Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jesse Monford, U.S. Navy/Public Domain
RECENT US AND ISRAELI joint strikes on Iran are likely to have a similar impact on Taiwan as to the US kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. This is especially true, seeing as Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has been killed by the US-Israeli joint military action.
The kidnapping of Maduro led to fears in Taiwan about a potential Chinese decapitation strike directed at Taiwan’s political leadership. Namely, that the US was capable of executing a military operation directed against Venezuela was perceived popularly as indicative of that China could potentially carry out a similar operation directed against Taiwan.
That the US and Israel killed Khamenei so quickly after the start of their war against Iran is likely to add to such perceptions. Popular perceptions will be that large and powerful states as the US, Israel, or China, would be able to carry out political decapitation strikes against weaker states relatively easily. For its part, online Chinese nationalists responded by calling for a decapitation strike against Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te.
Experts have often taken the opposite view, stating that the US’s actions against Venezuela are likely to deter China. The kidnapping of Maduro–as well as the more recent killing of Khamenei–would seem to indicate that the US has capabilities that China does not at present.
Still, the general public is not likely to read so closely into signalling between militaries about capabilities. And it is a credible view that the Trump administration’s actions, in targeting heads of state as part of efforts at regime change, will normalize targeting of heads of state, such that China will carry out more aggressive actions against Lai or other high-ranking Taiwanese government officials.
In this sense, such views assert that China has been forced to acknowledge the superiority of the US at present because of its recent actions. Nevertheless, that being the case, China is likely to put all the more effort into ongoing attempts to split the US and Taiwan, through efforts to disseminate “US-skeptic discourse.” Such discourse alleges that the US would be an unreliable ally that would abandon Taiwan in wartime, which only sells arms to Taiwan in order to economically profit and has no actual interest in defending Taiwan.
It is less clear if the US’s actions in Iran will lead to further circulation of views about the shift toward geopolitical multipolarism. In the immediate wake of Maduro’s kidnapping, conspiratorial views circulated online that the US and China had perhaps come to a deal about Venezuela, such that China had agreed to give Venezuela to the US, perhaps in return for Taiwan. This reflects rising concerns in Taiwan about the Trump administration trading Taiwan’s sovereignty off to China in exchange for a trade deal. Such views reflect a lack of knowledge of Latin America in Taiwan, in overstating China’s influence over Venezuela. Views of the Middle East, however, largely follow those of the US in the wake of the War on Terror.
At the same time, it is also probable that insofar as actions directed at Iran are a joint US-Israel military action, this will accelerate efforts by the Lai administration to strengthen ties with Israel. The Taiwanese military will carefully analyze Israel’s military capabilities and showy displays of power as the Khamenei assassination will increase the desire to build military ties with Israel. Taiwan-Israel ties are already motivated by Israel’s expertise in technologies that Taiwan could use to defend against China, such as drone technology.