This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Taiwan’s Trump problem’
Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast looks at the growing pressure on Taiwan and the changes in American policy in the Indo-Pacific, especially with regard to China. My guest is James Crabtree, the former director of the Asia office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
At the moment, it’s the wars in Ukraine and Gaza that are drawing the international headlines, but really important changes are afoot in Asia. So is the Trump administration cooling on the idea of an American defence of Taiwan?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[ZERO DAY ATTACK AUDIO CLIP PLAYING]
That was a clip from Zero Day Attack, a new television show that began to air in Taiwan earlier this month. It depicts a Chinese invasion of the island aimed at ending its de facto independence. The show is running as fears in Taiwan are rising, sparked by growing military pressure from Beijing, and a concern that Donald Trump may have little interest in defending the island.
I began my conversation with James Crabtree by asking him: Does Taiwan have a Trump problem?
James Crabtree
Yes, I think it does. I was in Taipei last month and did a round of officials in the National Security Council and the foreign office and the defence ministry, and you could get a sense of real disquiet on a number of levels.
So firstly, you have the tariffs. Taiwan was expecting to be reasonably well treated by Trump with his tariffs, and it wasn’t, it got a 20 per cent tariff when the nations it looks to as peers got 15 per cent, so Japan and Korea. Then you have a sort of feeling that Trump just doesn’t really care very much about Taiwan.
He has a grievance, which is that he feels that Taiwan stole America’s semiconductor industry back in the day. And he clearly wants to do some kind of big deal with China and Taiwan is the sticking point. And so in the midst of this, there’s a feeling a little bit like Ukraine, that Taiwan has this Trump problem.
It doesn’t have an in into the inner sanctum of the Trump court. It doesn’t have enough to offer Trump, although it has tried to make offers, and therefore they’re struggling to find a way to get Trump to do what they want, which is basically that the US will continue its current policy of protecting Taiwan against Chinese coercion.
Gideon Rachman
We talked about elite opinion in Taipei, but as far as you can see, do the general public yet feel a concern that China may be on the brink of invading?
James Crabtree
I don’t think so in the way that given all of the international focus on Taiwan, it’s surprising when you go there and I think understandable, that people don’t want to contemplate the idea that their country might be brutally invaded by their neighbour.
If you remember, most Ukrainians didn’t think that Russia was going to invade in 2022. So not all countries are like Finland. You go to Finland, they’re very sanguine about the fact that they may have to fight wars against Russia. You don’t really get that sense in Taiwan. And so this new government under President William Lai, in addition to trying to increase defence spending, has a big focus on civil preparedness, as in basically getting the population ready for the fact at one point they may have to do this.
And Zero Day Attack, the new television series, although it’s not state propaganda, in a sense, plays into that, that it’s part of a range of steps that the government is trying to take to get the public ready for the fact that the future may be bleaker than they would hope.
Gideon Rachman
And isn’t that part of the Trump circle’s complaint against Taiwan, in the sense that the public isn’t concerned enough, that they’re not doing enough to take responsibility for their own defence?
James Crabtree
I think there’s a couple of complaints. Yes, you do hear American officials sort of talking about what they call willingness to fight. As in if these guys aren’t willing to fight for themselves, then why should we do it for them? And therefore they want some sort of sign that Taiwan is willing to defend itself.
A lot of the complaint, however, is simply about money, as in it comes back to a little bit like in Europe with Nato numbers where there’s a percentage figure. And at the moment Taiwan spends about 2.5 per cent of GDP. They’re heading for 3 per cent. It’s been quite a big change under the new president, President Lai . . .
Gideon Rachman
On defence.
James Crabtree
On defence, which is a lot. I mean, Taiwan is very different from a European country because it only spends about 20 per cent of national income through its government. So when Trump and people like Elbridge Colby, who’s a senior Pentagon official, who is one of the über-China hawks who wants to focus both Taiwan and America on repelling a Chinese invasion, when they talk about Taiwan spending 10 per cent, that would be a colossal amount of money, a third of their entire budget.
