Written by Meng Kit Tang.
Image credit: 11.26 總統主持「守護民主台灣國安行動方案」記者會 by 總統府/ Flickr, license: CC BY 4.0.
Premise and Stakes
“The ultimate goal is to establish defence capabilities that can permanently safeguard democratic Taiwan.” – President Lai Ching-te, announcing the NT$1.25 trillion special defence budget, Presidential Office briefing, 26 November 2025.
In 2025, Taiwan confronted an intensifying military threat from China while grappling with profound internal divisions over how to respond. President Lai’s bold proposal for a supplementary eight-year defence package emerged as the year’s central security debate. Presented as an essential firewall against coercion, the initiative ultimately stalled in a polarised legislature, blocked five times by the opposition-controlled Procedure Committee as of 30 December 2025.
This impasse underscored a deeper dilemma: whether aggressive armament strengthens deterrence or risks accelerating conflict, fiscal exhaustion, and demographic erosion in an already ageing society.
The year ended with the pledge unpassed, raising questions about whether Taiwan’s pursuit of greater security paradoxically weakened its societal foundations and strategic resolve.
The Two Competing Strategic Narratives
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Kuomintang–Taiwanese People’s Party (KMT-TPP) opposition agreed on the existence of a severe threat but diverged sharply on its character and remedy.
The DPP viewed Beijing’s ambitions as expanding inexorably, advocating layered asymmetric denial through Hai Kun-class submarines, mobile missiles, drone swarms, and a porcupine posture to render conquest prohibitively costly. U.S. extended deterrence served as the unspoken multiplier, with special budgets bypassing ordinary caps to expedite procurement.
The core proposition is absolute: without this firewall, no schools, hospitals, or pensions will matter because nothing will be left to protect.
The KMT–TPP coalition sees a threat that is partly endogenous. Rapid, highly visible arms build-ups shorten Beijing’s decision window and raise the probability of miscalculation. Calibrated sufficiency, strict procurement oversight, and protection of social spending are preferred over open-ended escalation. Dialogue is treated not as appeasement but as a force multiplier in its own right.
The core proposition is equally blunt: a society that is bankrupted or demographically hollowed out in the name of defence has already lost the war before the first shot.
Both sides rested on the shared assumption that American intervention would prove decisive; yet 2025 exposed this faith as increasingly fragile.
Historical Record as Predictive Instrument
The saying ‘以史為鑑，可以知興替’ or “By using history as a mirror, one can understand the patterns of rise and decline,” reminds us that history reveals the patterns of rise and decline.
Taiwan’s experience in 2025 reinforced a longstanding pattern: military escalation without parallel investment in social resilience and cross-strait communication erodes long-term security. Heightened PLA activities, including the large-scale “Justice Mission 2025” live-fire drills in late December, simulating port blockades and strikes, coincided with legislative gridlock, deepening public anxiety while fertility rates remained critically low and emigration concerns persisted.
From earlier decades through 2025, periods of frozen dialogue and rising defence burdens correlated with strained societal cohesion. The lesson remained clear: readiness and resilience are interdependent; absent societal investment and communication channels, higher spending alone constricts strategic options.
Societal Trade-offs
“Heavy defence spending ‘risks crowding out social programmes and burdening future generations’.” The line captures the uncomfortable arithmetic behind Taiwan’s defence pledge. Budgets do not lie. They reveal what the country trades away when it prioritises one path over another, and they remind us that security means little if the society under threat is already weakening from within.
The NT$1.25 trillion supplementary package is not an abstraction. It equals roughly eleven to twelve years of current long-term care funding. It could also build about 125,000 to 250,000 social housing units at today’s cost. If redirected, it could finance twelve to thirteen years of childcare expansion, the amount required for Taiwan to reach the current OECD average. Every citizen would shoulder an additional NT$54,000 in public debt between 2026 and 2033.
These figures hit a society already in structural decline. The working-age population will shrink by about 1 per cent annually from 2026. Fertility remains between 0.78 and 1.11, the lowest sustained rate in the world. Long-term care funds face projected insolvency by the late 2020s to early 2030s.
The fiscal and demographic pressures described above directly amplify Taiwan’s strategic vulnerability. Every diverted dollar and postponed investment in social capacity intensifies the human cost of conflict, making the island more sensitive to external coercion and less resilient in prolonged crises.
