West should view China’s threat to Taiwan as ‘threats against us all’: Czech foreign minister

The United States and European powers should treat China’s aggression toward Taiwan as “threats against us all,” according to the Czech Republic’s top diplomat.

“We must increase the cooperation within democratic partners in the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan,” Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said Tuesday. “We must leave no doubt that we consider all threats against them to be threats against us all, and that, as in the case of Ukraine, we will support them to the best of our abilities.”

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Czechia and several other European states liberated by the collapse of the Soviet Union have taken a hawkish approach to China in recent years. Their motivations range from their anti-communist heritage to a strategic desire to curry favor with the U.S., their most important bulwark against Russia, but Lipavsky offered a more direct justification for their aversion to “the Beijing regime,” as he put it.

“Russian aggression against Ukraine is the most imminent security threat certainly to us in Central Europe,” Lipavsky told a Hudson Institute audience in Washington. “However, there is no doubt that the rise of China is the greatest systemic challenge to the current international order.”

Such an assessment is commonplace in Washington, as U.S. officials regard the Chinese communist regime’s rapid military modernization as a harbinger of struggle for access to the shipping lanes of the Indo-Pacific seas. It is more novel coming from a European policymaker, but Lipavsky warned that China already “is increasingly aggressive” in non-military arenas.

“The Beijing regime does not even conceal its ambition to alter the international system anymore,” he said. “China has been promoting its governance model to the Global South. It has stepped up its effort to get key multilateral organizations under its influence, especially those setting the international standards. And we should be honest about this: It has [had] some success in doing so.”

The blunting of that Chinese threat, he maintained, depends to a great extent on the defeat of Russia in Ukraine.

“In a nutshell, we must do whatever it takes to support Ukraine and help it to win this war — for the sake of Ukraine and its brave people, but above all, for the sake of our ability to continue our fight for a safer and [more] stable world,” he said. “Russia has portrayed this war as a conflict with the West, and whatever we might say, many countries will continue to see it this way. If Ukraine loses, our credibility will suffer greatly among our friends just as much among our enemies.”

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U.S. and European powers have made halting progress toward a common China policy over the last several years, but the process has been marred at times by economic disputes and political acrimony within the alliance. French President Emmanuel Macron sparked a trans-Atlantic furor last month by challenging the idea that European states should warn Beijing not to attack Taiwan — during a trip to China, he reiterated his belief that the European Union needs “strategic autonomy” from the United States — but Lipavsky rejected that line of thinking.

“What can we do as Europeans? First and foremost, we must not allow China to weaken the trans-Atlantic bond,” the Czech foreign minister said. “We might have differences between ourselves, but we know that we are allies, and that we share one goal to safeguard our security and prosperity and the rules-based international order.”