TAIPEI CITY (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Liz Truss stated during the Nato summit that if China invaded Taiwan, it would be “a catastrophic miscalculation” and that the UK and other nations should reevaluate their trade agreements with nations who use economic power in “coercive” methods.
The British foreign secretary said trade should be focused on nations that could be trusted, a sign of how dramatically UK official attitudes toward China have changed since the self-declared “golden decade” under David Cameron.
At the Madrid conference, Truss stated that given China’s growing geopolitical aspirations, the new Nato strategic concept—the alliance’s basic objective, which was last updated in 2010 and is to be revamped now—should clearly mention China.
Her remarks come a day after Truss argued that the Russian invasion of Ukraine taught the world to act more quickly to provide Taiwan with defensive weaponry in case China invaded.
Together with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, Truss stated that she didn’t think that with China widening its influence through economic coercion and building a powerful army, there was a real risk that they drew the wrong idea that concluded in a catastrophic miscalculation, invading Taiwan for example.
The G7 conference in southern Germany, which finished earlier this week, included efforts to spread more western infrastructure funding for poor countries as a reaction to China’s so-called belt and road initiative, which looks to bring influence by similar kind of investment.
Ms Truss argued that there was a need to extend forth and develop that network of liberty of other like-minded countries given the threat posed by both China and Russia.
She said that the G7 nations as well as countries like Australia should use their “economic weight” to fight China, and that the UK should even reevaluate its trade approach with Beijing.
She stated that historically they hadn’t utilised that economic power. In terms of who they traded with and collaborated with, they had been equally detached. And she believed that nations were focusing much more on whether or not they could trust their trading partners today. Would they use it to undermine them, or would they use it for mutual advantage of their economies? So trade had become much more geopolitical.
Speaking before the Commons foreign affairs committee on Tuesday, Truss significantly deviated from the standard language of the government on Taiwan by stating that the island needed to be armed for defence.
They needed to have taken action sooner. They ought to have started arming Ukraine with defensive weaponry sooner, she stated. For Taiwan, they must take note of that lesson. The sooner they did it, the better, as every piece of equipment they had provided required months of training.