But anyway, the complaint is yes, that until relatively recently, Taiwan hasn’t been taking its own defence seriously. It hasn’t been spending enough money, and it also hasn’t been doing what the Americans think it should do, which is what people call asymmetric defence. Instead of buying expensive fighter planes and ships, you buy mines and anti-ship missiles. The kind of things that you would need to stop an amphibious invasion coming across the Taiwan Strait.
To be fair to Taiwan, they seem to have come to this understanding. They are trying to spend a lot more on defence. They are investing heavily in these asymmetric technologies and so they’re trying to answer these American critics, but there is dissatisfaction in Washington and there has been for a while about the way that Taiwan has been preparing for this scenario.
Gideon Rachman
You mentioned Colby and he’s a figure that attracts a lot of attention. And as I understood it, his whole argument has been that America should spend less in Europe, invest less in the security of Europe, precisely because Taiwan is the most important issue.
And yet I’m not sure if that’s still his position and whether he’s winning that argument, because there seem to be other people in the Trump administration who are saying, you know, why should we defend Taiwan at all? People refer to an article by Michael Anton, the director of policy planning, who I think it was in 2021, but said, it’s not in America’s interest to defend Taiwan. So where’s the debate?
James Crabtree
So I think this is exactly the right question to ask. So people do watch Elbridge Colby because he was very prominent before he went into the administration, and yes, he wrote a book which basically made this argument saying Taiwan is the absolutely most important priority for American foreign policy and, therefore, we need to do much, much less in Europe and put all of our resources into defending Taiwan and what he called a denial defence, which is basically this attempt to do everything you can to stop a Chinese invasion so that the Chinese decide that they can’t invade.
However, that clearly isn’t what Trump thinks, and therefore people who thought like that, the China hawks, had a problem if they wanted to get jobs in the Trump administration, which is that Trump doesn’t really seem to care very much about this. And there’s also a pretty powerful strain within his administration who are much more isolationists led by the vice-president, JD Vance, the president’s son, Don Jr, but also more intellectual figures like Michael Anton, who’s the head of policy planning who are very sceptical about, you know, as Don Jr said, poking the dragon’s cage and think that if you do all of this deterrence, what will end up happening is that untrustworthy people in the foreign policy establishment will drag you into a war with China that you don’t want to get into. And Trump’s thing is that he wants to be a president of peace with a Nobel Peace Prize and not get into any more foreign wars.
So there’s a big debate going on below the surface in Washington about whether the policy that has been invest in deterrence against China, try and stop them, you know, thinking that today is going to be the day it’s right to launch an invasion. And there’s much more of a debate about this now in Washington as to whether or not that is the right way to go.
And there are these voices within the Trump camp who are pretty sceptical and therefore people like Elbridge Colby have had to attack a little bit this way and that I think, to be fair to him as still in there, trying to make the argument internally in the Pentagon, but they’re not the only voice in this debate.
Gideon Rachman
Mmm. I remember when Trump won office saying to an outgoing member, the Obama administration: Did he think that Trump would basically abandon the idea of defending Taiwan? And this guy’s argument was, well, Trump may come in thinking that, but when he realises how dependent we are on Taiwan for the most advanced semiconductors in the world, he’ll have to get off that position.
So how do they get around this problem that TSMC based in Taiwan produces the chips on which the American economy run?
James Crabtree
So I think there are three arguments that you can make for why Taiwan matters for the United States. One of them, Trump doesn’t care about at all, which is that it is, you know, one of the leading democracies in the region. And if you throw it under the bus, that would not be good for the cause of global democracy. And that’s not an argument that resonates at all with Trump.
And the second is semiconductors. In the end, it’s a big problem. The Trump administration is trying to get round this by removing more semiconductor production to the United States and other countries that are not Taiwan. But you know, we all have this massive problem that a huge proportion, still 80, 90 per cent of leading-edge semiconductor production and all of the knowledge and intellectual capital that goes into those chips is based in Taiwan. So in addition to all of the other problems that a conflict would cause, you have the prospect of shortages of semiconductors and the enormous effect that this would have on the world economy.
