A nation must think before it acts.
FPRI’s June Teufel Dreyer and Arthur Waldron Cited in The National Interest on What Beijing Gains By Threatening Taiwan
“Because of that separate Taiwanese identity, nobody in Taiwan advocates “secession.” The victorious DPP believes that Taiwan, in Dreyer’s words, “is already an autonomous state and can’t secede from something it was never part of.”
“The Taiwanese people have more than earned self-determination,” Arthur Waldron told me recently. They have, but as the University of Pennsylvania professor says, Xi is “intoxicated” by his power and capable of “highly dangerous folly.” “The unelected and cossetted Beijing leadership,” Waldron notes, “is poorly educated, poorly informed, insulated from public opinion in China, lacks judgment, and may therefore make a terrible mistake.””