May 15, 2021
Diplomats fog their minefields with blandness. A “joint leaders’ statement” can even put an insomniac to sleep: “We underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-strait issues.” Zzz.
Wake up. One word in that affirmation by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and U.S. President Joe Biden makes last month’s summit historic: Taiwan. It hadn’t figured in a comparable context since 1969.
Japan faces an agonizing dilemma two, rather: commerce versus politics; security versus freedom. Taiwan, boldly defiant of China’s threats to swallow it, is free but hardly secure. Japan, democratic and professing human rights, naturally wants to be and be seen in the camp of the free powers, which look askance at China’s one-party rule and concomitant truculence toward adversaries at home and abroad and Taiwan, in China’s view, is “home.”