But actually it’s the third argument, which is the most strategic, which is that for, you know, 200 years the United States has had a policy of not allowing another rival power to rise in either Europe or Asia. It’s feeling comfortable enough to take a step back from Europe, I think, on the bet that the Europeans will be able to manage Russia on their own. But they can’t take a step back from Asia. As in if they step back, China will fill that void and China will become the dominant country in the world.
And so you have these two problems, semiconductors on the one hand, but then the much bigger kind of geostrategic challenge of America’s position in the world, both of which point to a kind of continuity of policy that in a sense, the most likely scenario is that despite Trump’s isolationist instincts that he will decide to continue to support Taiwan.
But you know, it’s very difficult to tell. This is a highly unpredictable administration and it does a lot of things that nobody expects. So if you’re sitting in Taipei, then even what they call the Silicon Shield, the fact that you have these semiconductors and therefore you need to be protected, and the fact that you sit sort of at the crux of America’s alliance system in the Asia-Pacific, it’s not enough to mean that you are feeling confident about your future.
Gideon Rachman
Perhaps slightly. Oddly, I’ve focused entirely on what America is doing about Taiwan, but obviously the threat is from China. And is there a sense also in Taiwan that that threat is increasing at a time when America’s, as we’ve discussed, a bit less kind of clear what they’re doing, that China is steadily ramping the pressure up?
James Crabtree
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s very palpable. So you have two changes. I think one which is positive for Taiwan and one which is much less positive. The positive one is that this administration is taking its own defence much more seriously. But at the same time, ever since Nancy Pelosi’s visit, which some of your listeners will remember in the autumn of 2022, China has been, they call it the anaconda strategy. They’ve been tightening this vise around Taiwan with ever more elaborate military exercises, showing that they can surround the island, that there’s not very much that Taiwan’s military can do, that they could conduct a quarantine operation, for instance, or other ways in which they could make Taiwan’s life very difficult.
And so one senior official put it to me this way, that in a sense with every year that passes because China’s military gets better and better, they’re struggling to keep up just to keep the kind of the status quo level. China’s ability to potentially launch an invasion, or at least to use its military tools to coerce Taiwan increases with every year. And therefore Taiwan is running up the down escalator in order to try and keep its deterrence level even stable, let alone improving.
And so I think there is a sense that, you know, their basic strategy is they have to wait out the Chinese system. You know, they have to wait for China’s system either to collapse, which is very unlikely, or for President Xi to leave office and to be replaced by a slightly less provocative or Taiwan-focused leadership, which is probably not going to happen until the mid-2030s.
Gideon Rachman
And there are these developments in Chinese military technology, which seem to be very clearly focused on invading Taiwan. The development of these landing craft, new missiles that can sink American aircraft carriers from over a thousand kilometres away. So is the military balance tilting towards China?
James Crabtree
I mean, it certainly has been, and I think yes, you, have what the military experts call area denial capabilities, which is Chinese missiles, which can sink aircraft carriers and these push the American military further and further away.
On the other hand, you do have some other military technological developments. All of the, drone warfare sort of learning from Ukraine, which is potentially relevant. Taiwan is busily trying to turn itself into a Ukraine-style, drone-producing nation.
So it’s never entirely clear until the fighting starts how the military balance sits. But certainly if you look at numbers of ships, then China’s capabilities are going up at a very steady clip and the US and Taiwan together are not able to match these developments in hard power. So yes, I think Taiwan is pretty nervous about that.
Gideon Rachman
Now we talked exclusively about Taiwan so far, but it does seem to me that Trump in other areas is actually sort of undermining the American alliance system right across the Indo-Pacific. I don’t know whether he’s doing it deliberately or not, but I mean, let’s go through the key allies. I mean, South Korea, the South Korean president’s just been in the US. What’s going on there?
James Crabtree
So the South Koreans are nervous. Both South Korea and Japan got 15 per cent tariffs, which I think they were, you know, it wasn’t a disaster. The two countries in the region that feel they were very badly done by out of the tariffs were Taiwan on the one hand, and India on the other. But South Korea has a challenge, which is there are a lot of US military troops there.
