Though Taiwan only has a population of 23.5 million, its 2022 gross domestic product amounted to about $761.69 billion USD — ranking it #21 in the world — and is projected to reach $990.75 billion by 2028. Taiwan is crowned as one of the “Four Asian Tigers” alongside Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea — the Southeast Asian countries that experienced rapid industrialization and economic growth beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. Taiwan earned the title initially through its export-oriented economic strategies of exporting semiconductors, electronic components and computer hardware. 

Currently, Taiwan plays a vital role in the global supply chain, specifically in the technology sector. They are still a major producer and exporter of high-tech products. Taiwan’s tech companies dominate about “two-thirds of the semiconductor foundry market share with Taiwan Semiconductor Market Company (TSMC) controlling 84% of the production for the most advanced and efficient chips.” As a result, an increased number of “multinational corporations have invested in Taiwan in recent years, and demand for local talent with bilingual proficiency has also increased.” 

Further, the United States’ goal of trying to ‘decouple’ from China, meaning, trying to significantly decrease or sever economic dependence on Chinese supply chains, technology and trade in order to avoid national security risks and intellectual property theft has the potential to strengthen trading ties between Taiwan and the United States. From Taiwan’s perspective, this is another reason for their Bilingual 2030 pursuit — to increase its competitive advantages and international mobility to gain trading partners going forward, especially against competitor suppliers like Brazil, India and South Korea. 

Taiwan’s economic come up story and current success appear phenomenal at first glance. However, a closer look reveals that for both exports and imports, Taiwan’s “relative importance within global trade has fallen steadily since 2000.” In 2000, Taiwan ranked 14th in the world via exports, accounting for 2.3% of total world exports; in 2019, Taiwan ranked 17th in world exports, reducing its share of total exports to about 1.7%. Similarly, the bilateral trade relationship between the United States and Taiwan has greatly diminished. The United States has fallen to the fourth — from the first — largest trading partner for Taiwan since 2000. 

China and ASEAN (The Association of Southeast Asian Nations) members such as Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Maynamar have had a competitive advantage over Taiwan through cheap labor and large domestic markets — attracting more foreign investment and trading partners — a key explanation for Taiwan’s diminishing trading relationships. 

In addition, Taiwan’s domestic workforce is predicted to steadily decline over the next decade. 2022 was a year with a historically low number of births and the most deaths ever, indicative of Taiwan going into a negative growth by 2031. Consequently, Taiwan’s economic structure is no longer “labor-intensive, it is technology-intensive,” and now needs to fill shifting industry and talent shortage demands in “biomedicine, green energy, defense, modern agricultural and the circular economy.”

To counter the low fertility rates and push to create a ‘Silicon Valley for Taiwan,’ Taiwan also seeks to gain 400,000 white-collar foreign workers by 2030 with at least 20,000 being Silicon Valley-adjacent innovators and 200,000 overseas students. Despite this goal, Taiwan suffered a 5% decline in total foreigners from 2020-2021 — with some critics arguing Taiwan can make itself more expat-friendly, such as boosting English-speaking rates. 

Coupled together — a decrease in global trade, diminishing trading relationships, negative population growth, shifting industry demands amidst talent shortages and a decline in needed expats explain why Taiwan is desperate to recruit foreign technical workers and boost its labor force. More so, it explains why Taiwan sees becoming a bilingual English-Mandarin nation as a key facilitator to these goals and overall productivity growth. Taiwan can’t supply a cheap, domestic labor force like China and ASEAN members did to increase exports and certain trading relationships. But, Taiwan can boost its English proficiency as a means of reducing barriers to foreign investment and facilitating itself as a a hub for multinational firms looking to enter the Asian market.” Likewise, Taiwan can hope to outcompete Hong Kong. Singapore, India and the Philippines where English is widely used in business, governmental and professional sectors. 

The Bilingual 2030 policy realizes Taiwan’s shifting demands and meets them with a twofold policy. Its first aim is to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect with the world,” and secondly, to “attract international enterprises to Taiwan and enable Taiwanese industries to connect to global markets and create high-quality jobs.” For these aims to be achieved, Taiwan’s workers must not only align their professional expertise with international standards, but also collaborate with counterparts from other countries and work in global markets targeted by Taiwan’s industries. 

