US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last week should not have been exceptional: she merely reaffirmed the right of elected lawmakers to declare their support for democracy there.
I hope that many more defenders of freedom and democracy will soon follow suit.
However, the visit was followed by live-fire exercises and naval maneuvers around the island of Taiwan. Such aggressive military actions have implications far beyond the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea or even the Pacific.
The global security architecture is creaking dangerously. We see attempts to rock the boat of international peace and stability everywhere.
It is tempting to turn a blind eye to blatant threats to wipe out one of Taiwan’s most vibrant free societies and progressive democracies.
Can 23 million people and their aspirations to live in a free democratic society be considered expendable to appease China? For some it may seem like a small price to pay to avoid a major conflict.
But this is based on faulty logic.
He encouraged Russia to launch the war
There were those who thought that Ukraine’s legitimate aspirations to be in the EU and NATO could be sacrificed to keep Russia happy after it invaded the country in 2014.
It did not lead to peace, but encouraged autocratic Russia to launch the biggest war Europe has seen since World War II with enormous amounts of blood, suffering and destruction, and with no end in sight.
Calm does not lead to peace. It encourages tyrants to think that the free world is weak and irresolute, and encourages them to start new wars on an even larger scale. We should have learned this in Munich in 1938, we should have remembered those lessons after the invasion of Georgia in August 2008, after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but somehow we didn’t .
This raises a chilling prospect of a world order where smaller countries and millions of people can be expendable to satisfy authoritarian fantasies of grandeur and domination.
The only way to avoid new wars is not to give up an inch of territory. The cession of ground, real or metaphorical, leads to the certainty of war.
Our ability to maintain strategic focus is being tested by ever new theaters of geopolitical tension and conflict. Faced with these attempts to shake the global security architecture we must find in ourselves the strength to safeguard it. We cannot be overwhelmed. And we have to prepare for the long haul.
A test for the EU
China has been waging a trade war with Lithuania since we became the first EU member to open a representative office of Taiwan under the name of Taiwan in the summer of 2021.
This was a test for the EU and the West in general.
If the global security architecture begins to crumble, if we allow trade-offs to buy peace, where will it stop?
We need a global order where smaller democracies like Ukraine, Taiwan or Lithuania are not expendable.
To prevent this, we must now send a loud and clear signal: the free world cannot and will not allow Taiwan to become a second Ukraine.
Gabrielius Landsbergis is the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania.