Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed Taiwan to the forefront of geopolitics once again. The U.S. and Europe fear that Communist China will take the opportunity to attack Taiwan by force, while leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait insist that Taiwan cannot be compared to Ukraine. Beijing asserts that Taiwan is an internal Chinese matter and that linking it to Ukraine is a Western-created conspiracy about “democracy against dictatorship,” while Taipei emphasizes that it is fundamentally different from Ukraine in terms of its geostrategic and global supply-chain importance. We believe there is a real danger that Chinese Communist Party chief Xi Jinping will essentially “Ukrainize” Taiwan, and the international community must guard against it.
Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on the grounds of protecting Russians who were subjected to so-called “genocide” in Ukraine, NATO’s expansion to the east, and the need to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine. These justifications are untenable excuses for aggression against Ukraine. Russia’s aggression is in essence a blatant abandonment of the principle of the prohibition of the use of force to resolve international disputes among nation-states, as stipulated in the U.N. Charter, and it is a crime according to the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court.
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