Bilingual 2030 will stress college and senior high school education, supplemented by integrating English proficiency at all stages of education. In 2021, 21% of grade 12 and 6.5% of grade 9 students reached the B2 level (high-intermediate level) or higher on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for Languages, statistics that make 2030 bilingualism achievable. However, their high performance in receptive skills, reading and listening, were incongruent with their mediocre performance in writing and speaking — which is precisely what Taiwan wants to improve. The Ministry of Education has formulated six goals to bridge writing and speaking gaps and achieve bilingual proficiency. 

First, accelerate the development of bilingual higher education. The Ministry of Education plans to select universities that are able to speed up the implementation of bilingual teaching and make them a beacon for other Taiwanese universities. The ministry will collaborate with the British Council to provide consulting to universities in hopes of achieving the 50-50-50 target by 2030 — at least 50% of all university sophomores should have achieved B2 in listening, speaking, reading and writing, at least 50% of all sophomore and master students should have done at least 50% of their credits in full English for that academic year. 

Second, balance and optimize bilingual conditions for schools at the senior high school level and below. At a glance, this means enhancing students’ ability to use English in daily life, having STEM schools integrate more English, and adopting all-English teaching in English classes. Further, Taiwan seeks to form partnerships with the U.S., U.K. and Australia and have Taiwanese schools establish sister-school partnerships with these target countries — specifically to conduct online bilingual classes. By 2030, Taiwan hopes to have “one in every six schools nationwide to establish a partnership with a foreign sister school.”

Third, develop digital learning. The Ministry of Education aims to distribute technology to remote areas to bridge proficiency gaps between urban and rural areas. Likewise, Taiwanese university students with higher proficiency will online-tutor remote and disadvantaged students. 

Fourth, expand the provision of affordable English proficiency tests to gauge the progress of Bilingual 2030. With the support of the Ministry of Education, Taiwan developed their own English proficiency test — about a half to one-third the price of foreign English tests — to increase access for more rural, economically-disadvantaged demographics. 

Fifth, raise civil servants’ English proficiency. Bilingual 2030 will initially focus on the civil service whose work is integrated with international affairs and where English is pertinent to their job. In the future, English will be taught to all civil servants and the portion of English testing on civil service exams will be increased. 

Sixth, establish an administrative body dedicated to policy promotion and implementation. Bilingual 2030 is still a novel and nebulous long-term initiative and requires various stakeholders to collaborate and reach a consensus. The Bilingual Policy Development Center will “assist with the horizontal integration of measures relating to education, examinations, and training across 31 related government agencies. It will provide these agencies with vertical specialized services ranging from policy research to policy execution and consolidate international cooperation efforts under the policy.” 

In addition to the six initiatives, Taiwan has plans for multiple other ancillary initiatives. For example, there are plans to have “government regulations, policies, and websites in legally binding English” eliminating translation barriers to foreign businesses. The government will also “promote the establishment of an exclusively English-language television station, and both TV and radio broadcasters will be encouraged to produce English-language programming.” While Bilingual 2030 is still ongoing trial and error with each municipality and school having to acclimate the policies to its students, it’s a significant step for the island’s future.  

Taiwan faces various economic challenges which will only be exacerbated in the face of rapid globalization, the rise of AI, its volatile relationship with China and competition from neighboring countries. However, Taiwan can control its future by endowing its workers and future generations with bilingualism, global perspectives and international mobility. 

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My life has been dominated by presidents who irrationally use our military-industrial complex as a launchpad for quagmire wars while failing to win them. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan commenced in 2001 and didn’t end until 2021 — my first year of college, a forever war of failed nation-building and inept counter-insurgency. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq under the Bush administration with no clear military objectives, only citing the falsity of weapons of mass destruction — creating a power vacuum and destabilizing Iraq.  

In 2011, all I watched on my family’s TV was the Libyan war — an intervention started by former U.S. President Barack Obama. He didn’t learn from the Iraq War that chaos is far worse than dictatorship. Obama’s destruction of Gaddafi’s regime created a new failed state and ruined Libya for a generation — all symptoms of the United States’ obsession with promiscuous war-making — and none serving America’s long-term or domestic interests. What I am certain of, is in Washington, military action is assumed to be preferable to inaction, regardless of the consequences. 

Since the early 2000s, every preceding administration has been affected by the legacies of military interventions and each has attempted to distinguish their foreign policy from other presidents. Today, we are living in U.S. President Joe Biden administration’s foreign policy era. 

