In my opinion, Taiwan needs a “One Voice” foreign policy. From a recent discussion in Finland. 👇

"One China" policies are a sacred cow of foreign policy. Inherited dogma that ministers just go along with, because they are marketed internally as great diplomatic achievements. I went along with this for a bit, and think there was some truth in it. Certainly a lot of careful wordsmithing, and there was a genuine argument in favour of studied ambiguity. But now, our varying "One China" policies (not the same as Beijing's One China Principle), have created an open goal for grey-zone tactics, and don't correspond to reality. We need new policy. The fact is that various countries decided upon One China policies as a way of resolving the question of who should represent China. After the civil war, the KMT regime, having retreated to Taiwan, made the claim of jurisdiction over the whole of China. A competing claim came from Beijing. It was necessary to decide who should represent China, which major democracies did without nailing their colours to the mast regarding Taiwanese sovereignty. Here's what I don't get: Taiwan has ***not made a claim of jurisdiction over the whole of China for decades.*** They have enacted constitutional amendments to make the KMT regime's historical claims obsolete. So our One China policies are predicated on a problem which has not existed for a long time. As @FreddyLim said recently in Finland: what do we want? Do we want Taiwan to make a claim of sovereignty over China so we can reject it? Makes no sense. Meanwhile, our "One China" policies fail to recognise adequately Taiwan's obviously self-governing status, fail to wrestle post-war anachronisms and the complex history of the region, and emphatically do NOT define the "Status Quo" in any useful way. They do not substitute for a Cross-Strait deterrence policy, and succeed mainly in assisting the isolation of 23 million Taiwanese people from the international community. Beijing has redefined them to mean "we rule Taiwan and the whole world says so", and democracies are regularly pushed by Beijing to restate their "One China" policies, and if rejecting Taiwan's claim to sovereignty means anything at all. Meanwhile, Beijing exploits our ambiguity to intimidate Taiwan with minimal pushback, and progressively shrink the world for Taiwanese people. One China policies are an absolute busted flush. They have reached the end of their lifespan and should be replaced with a policy that befits a self-governing, flourishing democracy with an increasingly important economy. We are hurtling towards an economic depression of untold severity (10 trillion in a kinetic Taiwan Strait scenario, according to @economics) with no plan beyond pleading that we oppose "unilateral change to the status quo" (which is unilaterally changed every week by Beijing). Last week I learned from a @merics_eu study that only 10% of impacted German businesseses had modelled Taiwan Strait escalation, and had a plan. It's bad, guys. One China policy, fine. But we need a One Taiwan policy, too. And we need one before it is too late.