The Distorted View of Taiwan from Washington

Americans keep expecting to find Israel when they go to Taiwan, and then they are surprised that it is not like a country with which it has almost nothing in common.

Damir Marusic comments on the same thing that struck Dexter Filkins as strange about Taiwan:

The point of the anecdote is that the Taiwanese don’t seem to take the threats to their security nearly as seriously as most observers in Washington do. The Taiwanese worry, of course. It’s impossible not to, especially because China has altered the status quo in the Taiwan Strait after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit earlier this year by repeatedly sending fighter jets and frigates far into Taiwan’s territorial waters. But the mood on the island is much more relaxed than the mood in Israel, a country that similarly faces implacable hostility from some of its neighbors [bold mine-DL]. Indeed, the contrast could not be more pronounced.

So what is going on with Taiwan?

One plausible explanation for what is going on is that the people with the most at stake have a more accurate assessment of the situation than people that live thousands of miles away. If observers in Washington are more worried about a threat than most of the local people are, perhaps those observers are wrong and need to get their eyes checked. There is a long history of Americans exaggerating and outright imagining threats in other parts of the world that were much more manageable than they thought or that did not exist at all. The U.S. has erred far more often and more disastrously by inflating a foreign threat and the overreacting to it than it has by being complacent.