At the start of his term, when Biden released his interim national security strategic guidance document, the President claimed “America is back. Diplomacy is back. Alliances are back.” Yet, has Biden owned up to his grand pronouncements? 

At a glance, the Biden administration has ushered in a renewed seriousness towards statesmanship and multilateral restoration. He has departed from former President Donald Trump’s adhocracy towards foreign policy-making and from Trump’s America First isolationism. At the beginning of his presidency, he even rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement and declared re-engagement with the World Health Organization. 

In practice, however, Biden’s foreign policy record and priorities are an altered duplicate of Donald Trump’s foreign policy — “MAGA lite: making America great again with the assistance of foreign partners rather than over their objections.” Biden’s ‘foreign policy for the middle class,’ which puts working families at the center of U.S. national security, resembles Trump putting U.S. interests over global interests. Trump would argue that unless you can link U.S. foreign policy to our domestic agenda, we shouldn’t be doing it, and Biden would agree, though to a lesser extent. 

MAGA lite is also observed in the Biden Administration’s approach to Afghanistan. In May of 2021, Biden started to fully withdraw troops, following Trump’s orders to halve the deployment to 2,250 by the end of 2020. Afghanistan was a NATO operation. America’s NATO allies have invested billions in military and reconstruction efforts and have lost over 1,100 soldiers. The United States’ European allies also had a greater stake in the operation than the United States did, needing to prevent a state of 40 million people from collapsing into a failed state that would trigger another influx of mass migration in Europe or become a new incubator for terrorism. Once Biden recommitted to Trump’s Doha Agreement, the decision was automatically made for 7,000 non-American NATO forces in Afghanistan. Additionally, the Biden administration rejected NATO allies’ pleas to extend the Aug. 31 deadline for troop departure, leaving them scrambling to airlift thousands of their citizens out of the country. 

Biden’s actions are Trump-adjacent. Former UK Prime Minister Theresa May even publicly criticized Biden for “following Trump’s lead in unilateral negotiation with the Taliban.” When Biden operates unilaterally, countries take notice. In response to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Taiwan’s President Tsai-Ing-wen stated, “Taiwan’s only option is to grow stronger and become more united, strengthening our determination to protect ourselves.” Foreign-policy flip-flopping casts doubt on U.S. credibility — especially when Biden claimed he withdrew from Afghanistan partly to devote more resources to East Asia and defend Taiwan. However, if he doesn’t begin to consult with U.S. allies on key issues that affect them, it leaves the United States in an untrusted position as an international security guarantor. 

Biden’s foreign policy is converging with Trump’s policies — some positive and some not — even if the administration tries to frame its approach as liberal internationalism. On the contrary, Biden continues to borrow from his predecessor’s foreign policy. However, this trend shouldn’t be a surprise. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has conducted what is known as“a la carte multilateralism,” a commitment to multilateralism when the U.S. can but unilateralism when the U.S. must — with each administration choosing “when we must” given the current global circumstances, opportunity costs, and their foreign policy-making ideology. Biden’s alignment with a la carte multilateralism positions the United States halfway along a policy spectrum with aggressive American exceptionalism at one end and liberal internationalism at the other. 

For instance, Biden has continued aid and defensive weapons sales to the Saudi military in the Yemen War, despite his earlier pledge to end that aid because Saudi airstrikes killed civilians. He has continued Trump-era tariffs on China despite the Chamber of Commerce calling for tariff relief. However, he has kept the Trump era’s genocide designation for China’s human rights abuses of the Uyghurs. 

Biden has sought to re-broker a nuclear agreement with Tehran, an Obama-era agreement that Trump dismantled. However, he has kept a Trump-era action, designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp as a terrorist organization, despite it leading to an impasse on the nuclear agreement — consistently oscillating between Obama and Trump. 

Above all, Biden has promised to phase out America’s forever wars and elevate diplomacy as the tool of first resort. He simultaneously pledged to “never hesitate to use force when required to defend our vital national interests’”— with this statement directed at China and Russia. 

However, Biden has sustained the first part of his statement and quasi-diplomatic focus on China. Biden’s “invest, align and compete” strategy towards China — which calls for the United States to be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be and adversarial when it must be — is Biden’s own a la carte multilateralism. 

Biden aimed to counter China economically by investing billions in U.S. tech industries. He sought to “align” with U.S. allies who oppose China’s vision of making the world safer for authoritarianism — through an updated Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, collaboration through the Quad, and the AUKUS military cooperation scheme. Lastly, by “competing,” the U.S. aims to outcompete China by increasing our competitive advantage in global innovation, protecting our IP, and offering developing states alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. 

