Foreign Minister Jaushieh Joseph Wu said Taiwan is committed to strengthening its self-defense capabilities while working with like-minded parnters to counter authoritarian expansion.
Wu made the remarks in an interview with Anne Applebaum for an article titled “China’s War Against Taiwan Has Already Started” published Dec. 14.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raised awareness in Taiwan and around the world that an authoritarian government is initiating a war against a peace-loving country, Wu said. The similarity of Taiwan’s position to Ukraine immediately attracted global concern, he added.
According to Wu, Russia and China are extending their ambitions to Central and Eastern Europe and the Taiwan Strait, respectively. The Russia-Ukraine war has alerted Western democracies to the fact that they must curb authoritarian agression, Wu said, otherwise global peace and stability will be endangered.
Taiwan and Ukraine are both states in the sights of authoritarian expansion, Wu said. While China seeks to expand its global influence further, Taiwan’s strategies against Beijing’s military threats including cognitive warfare, conomic coercion and political manipulation, can be a useful reference for other countries and territories, he added.
Wu said Taiwan co-established the Global Cooperation and Training Framework with the U.S. to strengthen its information security capability. The framework stakeholders simultaneously further cooperation and training in media literacy while inviting democracies to join the resistance against compound threats from totalitarian countries, he added. (YCH-E)
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