Taiwan Raises Defence Spending to a Record to Deter War
“Our aim by increasing investment in national defence is not to provoke; rather, it is to deter war,” President Lai Ching-te said outside the Presidential Office on the island’s national day. The 2027 budget is a record NT$1.1 trillion, about $34.5bn and more than 3% of output. Twenty-one Chinese military aircraft circled in the previous 24 hours.
He framed it as a limit rather than a challenge: “We are open to exchanges, but will not accept subordination,” and “Peace cannot rely solely on wishes, and tolerance cannot become a pretext for aggressors to encroach ever further.” Thirteen of the twenty-one aircraft crossed the median line of the strait, alongside seven navy vessels. Taiwan is waiting on American sign-off for about $14bn of weapons including Patriot air defence, after an $11bn package in December that was the largest arms sale to the island on record. That wait is the point. In May, after meeting Xi Jinping, Mr Trump suggested arms sales to Taiwan could be a bargaining chip — the same transactional logic that last night traded sanctions on Russian fuel for a promise of diesel. A British reader can see the pattern twice before breakfast. The practical stake is narrower and harder: Taiwan makes the advanced semiconductors inside every British car, phone and data centre, and no alternative supply exists at that quality or scale. This account rests on a single approved source; it is a national day set-piece and will be matched widely later today.