With this strategy, Biden does not intend to sever China’s economy from the United States or facilitate American isolationism. Rather, the strategy is to counter China’s asymmetric economic decoupling and its hope that the world will be more dependent on China. It is to counter the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation and China’s hegemonic rise in an era of multipolarity — within reasonable, non-belligerent guardrails. Competition is not meant to lead to a second Cold War. 

Biden has remained steadfast in his commitment to defend Taiwan. But, he risks his credibility with China and microdoses conflict when he suggests that Taiwan can declare independence if it chooses — a lite renegade of America’s support for the One China Policy. China’s actions towards Taiwan are not timeline-based; instead, they are conditions-based, and Biden has been disrupting these conditions. Biden has embraced “strategic clarity” in pledging to defend Taiwan. However, when he flip-flops on historical commitments that could provoke Taiwan to declare de jure independence unilaterally, those conditions could cause China to increase its pressure campaign against Taiwan and force the U.S. into a proxy war. 

There are a myriad of pertinent foreign policy issues that remain unresolved, and the 2024 presidential election is still a year away. Whether the United States elects a second Biden or Trump Administration or someone new like Ron DeSantis, U.S. foreign policy will gain a new a la carte multilateralism. Regardless of the candidate, U.S. foreign policy should look different going forward. 

Foremost, to prevent continued interventions and uncertainty, the United States needs to understand America’s version of democratic peace theory is dead. Democratic peace theory argues that democratic countries go to war less with each other. The United States takes it a step forward by coercing the theory and intervening in countries to make them democratic. After the United States invaded Vietnam and Iraq, their domestic stability was catastrophic. The United States needs to heed former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s advice to all countries — “We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.” 

Russia’s war in Ukraine is the ultimate geopolitical litmus test. So far, Biden has heeded Eisenhower’s advice while maintaining resolute restraint. He has kept American boots off the ground in Ukraine while providing military equipment and maintaining a trans-Atlantic coalition to support Kyiv. U.S. foreign policy’s default should be “resolute restraint” — being firm on defending allies and core interests without succumbing to escalatory pressures and war. In Biden’s National Security Strategy (NSS), he argued, “military force should only be used when the objectives and mission are clear and achievable.” Rather than being contingent on individual administrations, U.S. foreign policy needs a fixed strategy of resolute restraint. In the future, if the United States is pushed to defend allies but there is a probability of slipping into a quagmire war, it should employ integrated deterrence, not military intervention. 

Biden repeated the word “values” 29 times in his NSS report and vowed to shape the future of the international order with American values. U.S. values should exclude long-term commitments with a predictable long tail or nation-building. The United States should opt for policies closer to Truman’s Marshall Plan or JFK’s approach to the Cuban missile crisis than the Vietnam, Iraq or Libya wars. While these conflicts were all launched with the vision of a liberal international order, the latter three failed to accomplish any U.S. objectives, indicative of a needed change in the United States’ strategy model. The Biden administration has outlined an adequate methodology for current and future foreign policy, despite some blunders where he’s sacrificed values over interests.  

Going forward, U.S. foreign policy needs to maintain multilateralism and credibility, especially by consulting U.S. allies that have a stake in an endeavor. Foreign policy needs to maintain strategic clarity and not flip-flop on prior commitments, especially when the cost of not doing so could be deadly. Most importantly, the United States needs resolute restraint in all geopolitical areas. U.S. foreign policy must institutionalize that force should only be used when it is clear, achievable and compatible with holistic and long-term U.S. interests. The United States should rely more on rational-actor policies, such as deterrence and legitimate cost-benefit analysis for all parties involved, not heuristics. 

The United States is now confronted with an unprecedented war and hegemonic rise of China that threatens almost every aspect of international relations. But ultimately, the main goal should be not to add to the list of U.S. military interventions in sovereign states in the future. What I am certain of, is military action should not be assumed to be preferable to inaction.

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The making of Palestinian refugees can be traced back to 1948 when Israel was legally established during its War of Independence. To Palestinians, 1948 is known as Al-Nakba — “The Catastrophe.” 