The Proxy-War Structure and Abandonment Risk
Ukraine offers Taiwan its starkest warning. Between 2022 and 2025, Western governments sent Kyiv roughly $175 billion in military and economic aid, such as artillery, drones, precision weapons, intelligence, and financial lifelines.
But not a single allied combat brigade entered the fight. Ukrainians fought and died alone while partners armed them from afar. The pattern is unmistakable: the West will send equipment, training, and solidarity, but it stops short of sending soldiers.
Taiwan now sits inside this same proxy-war architecture. Washington’s long-standing strategic ambiguity has softened into what analysts increasingly call “ambiguity about ambiguity.” Signals that once hinted at intervention now oscillate between reassurance and hesitation.
U.S. Marine Corps simulations are even starker: in wargames run from 2023 to 2025, Taiwan collapsed in 18 of 22 iterations before substantial American forces could arrive. The island fell too quickly for help to matter.
U.S. public opinion compounds the risk. A July 2025 Chicago Council survey found only 37% of Americans supported sending troops to defend Taiwan, and just 26% among younger voters.
The political class has adjusted accordingly. During the 2025 transition, Trump advisers openly tied intervention to allies spending 8–10% of GDP on defence, framing support for Taiwan as conditional, not assured.
Together, these trends erode the belief that the U.S. will respond rapidly or decisively to a Chinese attack. The promise of rescue is no longer politically or operationally solid. The burden of survival will fall first on Taiwan itself.
The Unspoken Premise That Determines Everything
President Lai Ching-te warned in November that “the most threatening script isn’t force, it’s surrender,” emphasising that Taiwan’s resolve, supported by allies, prevents capitulation. Yet beneath every plan, there is an invisible assumption: that the United States will intervene swiftly and decisively if Taiwan faces an existential threat. Both the ruling DPP and the opposition coalition anchor their strategies on this unspoken guarantee.
The DPP expands rapidly, invests in advanced systems, and builds layered deterrence, relying on allied support to multiply the effect of each weapon. The KMT and TPP stress fiscal discipline and calibrated sufficiency while assuming the same external shield will prevent catastrophe. Remove this assumption, and the entire defence architecture collapses.
Taiwan’s required defence burden more than doubles, procurement and mobilisation timelines compress, and social sacrifices accelerate. Dialogue urgency becomes survival, and long-term programmes face immediate stress. The human cost of this miscalculation would fall on every citizen, from ageing caregivers to young families, amplifying demographic and social strain.
No plan works if external salvation fails. Taiwan must prepare to stand alone while preserving its society without relying on guarantees that may never arrive.
A Viable Third Path
Drawing on 2025’s hard lessons, such as legislative deadlock, demographic strain, and PLA escalation, Taiwan requires a balanced approach integrating military readiness with societal preservation.
First, Taiwan should set a defence ceiling of 4.5 to 6 per cent of GDP, with full transparency and accountability. Second, the government should secure a social floor, ensuring that long-term care, housing, and fertility-support budgets cannot be cut under any defence programme.
Third, Taiwan must pursue radical indigenisation and co-production to reduce reliance on U.S. supply chains and avoid export-control delays. Fourth, cross-strait communication channels should be immediately restored, including hotlines, confidence-building measures, and joint protocols to prevent incidents from escalating. Fifth, Taiwan should publish an annual bipartisan national security review, fully transparent and independently audited.
This approach explicitly plans for the possibility of standing alone while actively seeking every opportunity to prevent conflict. It treats societal resilience and military readiness as equally critical. By doing so, Taiwan strengthens its security without hollowing out the society it aims to protect.
Conclusion: The Two Voices
There is a Chinese saying, ’ Left ear hears the devil, right ear hears the Buddha; whichever you follow decides whether you descend to hell or ascend to paradise.’ (左耳聽的是魔，右耳聽的是佛，最後跟著誰走，決定你下地獄還是上天堂。)
In 2025, Taiwan navigated between extremes: one voice demanding unbounded armament premised on allied salvation, the other cautioning restraint amid perceived inevitability of conflict. Both risked illusions, overlooking history, societal limits, and external uncertainties.
The year closed with the special budget stalled, PLA drills encircling the island, and demographic challenges unabated. Only a realistic strategy, such as embracing restraint, resilience, and human-centred security, offers Taiwan enduring prosperity as a free society.
Meng Kit Tang is a Singaporean freelance analyst and commentator who works as an aerospace engineer. He graduated from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, Singapore in 2025. He is also a regular contributor to Taiwan Insight.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Review Taiwan 2025: Challenges, Continuities, and Change.’
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