China-Friendly KMT Stunts Taiwan’s Attempt To Grow Into A Fully Formed Hedgehog

Key weapons blocked

Republic of China Army photo

This story was commissioned by The Strategist. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Perhaps the strongest sign that Taiwan was on the verge of a strategic breakthrough came in early May, when the Taiwanese legislature, led by the China-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), passed a pared-down version of the special military budget championed by President Lai Ching-te.

After all, detente with China, or soft surrender if you’re being less generous, is a central plank in the KMT’s platform. Its passing a special military budget seems remarkable at first glance.

But in shrinking the special budget to just $25 billion from the proposed $40 billion, the KMT under chair Cheng Li-wun eliminated all the most important spending. This was the spending that would help Taiwan grow into an ‘indigestible hedgehog’—that is, prey too prickly for a larger predator to easily consume.

What got cut out of the special military budget: all domestic programs, including orders for 200,000 small drones. What stayed in: big-ticket purchases of American-made munitions, including Patriot air-defense missiles.

Adding insult to injury, Pres. Donald Trump froze U.S. arms sales to Taiwan around the same time the special military budget passed in Taipei. Calling arms sales to Taiwan ‘a very good negotiating chip’ in talks with Pres. Xi Jinping, Trump paused announced deals for missiles and other weaponry worth $14 billion. Those purchases are among those funded by the approved special military budget.

If Trump continues to withhold his signature on U.S.-Taiwanese arms deals, the $25 billion worth of (mostly) American arms in the special military budget would disappear alongside the Taiwanese arms Lai’s administration had proposed. In that dire scenario, the special budget could go unspent. All that drama for nothing.

Read the rest at The Strategist.