So South Korea is in the most like Europe, where Trump has a grievance, which is he feels like he is excessively funding US military personnel in the big bases in South Korea, which are designed to stop an invasion from the north. And so in the first Trump administration, there was this recurring theme of Trump wanting South Korea to pay more for this.
And so you, have this kind of tension between the two sides, which means that Seoul, as with the rest of the allies is pretty nervous about their position. They are hosting the Apec summit, which is an economic group in Asia later this year, and Trump may go to the Apec summit and people are now talking about whether Kim Jong Un might come to that.
So in a sense they’ve managed to insert themselves into something that gives Trump profile and that may be positive. But as is true with the other allies, I think South Korea doesn’t feel like it’s got a good handle on how to talk to the Trump administration.
Gideon Rachman
And people say that Japan — I haven’t been for now over a year, I want to go back — but, that there’s been a real shift in mood there, that they’re increasingly upset with the Trump administration, which they traditionally, they’ve got better with Republicans, but not this time.
James Crabtree
Yeah, well, I think the 15 per cent tariff that they were hit with was treated with real shock and anger because, you know, the United Kingdom had got 10 per cent in Japan as the model ally, not only hosts large numbers of US troops, but if you look at the region geostrategically, it’s the most important ally. It’s enormously, strategically important, and yes, so Trump didn’t really give them any quarter. He went in and took what he could. And so I think in all of these countries, strategic elites are thinking, can we really rely on the US anymore in the way that we thought we would? And, what effect does that have?
So across the region, you see countries just trying to make sure that they’re not having tensions with the US and China at the same time. You see a kind of a little Thor in almost all of these countries and their relations with China because as they try and work out exactly how it is, they can handle the US and how much of a long-term change the Trump administration’s policies are gonna be.
Gideon Rachman
And what does that do to the countries of south-east Asia? As I mentioned, you were based in Singapore. The Philippines under Marcos seems to me to have attached much closer to the United States after the Duterte years. Singapore, you know, has always hosted the American navy when it comes through Vietnam, saw America despite obviously the horrors of the Vietnam war as an important balancer against China. Is there evidence there for rethinking any of those?
James Crabtree
I think it’s pretty clear the Philippines is an exceptional case because it is a US treaty ally and under Marcos has become much closer to the US and sort of thrown its lot in with the US, allowed the US to build not quite new military bases, but to have access to military bases.
The others in the region, I think there’s a division. Some of the countries I think like Vietnam and Singapore are very anxious about the US playing less of a role in the region and have a view that the US is very important to the strategic balance of the region. As in if the US isn’t playing an active role, then really China is the dominant force in south-east Asia.
There’s not much you can do about that if you’re a tiny country like Singapore or a medium-sized country like Vietnam. But for most of the rest of the countries in the region, I think the attitude is, you know, the US is being extremely painful. They’re making our lives much more difficult. They’re hitting us with these tariffs.
And if you are one of the Muslim-majority countries like Malaysia or Indonesia, you look at what’s happening in Gaza and that all adds up to a lot of popular discontent. And this is all good for China. I think you can see not a dramatic but a pretty steady shift in improving ties with China and weakening ties with the US.
And that’s mostly because these are countries, they’re trading nations, and therefore they’re interested in trade and investment and the US has sort of got out of that game. It’s not interested in trade agreements anymore. And to the extent that it has an economic policy for Asia, it’s coercive. It’s interested in the military side, but only really with its allies. So only with Japan and the Philippines and countries like that.
Gideon Rachman
And what about Australia? I mean, they also made a big bet on America through the Aukus pact, with Australia, the UK, and the US. They’re meant to be getting these nuclear submarines from America or American technology as well, but I gather that’s now under review in the Pentagon.
James Crabtree
I was in Washington not too long ago either, and I saw Kevin Rudd, the ambassador and former prime minister, and he said, you know, nothing to see here actually. There might be a little bit of chop on the surface, but you know, we’re all good underneath.
