Shawn Fleetwood of the Federalist focuses on the incoming president’s approach toward protecting Taiwan.
It’s no secret by now that Joe Biden’s presidency has ushered in a more unstable geopolitical environment. From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, the lack of effective and competent U.S. leadership has given America’s worst adversaries the confidence to act upon their destabilizing agendas — chief among them being Red China.
Throughout the past four years, the Middle Kingdom has significantly upped its aggressive behavior toward the U.S. and its allies in the Indo-Pacific. This has notably included deploying hostile military exercises and other “gray zone” tactics against Taiwan, which Beijing views as Chinese territory and has threatened to take by force, if necessary.
On Friday, Taiwanese authorities reported that a Chinese vessel cut an undersea internet cable connected to the island, a maneuver used by the communist nation in the Baltic Sea in November. According to The Wall Street Journal, the apparent act of sabotage caused “only minimal disruption of service but [sent] a message about the vulnerability of the island and its internet.”
The incident occurred days before Taiwan’s National Security Bureau revealed the island received double the number of cyberattacks from last year, averaging 2.4 million attacks per day. Most of these attacks, the bureau noted, came from China.
With Biden riding off disgracefully into the sunset, it’ll be up to President-elect Donald Trump to grapple with the increasingly unstable situation in the Taiwan Strait. While restoring efficiency and lethality to America’s military remains paramount, there a number of actions the incoming commander-in-chief can take to deter China from launching a military offensive against the island nation.
“If we don’t get this right, Chinese socialism will be on the ascendancy throughout the world,” Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow for The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Security, told The Federalist.
