thing to do for a stranger. Amazing. That's incredible. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Tom Bowman. I cover the Pentagon. And Emily Fang, NPR's correspondent in Taiwan, joins us now. Hello, Emily. Hey, thanks for having me.

So today on the podcast, we're talking about the U.S. relationship with Taiwan. President Biden has committed to defending Taiwan and its democracy in the event of a military attack by China, which, of course, views Taiwan as part of its country. A recent foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel also included billions of dollars for the Indo-Pacific region, but specifically to bolster defense capabilities around Taiwan. Emily, can you take a step back and explain for our listeners who are not experts on this issue or the region, what exactly is the U.S. interest here in protecting Taiwan? Well, number one, it's curbing China's influence. And this dates back to the early days of the Cold War, when that's explicitly what Taiwan was for. Since then, Taiwan has evolved into this vibrant democracy. So it's become also a moral and ideological point to protect the democracy that exists in Taiwan. Against China, it's remained

this massively strategic location and what the U.S. calls its first island chain strategy. So Taiwan is part of the Philippines and Japan and this ring of essentially military bases that were once used to contain the Soviet Union in China and now are an important bulwark to the network of U.S. military alliances around the world. But the interest is now commercial as well. There's just a huge amount of global shipping and oil and gas and things like semiconductors that are made or passed through the waters around Taiwan. So it's become more important than ever. Tom, do you see something specific about this moment that seems to be heightening these tensions, which Emily just articulated have long existed. Is this just part of the broader

escalation of tensions we've seen between the U.S. and China? Is there something else going on here? Well, I think a couple of things. President Xi Jinping has basically said he wants to take back Taiwan. He will do it militarily if necessary. And also going back over the past couple of decades, China has put a huge amount of money into building up its military. It's not on par with the U.S., but it is in some ways reaching almost a status of on par in some areas, particularly in space. They're building anti-satellite weapons in space. Cyber, they're putting a lot of money into that. They're building a lot more fifth-generation fighters, as they say, and aircraft carriers. And the big thing is coercive measures around the region, particularly with Taiwan. When the recent president in Taiwan was inaugurated, gave his speech, China then sent ships all around Taiwan, almost like a blockade. They did similar move when Nancy Pelosi went there. So there is a concern with Xi Jinping that he wants to maybe move more aggressively against Taiwan. And U.S. military officials say they think they would have the capability of taking Taiwan militarily by 2027.

Wow. And Emily, as Tom just said, Taiwan just recently had elections. Has the new president changed positions at all? So yes, Taiwan has a new president. He has sworn to uphold the policies of the previous president, but he also gave this inauguration speech a couple of weeks ago

that depending on what your politics are and who you swear allegiance to, people have read in very different ways. In Taiwan, his political party, President Lai's political party, has said that nothing, the status quo between China and Taiwan has not changed, but China has said that his speech used certain phrases and terminology that seemed to signify Taiwan saw itself as an independent country without formally declaring independence. And within days of Taiwan's new president being inaugurated, Taiwan's military said it was going to launch more military drills encircling the entire island that were even bigger in some ways than previous drills. And they said these drills were explicitly in reaction to Lai's speech to punish Taiwan

for being too pro-independence. Obviously, people in Taiwan don't feel that Lai broke any kind of status quo. But the fact of the matter is that China is really upset. And at a big defense summit just a few days ago in Singapore, China's defense chief came up and said, listen, if Taiwan's leaders continue to put out what China sees as very pro-independence rhetoric, they're going to hit back even harder. I mean, Tom, this is so interesting because in diplomatic situations like this, words and rhetoric matter so much and everything is parsed. And yet you also saw Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in the region recently also using really tough language. Right. He said, listen, no country in the area should be coerced.

He talked about the military drills that were held around Taiwan. He called it so-called punishment. But his Chinese counterpart also said, listen, anybody attempting to separate Taiwan from China is bound to be smashed to pieces. So the rhetoric has really increased there. So, you know, I was in Singapore. I was at this defense conference that the U.S. defense chief and the Chinese defense chief were at. And I go every year because it's the one chance where you can actually talk for an

extended period of time with Chinese military officials. Normally, they're very guarded and inaccessible in China. But, you know But I asked them, what do you think of your defense chief's speech? And their interpretation is, this is a message for peace. Basically, China kept trying to signal in that speech, we don't want to fight. And we know that the US and Taiwan don't want to fight. So please tone down the rhetoric. Someone rein in Taiwan's president because we really don't want to have to fight, but we're prepared to do so if Taiwan, in their eyes, continues to misbehave. Unfortunately, they just said it in such an aggressive way and offered no room for compromise that I think it

