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Now is no time to
degrade military
By Wang Jyh-perng 王志鵬
On Jan. 18, four days after being elected to a second term in office, President
Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) attended a banquet laid on by the Ministry of Defense to
celebrate the Lunar New Year. In his speech at the banquet, Ma said that
Taiwan’s strategic thinking was no longer focused solely on the military aspect.
He said that improving relations across the Taiwan Strait, including trade,
investment and educational and cultural exchanges, were all implicit kinds of
national defense that helped safeguard the nation’s security.
He said that his government would continue working to make the nation’s armed
forces smaller, but also proficient, strong and skillful, and that it would also
set up different kinds of defense lines in the Taiwan Strait involving different
sectors, so that China, would not consider using non-peaceful means to resolve
cross-strait disputes. Ma said that this approach was in keeping with one of the
core ideas of Sun Zi’s (孫子) classic text The Art of War (孫子兵法), which is that
“the highest form of generalship is to thwart the enemy’s plans; the next best
is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next after that is to
attack the enemy’s army in the field and the worst policy of all is to besiege
walled cities.”
Ma’s idea that trade, investment, education, culture and other kinds of exchange
are all substantial forms of national defense is very surprising, and also
rather worrying.
After he took office as president in May 2008, Ma worked toward a cross-strait
Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), which was signed in June 2010.
One of the ideas behind the ECFA was that trade in itself tends to uphold peace.
This theory of peace through trade includes four main ideas, which are as
follows:
First, intense economic and trade activity make a country more prosperous and
this in turn reduces or restrains its rulers’ motivation for launching wars.
Second, economic and trade interactions promote mutual understanding between
countries and thus make it less likely that misunderstandings will arise and
lead to war.
Third, economic and trade factors can change a country’s internal power
structure by building up the influence of groups that benefit from peaceful
trade relations.
Fourth, intense economic and trade activity creates a spillover effect by
strengthening the political relations between trade partners, and it promotes
political cooperation between countries.
There is nothing much wrong with the concepts of this theory of peace through
trade, and it is likely to have the desired effects during the initial period.
However, historical examples of this theory at work are mostly drawn from
Europe, in situations where two countries or groups of countries were equal or
not very different in terms of their political, economic and military power.
However, in the case of Taiwan and China, there is considerable political,
economic and military inequality between the two, with Taiwan being the weaker
partner in all three aspects. In view of this, the spillover effect of intense
economic and trade activity across the Taiwan Strait as time goes by is likely
to be a high degree of dependence from which it will become increasingly
difficult for Taiwan to free itself.
Besides, the flipside aspect of this theory of peace through trade is the idea
that the military no longer serves any purpose. On Jan. 17 the Washington Times
reported comments regarding Ma’s re-election by Patrick Cronin, who is senior
director of the Asia-Pacific security program at the Washington-based think tank
the Center for a New American Security. Cronin said that while Ma had in the
course of his campaign expressed an interest in buying F-16C/D jets and eight
diesel-electric submarines from the US, he had done so to appease voters
critical of his closeness with China.
According to Cronin “it’s going to be harder for the US to sell arms to Taiwan”
now that Ma has been elected for a second term. Cronin’s critique is clear and
direct, and can be taken as an indication of whether Ma will really go on making
practical efforts to obtain the submarines during his second term in office.
As then-deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia David Sedney said in
his address to the US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference in Jacksonville,
Florida, on Sept. 29, 2008, preserving security in the Taiwan Strait would
depend both on Taiwan’s democracy and on military technology. Without the
necessary defense capability, Taiwan’s democracy and freedom are sure to face
increasing threat as time goes by.
Between 2008 and the present, Taiwan’s armed forces have suffered a string of a
dozen or more major accidents, such as fighter planes going out of control and
crashing into the sea or mountainsides, submarines firing off torpedoes by
accident and missiles fired during joint exercises malfunctioning and missing
their targets, yet none of these incidents has been followed by a public inquiry
and detailed explanation. These incidents are early signs of a gradual weakening
of Taiwan’s national defense capability.
Ma says he wants Taiwan’s armed forces to be smaller, but proficient, strong and
skillful. His proposal may sound impressive, but so far it has been no more than
an empty slogan, with no real action or content.
Under the stable relations that currently prevail across the Taiwan Strait,
Taiwan’s national defense capability is being continually reduced in both
quantitative and qualitative terms. If this process goes on without instituting
the major changes that are needed to make our armed forces proficient, strong
and skillful, then making them small can only go on making them weaker.
Wang Jyh-perng is an associate research fellow at the Association for
Managing Defense and Strategies.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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