MOFA response to comments by UK Prime Minister Liz Truss in a CNN interview that the UK is determined to work with its allies to make sure Taiwan is able to defend itself:
September 26, 2022
During a recent interview with US-based CNN, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Liz Truss reiterated that the UK would work with its allies to make sure that Taiwan is able to defend itself. MOFA sincerely welcomes and appreciates Prime Minister Truss’s reaffirmation of the UK’s resolute commitment to support Taiwan and her public call for stronger international cooperation to ensure Taiwan’s security. This continues the policy of backing peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait she endorsed as Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs.
Prime Minister Truss has on multiple occasions publicly stated the importance of ensuring peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. In September 2021, as Foreign Secretary, she launched an initiative to build a network of liberty, urging like-minded countries to jointly safeguard democracy, freedom, and the rules-based international order. This April, she delivered a speech on the return of geopolitics. These remarks had important global strategic implications. She explicitly called on NATO allies to ensure that democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves and pointedly declared that China must abide by international rules. In August, while competing for the Conservative Party leadership, she urged countries in the global democratic community to ensure Taiwan’s self-defense capacity as China deliberately used the visit to Taiwan by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a pretext to conduct military exercises around Taiwan.
During her interview with CNN, Prime Minister Truss stressed that the international community needs to learn the lessons from Ukraine to make sure that Taiwan is able to defend itself in the event of a Chinese invasion. She also pointed out that the UK and the United States share a special relationship and would make a closely coordinated response in countering threats from Russia and increasing assertiveness from China. These comments fully demonstrate Prime Minister Truss’s commitment to bringing like-minded nations together to counter collaboration between the totalitarian regimes of China and Russia, defend the shared values of freedom and democracy, and stand resolute in facilitating Taiwan’s self-defense capacity.
Taiwan and the UK share the core values of democracy, freedom, human rights, and the rule of law. At this critical time of drastic international geopolitical change, Taiwan, as a responsible member of the Indo-Pacific, will continue to deepen cooperation with the UK and other like-minded nations to strengthen democratic resilience and counter authoritarian expansion and coercion. Taiwan will also work with countries worldwide to preserve the rules-based international order and ensure a free, open, and prosperous Indo-Pacific.