In 1947, the UN Partition Plan called for the partitioning of the British Mandate territory of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. The plan passed during the UN General Assembly but was rejected by the Arab community — and the 1948 War followed shortly after. The conclusion of the Al-Nakba war spurred more territorial changes. The Israeli government seized an additional 60% of the land designated for the proposed Arab state in addition to obtaining the 1947 UN Partition Plan, resulting in the exodus of 750,000 Palestinian refugees to the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Today, the Palestinian refugee population encompasses over seven million people. 

After the 1948 War, indigenous Palestinians who attempted to return to their homes were either killed or rejected. At the time, the Israeli government believed that allowing Palestinians to return would undermine self-determination efforts and create a Jewish minority. 

In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank. Some Israelis settled for economic reasons, and some settled to fulfill an ethnic cleansing paradigm. Noam Chomsky defines this as establishing a Jewish state by taking as much of historic Palestine as possible and leaving as few Palestinians as possible. Ethnic cleansing often relies on expulsing individuals from the state, which isn’t always possible in today’s Israel since Palestinians have resided in the region since the early 20th century. Instead, Israel relies on enclaving Palestinians and occupying Palestine. 

Regardless of the reasons, Israel’s current-day expanding occupation of designated Palestinian territories is a blatant violation of international law and constitutes a war crime, according to the International Criminal Court. 

To an outsider, certain facets of the Israel-Palestine conflict may seem like a simple legal or illegal, moral or amoral binary. However, the conflict is objectively complex, with no foreseeable policy solutions. 

The ongoing conflict between Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Right of Return is a culmination of religious contradictions, political deadlocks and policy stalemates — issues that international law cannot rectify. 

Though international law intended to rectify Israeli occupation, legal declarations hold no legitimate enforcement mechanisms, including international human rights courts. Ultimately, there are no costs for not adhering, and countries don’t have any form of ‘bargaining power’ to make them adhere. Israel may ratify treaties, but, at the end of the day, Israel has different interpretations of international law and ends up executing the law differently — in a method that benefits them. Moreover, countries often see international law as a violation of their state sovereignty and will either bypass or ignore mandates. For international law to work, it requires common denominators — an agreement on specific civil liberties, geography, interpretation of history and religion, and a specific idea of sovereignty —  between all parties. 

However, international law has inherent failures deeming it futile. The main way international law fails is by allowing countries to sign human rights treaties without requiring the country to ratify and incorporate them into its domestic law. The Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49 (which prohibits the occupying power to transfer citizens from its territory to the occupied territory), and the 1949 Hague Regulations were signed by Israel, not ratified. 

This means the Israeli government is only required to act in de facto compliance, not de jure. De facto means existing ‘in fact’ or in practice but not strictly ordained by law. De jure is a legitimate right and is ordained by law. If a country doesn’t embed international law into its constitution, adherence doesn’t matter because its agenda doesn’t align with it in the first place. Support from the country’s legislature is simply absent. 

Israel’s mere nod to international human rights law has allowed its occupation to become the most prolonged in modern history and build at least 250 illegal settlements on Palestinian land. 

Another way international law perpetuates this conflict is through ambiguous, unenforceable legal jargon. Human rights treaties use words like “self-determination,” “equality,” “property,” and “freedom of movement”, but fail to operationally and systematically define these terms in the context of the situation — allowing for the country to cherry-pick the human rights they are willing to abide by. 

Countries strategically write treaties with words and syntax that result in outcomes favorable to them to circumvent the responsibility they should be dealing with. In the 1967 Israeli Military Order 101, for example, the Israel Defense Forces state they “entered” the area, as opposed to “conquered” or “occupied” — words that align more closely with the reality — “for the purpose of establishing security and public order in the area,” allowing Israel to avoid accountability for their settlements. 

Lastly, international law is immensely subjective, especially in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Countries demonstrate legitimacy and belief in something only if they choose to believe in it, whether it’s a legal geographical boundary or a treaty. 

Settling in Area A in the West Bank is illegal by all standards of international law. To Israel, it’s not — simply because they believe it’s their right. International law remains illegitimate to Israel because its laws treat it as such, and nothing happens due to an absence of enforcement methods. 

International law, though well-intentioned, is performative. It sustains Israeli occupation by giving Israel an easy pass. Once Israel signs and merely acknowledges these legal declarations, the UN and countries intending to hold Israel accountable in treaties do not expect anything more. International law has no inherent enforcement mechanisms to challenge Israel’s behavior or ensure repercussions for its violations. 

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