Opinion | For the KMT, the Real Audience Isn't Washington. It's Taiwan

Kuomintang (KMT) chairwoman Cheng Li-wen (鄭麗文) concluded her sixteen-day visit to the United States this week. Reactions have been predictably mixed, shaped more by existing political loyalties than by any dispassionate assessment of what she actually accomplished. Setting aside those partisan lenses, her trip is best understood as a distinctive kind of political performance — and the ability to deliver a credible performance on the international stage is a basic requirement of any serious political leader. On that measure, she completed what she set out to do, even if the execution left considerable room for improvement.

On substance, her core argument is largely sound: cross-strait relations must rest on peace, exchanges between the two sides can and should be deepened, but any movement toward unification requires the genuine consent of the Taiwanese people. That position is unlikely to attract serious challenge within Taiwan. The more contested question is how one defines "Taiwanese independence" — if the green camp's vision involves establishing a formal "Republic of Taiwan," that aspiration has, for all practical purposes, already been foreclosed.

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

— President John F. Kennedy, "We Choose to Go to the Moon," Rice University, September 12, 1962

History, of course, teaches that nothing worthwhile comes easily. Kennedy gave his moon-shot program a decade. He met the deadline — but only after absorbing countless setbacks and failures. Apollo 11 landed on the lunar surface more than seven years after that speech at Rice University, the product of enormous national effort and painful lessons learned along the way.

There is also a cultural dimension worth naming directly. Western strategic thinking tends to privilege deterrence and coercive pressure — what the old diplomatists called "the big stick." East Asian historical experience points toward a different logic. The Northern Song dynasty fought the Liao empire, but ultimately secured a century of stability through the Treaty of Chanyuan. It was a later Song emperor's decision to abandon that framework — to discard a hundred years of managed coexistence with Liao in favor of an opportunistic alliance with the Jin — that produced the catastrophe of the Jingkang Incident and inspired Yue Fei's famous lament. The lesson is not that strength is irrelevant, but that stable arrangements, even imperfect ones, have a value that short-term tactical maneuvering tends to destroy.

Borrowing Kennedy's framing: if the KMT chooses to pursue cross-strait peace — and to do the other difficult things that go with it — that choice should be made precisely because the goal is hard, not in spite of it. A party that genuinely understands this will not abandon its approach simply because a particular administration in Washington shifts its position. The ultimate arbiter remains the consent of the Taiwanese people.

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.

— Plaque left on the lunar surface by Apollo 11

Those words sound unimpeachably noble in isolation. Place them alongside a different historical moment, however, and a more instructive picture emerges. When President Nixon traveled to Beijing in 1972 — invoking the same spirit of coming "in peace for all mankind" — China was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. The most violent phase of that decade-long upheaval had passed, but the movement itself was still very much underway, reshaping the lives of hundreds of millions of people. None of that stopped Washington from pursuing normalization. The lesson, as plain today as it was then, is that American foreign policy has no permanent friends and no permanent enemies — only permanent interests.

A more recent episode underscores the point. Just this week, a deal that observers had expected to be signed between the United States and Iran collapsed at the last moment. The Trump administration pulled back on Friday, apparently unwilling to absorb the political costs of the agreement, or constrained by Israel's ongoing military operations in Lebanon. What made the episode especially striking was that Vice President J.D. Vance — a figure associated with the American right, which has historically been strongly pro-Israel — publicly berated Israel in terms that would have been unimaginable in an earlier era.

Leaked accounts in the American press suggest that President Trump himself has sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Benjamin Netanyahu), accusing him of undermining U.S.-Iran negotiations. For Taiwan, this should register as a warning. Even the closest alignment with Washington's political right offers no immunity. When a foreign leader becomes inconvenient — when they are seen as blocking American objectives — the Trump administration has shown it will not hesitate to say so publicly, regardless of how warm the personal relationship may have appeared. The message for any government that relies heavily on U.S. support is clear: if you become a "troublemaker" in Washington's eyes, do not expect diplomatic cover.

And yet Netanyahu's record also points toward a different lesson — one that the KMT, and Cheng Li-wen in particular, would do well to study. Israel is a country of nine million people. It has repeatedly shaped American foreign policy, frustrated the strategic designs of Arab states and Muslim-majority nations with populations many times its size, and positioned itself as an indispensable actor in a region where the odds would appear to be stacked against it. That is not conventional political skill. In the language of international relations, Netanyahu's relationship with Trump and with successive American administrations is a textbook case of "the tail wagging the dog."

Vance's outburst captures the frustration this dynamic produces: "I want my response to be: what is your actual plan? You are a country of nine million people. You cannot kill your way to solving every national security problem." The irritation is genuine — but it is also a measure of how much leverage a smaller power can accumulate through strategic clarity and sheer persistence.

This is the political challenge that actually confronts the KMT. The moon-shot goal of cross-strait peace remains worth pursuing — not despite its difficulty, but because of it. For an American strategic culture that defaults to deterrence and coercive leverage, demonstrating how East Asian societies have historically navigated prolonged periods of managed coexistence is itself an important contribution to the debate. And for Taiwan's independence advocates, Vance's words carry their own pointed message: a country of 23 million people cannot resolve its existential challenges through war.

Cheng Li-wen's performance in Washington — at the Asia Society forum in New York and in her various public statements and interviews — showed real gaps: in delivery, in the quality of her argumentation, and in the depth of preparation. There is significant room for improvement. That said, when the U.S. military has quietly renamed its Indo-Pacific Command back to Pacific Command, and when a $14 billion arms sale package to Taiwan continues to sit in bureaucratic limbo, the underlying logic of her position is not, on its merits, obviously wrong.

The more serious challenge she faces is domestic, not foreign. American skeptics who describe her approach as naive or idealistic are not primarily questioning Beijing's intentions — they are questioning whether her vision can actually command broad public support within Taiwan. That skepticism is legitimate. The critical test of any cross-strait policy is not whether Washington accepts it or Beijing tolerates it, but whether the Taiwanese people themselves embrace it with clear eyes about what it entails and what it costs.

Taiwan's leaders — across party lines — face a choice that Netanyahu's career illustrates in sharp relief: do you absorb pressure and hold out, like Iran, or do you build the strategic leverage to shape the decisions of far more powerful actors? Both paths require something that is currently in short supply: not promises, but genuine political wisdom, and a public with a clear-eyed understanding of where Taiwan actually stands. Without that, any policy can be announced. None can be delivered.

Original Article in Chinese

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