TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — Now is the time to start tooling up the capacity to ship arms to Ukraine, as doing so would not only be the right thing to do for a fellow democracy facing off against a menacing giant, but it would bring long-term diplomatic, domestic morale, national defense, business, and political benefits to Taiwan.
Many heartrending wars are leading to unimaginable suffering around the world, including in Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Syria, and periodically the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Ukraine conflict is the one that bears the most resemblance to the situation here in Taiwan.
Should China send the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into battle with Taiwan, Taipei will be looking to the world for help. Taiwan must send a strong message to other democracies that it is more than a charity, but is an essential partner when the chips are down.
When the pandemic hit, the world faced dire shortages of masks, temperature scanners, ventilators, and personal protective gear. Taiwanese businesses responded by doing what they do best, acting nimbly to get quality products done fast. While other countries struggled to cope, Taiwan was supplying the world with tens of millions of masks, medicines, and equipment to over 80 countries, donated by the government under the banner “Taiwan can help.”
This was a diplomatic breakthrough for the nation and made global headlines. Often in discussions in parliaments about drawing closer to Taipei or sending delegations, those on Taiwan's side frequently bring this up and contrast its generosity to China cynically making money selling often subpar products to a desperate world.
“Taiwan can help” was a success that garnered significant global goodwill. This generosity was repaid in kind when China made it difficult for Taiwan to get vaccines, and many of those same countries bought and donated vaccines to Taiwan. This led to deeper relationships of trust with many nations.
It was also a morale boost domestically and made Taiwan proud to have made such an important contribution at such a crucial moment, and rightly so.
NATO needs Taiwan
Similar to during the pandemic, NATO countries and Ukraine are struggling to tool up to meet the massive demand for weapons, ammunition, and materials needed to maintain Ukraine’s efforts to push back against the Russian war machine. Enter “Taiwan can help.”
Taiwan also has a problem, a defense industry that struggles because of a small domestic market and up to now limited exports because they lack the economies of scale needed to be competitive. Taiwan will need all the capacity it can get if a war does break out, so supplying Ukraine and NATO would be a way to achieve that.
With the war in Ukraine looking like it is going to last awhile, NATO’s struggling to maintain supplies and nations like Japan sharply hiking their defense budgets, Taiwan’s new added capacity will have markets for years to come, especially if Taiwan maintains a reputation for quality product made for a reasonable price.
Taiwan could donate to Ukraine and sell to NATO if an arrangement can be made. This would be beneficial to Taiwan on both national security and diplomatic levels.
Taiwan would need to coordinate with NATO on logistics and weapons specifications. That would be a huge achievement because a trusting relationship would be built, Taiwan would become more “real” in their eyes, and some weapons systems possibly be more interoperable, all of which could be valuable should a crisis break out in the Taiwan Strait.
Considering the magnitude of the crisis of supply in NATO countries and Ukraine, and the struggles to get budgets passed in the U.S. Congress, Taiwan stepping up now would generate enormous goodwill in Ukraine and among NATO countries. This would not be forgotten, especially by Ukraine, and Russian border states like Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states that have been drawing closer to Taiwan in recent years.
Tools and technology
The Ukrainians have shown their ingenuity in weapons, ammunition, and drone manufacturing under extraordinarily tough conditions. Taiwan is one of the world’s leading producers of machine and precision tools and should be sending those to Ukraine.
Most importantly it would be the right thing to do, but it would also help make up for some of the damage caused by the scandalous revelation that Taiwanese companies have been a key supplier of machine tools by shipping them through third countries. On the larger machines, “Taiwan can help” can be painted on the side in English and Ukrainian for an added public relations bonus when news crews do reports on their arms factories.
Taiwan would need to coordinate with Ukraine and NATO to determine what they need and what would be appropriate. Consideration would also need to be put into building more stockpiles domestically and around the region for both local military needs and the Americans, who have been recently building munitions stockpiles in the region.
Some weapons systems like missiles have more difficult supply chains and it may take considerable time to build those out to be able to build more than is needed domestically, but others are relatively simple such as ammunition, guns, and smaller drones. There may be cases where Taiwan may not want to share very specific weapons with unique Taiwanese technology that they would not want to fall into Russian hands and be passed on to the Chinese, but these should be rare cases.
One big advantage of sending Taiwan military equipment to Ukraine is to learn how well they stand up in actual war conditions and learn from that to improve the technology going forward. That could provide a valuable edge to Taiwan militarily.
Well worth the price
Domestically it would be politically important in helping build a sense of morale about Taiwan’s place in the world, that it is a valuable player and part of the team taking part in defeating evil. A sense of national responsibility builds goodwill between the partners involved, both domestically and abroad.
Would this make Russia more likely to assist China should they decide to invade? Not likely any more than they would have otherwise. Taiwan would be just one of many countries that have aided Ukraine and an autocrat like Vladimir Putin only considers what is good for himself and helps him keep power.
The only cost of doing this would be money. Taiwan so far has only given US$65 million (NT$2.04 billion) in humanitarian aid. Japan, which has almost the same GDP per capita as Taiwan, has donated over US$7 billion. If Taiwan had donated as much on a per capita basis, it would have donated over US$1.3 billion, and Taiwan is in far better financial shape than Japan. Japan has also donated militarily and financially.
Taiwan, being a country that may need aid like Ukraine does now, needs to send a far stronger message to potential allies going forward than Japan does. The benefits would far outweigh the costs.
It would also be the right thing to do.
Correction: $130 million corrected to $1.3 billion.
Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文) is a regular columnist for Taiwan News, the central Taiwan correspondent for ICRT FM100 Radio News, co-publisher of Compass Magazine, co-founder of Taiwan Report (report.tw) and former chair of the Taichung American Chamber of Commerce. For more columns by the author, click here. Follow him on X (prev. Twitter): @donovan_smith.