Ep 39: The "Hornet's Nest" - Turning Taiwan Into a Hellscape

Recently, there's been a lot of talk about how Taiwan is the Israel of East Asia, all because some Philistine who clearly doesn't understand Taiwan made an Instagram reel pointing out that Taiwan just got a $14 billion arms deal and then compares us to Israel because Israel also gets billions of dollars worth of weapons from the U.S.

But there's a pretty important difference that he left out.

Whereas the US currently provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military funding every year, meaning Israel can essentially receive US weapons at little to no cost, the weapons Taipei purchases from Washington are paid for by the taxpayers here in Taiwan.

In other words, Taipei is essentially being strong-armed by Washington into spending billions of dollars every year on overpriced and outdated weapons, many of which don't even arrive on time.

And while Congress is pushing for an even closer U.S.-Israel defense partnership, the anti-China war hawks in Washington are coming up with plans to turn Taiwan into a self-destructing trap, one that wouldn't necessarily or actually defeat the PLA, but would be designed to wear it down while turning Taiwan into a sea of fire as the U.S. watches from a distance.

Last year, in episode 19, I talked about a policy proposal developed by U.S. foreign policy advisors for Taiwan called the Porcupine Strategy, or sometimes the Hedgehog Strategy.

In short, the idea is to arm Taiwan in ways that would make a PLA attack more difficult and costly, but not necessarily to give Taiwan the capability to actually win a war.

Under the porcupine strategy, Taiwan ought to be armed as robustly as possible in a way that allows the U.S. to provide material assistance from a comfortable distance while prioritizing survivability and asymmetric warfare over direct confrontation.

That means investing in things like sea mines, mobile air defenses, and anti-ship missiles.

In other words, cheap and effective tools that make an attack on Taiwan by the PLA more costly and time-consuming while keeping the US forces as far away from the line of fire as possible, meaning not even on this island.

However, Chinese reunification is essentially seen as an inevitability by the architects of this strategy.

It's a relatively passive approach that assumes Taiwan would be responding defensively to a potential first strike from the mainland, rather than to prevent reunification altogether.

This policy comes from those who prefer to uphold U.S. hegemony in a more pragmatic way rather than provoking Beijing head-on.

In the aftermath of the meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, the war hawks are now worried that Trump is becoming too hands-off when it comes to Taiwan, and they're therefore pushing Taipei to adopt a more aggressive strategy against Beijing.

This policy is called the Hornet's Nest strategy.

Just like the porcupine strategy, it also operates under the assumption that reunification is inevitable and that US forces will not involve themselves directly in a conflict with the PLA.

But what's different is that this strategy expects Taiwan to enter a war and go out with a bang.

So not only is the price of reunification increased for the PLA, it's also increased for the civilians of Taiwan.

because the underlying assumption is Taiwan entering a state of total war, including urban warfare.

So even if the PLA breaks through Taiwan's air and naval defenses, even if PLA troops have landed on the island, and even if Taiwan's command center has been captured by the PLA, Taiwan's forces are supposed to fight until the last man standing.

We're supposed to first fight on the sea, then on the beaches, then in the cities, and finally up in the mountains.

So if both strategies assume a possible PLA attack, how does the hornet's nest strategy actually differ from the porcupine strategy? To put it simply, the porcupine strategy is basically, oh, you want to swallow me? Fine.

You're going to get hurt in the process.

So maybe you'll decide that reunification by force isn't worth it.

So it's still fundamentally defensive in nature and it's a deterrent.