But there is clearly a lot of worries in Canberra as well. And the Aukus submarine deal, which is enormously expensive, long-term project that will only begin to deliver these submarines into the 2040s is a big focus. The Pentagon under Elbridge Colby, who we talked about previously launched this review. The basic question being: By building these submarines for Australia, are we getting in the way of building submarines for America, and is that a problem?
There are other challenges as well. So I think in all of these cases, the bilateral relations between the US and its allies are, you know, at their lowest they have been in many decades. I think certainly after the Biden administration, which puts such a lot of effort into being nice to Asian allies and trying to build up these relationships.
And again, that’s not even without talking about India, which is the most obvious example of a long-term American attempt to build bridges that has been pretty much trashed in a period of a couple of months.
Gideon Rachman
So let’s talk about India. Another country you used to be based in, I think in a couple of days’ time, Prime Minister Modi’s going to meet Xi Jinping in China. The first visit in seven years. As you say, I mean, it seems to me a dramatic act of self-harm by the United States. They’ve spent 20 years building this relationship. They’ve even rechristened the whole area, the Indo-Pacific as a way of signalling how important India is to the balance of power, and now they just seem to have alienated the Indians. But is that a temporary score or do you think there’s kind of lasting damage? Maybe too soon to tell?
James Crabtree
So we are recording this the day before the tariffs are meant to come in. And so the threat at the moment, India in the first round of the tariffs was threatened with 25 per cent, but it then got itself tangled up in issues to do with the Ukraine-Russia negotiations.
India buys a lot of Russian oil, and then because of this Trump threatened India with a 50 per cent tariff, which is much, much higher than any other nation has got. So we are waiting to see whether a last-minute deal or potentially a postponement occurs. But I think the assumption at the moment, certainly in Delhi, is that they are gonna get hit with these tariffs and they will be very economically damaging.
And then that will further damage ties between the US and India, which have been hit by a number of problems over the last couple of months. And as you say, it is a massive act of geopolitical self-harm because the wider Indo-Pacific region, you look at it through the eyes of the United States, worried about China, then if you have India kind of broadly on your side or you know, not as an ally, but as a partner with similar concerns and lots of ties.
Then that makes the balancing coalition against China look much stronger. If India shifts back to a more neutral position, then it looks much, much weaker. And Trump is throwing this away for very little, you know, no particular reason apart from wanting to appear to be tough in negotiation.
So I think that the damage will be done. It would take a lot of effort to repair this. I don’t necessarily think it’s entirely irreparable, but it will be very damaging. It will take a long time to put this back together.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I mean, I’m reminded, there was a quote from the former CIA director Bill Burns, who was actually responding to something much narrower when the Trump administration just announced that they were sacking half of the most important intelligence specialists in the CIA specialising in Russia or in China and so on.
And Burns wrote an open letter to them saying, you know, that our adversaries in Beijing and Moscow will be opening the champagne. And it seems to me that on a broader level, certainly in Beijing, they must really see this as a moment of opportunity.
James Crabtree
Yes. I mean, I suppose the one caveat to that is that looked at from 50,000 feet, you would’ve said that was true for the last two decades, that it was a mistake for China to act aggressively against India, both on its Himalayan border, but also by making incursions into the Indian Ocean in a way that really put Delhi’s back up, and that the sensible thing to do would be to make nice and kind of peel the Indians away from the Americans.
And Beijing never seemed to be able to do this. The notion of a kind of charm offensive from Beijing seemed to come, as people say, with lots of offensive and very little charm. So I think now it’s an open question as to whether or not China can take this opportunity, whether or not their system is kind of structurally able to offer Modi something that he wants and damp down the tensions both in the border and around the region. And again, that’s a . . . it’s an interesting question of day-to-day diplomacy against kind of big picture structures, because there are lots of reasons to think that India and China are set on a path of long-term competition with one another.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there can’t be, you know, some ebb and flow in that. And so I think it’ll be very interesting to see how China now behaves towards India. There is clearly an opening to peel India away from the kind of American western camp. And the question now is, can China take that opportunity?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Gideon Rachman
That was James Crabtree ending this edition of the Rachman Review, and James is also currently writing a new book on all of these very themes, which will be out next year. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.