Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: US Department of State/Public Domain
A TRUTH SOCIAL post by US President Donald Trump drew widespread condemnation after Trump threatened that “a whole civilization” would die if Iran did not comply with US demands to surrender. In the same post, Trump incongruously stated “God Bless the Great People of Iran”, as well as touted “Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized people prevail”.
Trump’s threats were seen as building on previous US threats to target Iranian power stations and bridges. At the same time, Trump’s statements were also seen as potentially threatening the use of nuclear weapons, as the most destructive weapons in the US arsenal.
Trump eventually backed down, declaring a two-week ceasefire. After the breakdown of talks, Trump has now begun to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. What happens next is to be seen.
Trump’s comments were quickly noticed in Taiwan, becoming a front-page news article on domestic outlets. The Iran War has been extensively covered in domestic Taiwanese news, even when international stories are not always so widely reported on.
It may not be surprising to note that the usual, pro-China suspects in Taiwan have leapt onto Trump’s comments, framing China as an arbiter of peace when the US is not. Such political actors have taken advantage of the instability presented by the Trump administration in order to weaken faith in the US as sustaining the so-called “rules-based international order,” positioning China as a force for stability that can replace the US.
Sometimes, this has dovetailed with framings of KMT chair Cheng Li-wun’s recent trip to China. Despite having claimed two weeks ago to international press correspondents that the KMT was a party that hoped to maintain stable ties with the US, in a speech at Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum in Nanjing, Cheng claimed that Asian culture–as embodied by China–was inherently peaceful. Cheng juxtaposed this with “despotic Western civilization.” The last Asian power that sought to become a regional hegemon before China’s current and ongoing attempt, Japan, was termed as having taken up “despotic western civilization.”
Indeed, the “rules-based international order” was always the dominance of great hegemonic powers, and swapping out the US for China does not change that. It is hard to see China as a regional peacemaker when it has had thousands of missiles pointed at Taiwan for decades. The discourse of “Keeping the island, but not the people”, too, suggests a genocidal logic not unlike that of Trump’s. To term China a peacemaker, on a civilizational basis that appeals to murky history, also neglects that polities in what we now call the Asia Pacific have feared conquest by premodern Chinese empires for thousands of years.
Still, it is not surprising to see that such pro-China actors–as well as China itself–have sought to pursue global hegemony through this framing of China as having always been a peacemaker and having always been peaceful. One can simply look at the prevalence of war in Chinese classics such as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, or Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, or the endless wars of dynastic succession that China has seen, to observe that this is not the case.
Of course, on the flipside, domestically in Taiwan, one also expects to see the usual pro-Trump political actors not only whitewash Trump’s actions, but to somehow seek and depict them as reassuring to Taiwan’s safety. There will be little attention paid to the essential depravity of claiming to liberate a people while threatening to wipe them out in the same series of sentences, or the twists and turns of Trump’s decision-making, as if Trump had a consistent stance throughout.
In this sense, such individuals prove mirror reflections of those who have sought to use the apoplectic fits of waning US power to suggest that China is inevitably on the rise. For such individuals, the US can do no wrong. Even when the two great powers resemble each other more than not–as a declining power and the rising power that seeks to step into its predecessor’s shoes–the US will be idealized as a force for civilizational good in the world.
This goes to demonstrate the wretchedness of political discourse in Taiwan, then, caught as it is in two binaries between the US and China. Ironically, perspectives that center the small countries caught between the machinations of great powers–as Taiwan is–are often marginal within those small countries. Instead, such viewpoints, which are bottom-up and grounded in the experiences of such contexts, and are displaced by campists of one stripe or another, whether it be those who back the US or China.