3 posts
Taipei. Reading every word of this for reasons I should not have to explain.
From Taipei, and I will keep it short.
An American guarantee was tested this month. Not against us and not by China. By America.
We have spent forty years building a national strategy on one question — will they come — and we have just watched the answer be given somewhere else, in an accent we did not expect.
Beijing has not moved a single soldier. They did not need to. They just watched with us.
They destroyed the air defences first, then the aircraft, then cratered the runway, then landed.
I have read that sequence in staff college papers about my own island for twenty years. Watching it executed on a NATO member at four in the morning has been the single worst hour of my life as a citizen of this place.
Watching a superpower spend forty-two percent of its long-range missiles on an ally.
I want to be careful how I say this. Those missiles were built for a war over my home. They are now craters in Scotland.
I do not know whether that makes us safer this year or abandoned next year. Neither does anyone in this city, and we have talked about nothing else for a week.