just turned up the temperature more, unfortunately. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll talk more about this when we get back. This message comes from Wise, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. This message comes from NPR sponsor, the NPR Wine Club, a place to explore the exciting world of wine, including wines inspired by popular NPR shows like Weekend Edition Cabernet. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, all purchases help support NPR programming and fun quality reporting developed to connect people to their communities and the

world they live in. More at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. And we're back. And Emily, China has been such a focus of politics here in the U.S. for both President Biden and former President Trump. But I'm curious for the perspective on our election from your vantage point and from the people you talk to. How closely are people following the U.S. presidential election here? Pretty closely in Taiwan because the U.S. is a really, really important security guarantor of Taiwan. President Trump in his term as president was not a very stable, shall we say, partner for Taiwan. Now that he is not president, he's also made comments that he thinks the U.S. is too reliant on Taiwan's semiconductor and technology industry, and that's something he would try to take down a peg if he were president again. So people in Taiwan don't

know if he's going to be hard on China, which would make some people in Taiwan happy, or whether he's going to be both hitting back at Taiwan at the same time that he's trying to curb China's influence. All of it is amplifying already existing political uncertainty in Taiwan's domestic political scene, where in just the first few weeks of the new presidency, there's been mass protests and fights in the legislature. So U.S. politics could only magnify that discord even more. Tom, I do think that there is some confusion over what maybe a President Trump would do with Taiwan. President Biden has been more clear. But I do think it's worth reminding people that when you look to the other parts of the government, like on Capitol Hill, there is vast bipartisan support for the U.S. to stand with Taiwan. This isn't

as controversial an issue down the ballot, as I might say, as it might be with the people leading the party. No, I think that's right. I think both parties have strong support for Taiwan. The only thing about Trump, I would say, militarily speaking, is providing billions more dollars for Taiwan. I could see him, like he said in Ukraine, let's make it a loan. Let's not just give them money.

So that's a possibility. But again, I think with both parties supporting Taiwan, I think, regardless of who wins in November, there's still a lot of support for Taiwan and also a lot more money heading that way for defensive capabilities. Tom, can I ask you a question, especially because Taiwan was part of this broader funding package about the geopolitics of the moment. And I wonder if you see any connective tissue between Russia's invasion of Ukraine and a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan in that, at the very least, it's providing sort of a playbook of how the U.S. would respond to an adversary invading an ally. Well, I think there are a couple of things. I

think the U.S. looks at Ukraine. We need to support Ukraine, the U.S. would say, because if we don't, that's going to send the message to China that the U.S. won't stand by its allies or friends. That's a big, big part, I think the U.S. is looking at, again, some sort of, they call it a porcupine defense, to not make it easy for China to take over Taiwan, layered defense. And that's what they're pushing with the Taiwanese. But the big thing, I think, strategically is, if we don't support Ukraine, that's going to send the message to China that the U.S. doesn't stand by its friends. Emily, what are you watching for from here? Is it just sort of an outcome of the election here? Or is there things on the ground there that you're covering more closely to see the next sort of turn in this? I think three things. I mean, I wonder how the U.S. might work with Taiwan's new leadership that, although it says wants to continue the policies of its predecessors, has taken already a much more strident tone and whether the U.S. is going to have challenges

balancing that basically with tensions with China. Two, speaking about arming Taiwan, there are still massive delays in getting weapons that the U.S. has already sold or given to Taiwan. Sometimes the lead time is like as long as two years. And so the U.S. really needs to work on that. And third, I'm looking at the South China Sea, which Taiwan is a part of, but it involves countries like the Philippines, which have been very, very outspoken. And I'm actually much more worried about hot conflict in the short term between the Philippines and China than between China and Taiwan. No, that's a really good point because as we've seen recently, China will use water cannons

against Philippine boats in the area. And also the U.S. has offered to do patrols in the Philippines and the Philippines at this point have said, no, we're not interested. We don't want to rattle the cage too much when it comes to China. But that could be something you see down the road where the U.S. will actually, U.S. ships will accompany Philippine ships. That's quite possible. I do know from talking with senior military officials that for a long time, what the Philippines were worried about was, you know, Islamist insurgents in the southern part of the Philippines. That's no longer a concern for them. They're much more worried about China. And they're providing some training areas in the northern part of the Philippines for the U.S. That's fairly recent, and that's significant.

All right. Emily Feng in Taiwan, thank you so much for coming on today and explaining all this to us. My pleasure. That is it for us today. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Tom Bowman. I cover the Pentagon. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.