Taiwanese artillery and tanks carry out a large-scale live-fire exercise to deter a Chinese landing invasion. (©Sankei by Yasuto Tanaka)
As authoritarian China intensifies military, economic, and political pressure on Taiwan, the durability of international democratic solidarity matters more than ever.
Yet the most serious threat to that solidarity may not come from Beijing alone. It also arises within democracies themselves, where illiberal practices — embraced by both militant progressives and populist conservatives — are steadily eroding the moral authority and political legitimacy required to defend vulnerable democracies abroad.
Across democratic systems, a common logic has taken hold: politics is framed as an existential struggle in which domestic opponents are treated not as legitimate rivals, but as enemies to be neutralized by any means necessary. While the rhetoric varies by ideology, the consequences converge. Democracies that weaken the rule of law at home struggle to justify its defense abroad.
South Korea and the United States — two countries central to Taiwan's security environment — illustrate this danger from different ideological directions.
South Korea
In South Korea, the administration of President Lee Jae-myung has leaned into a form of "militant democracy" that emphasizes the suppression of perceived anti-democratic forces within. Given South Korea's history of authoritarian rule and external subversion, vigilance is understandable. Yet the growing reliance on prosecutorial power, selective investigations, and moral absolutism toward conservative opponents risks narrowing democratic pluralism. When democracy becomes defined by the elimination of internal enemies rather than adherence to neutral procedures, its credibility as a universal principle diminishes.
Additionally, when militant democracy advocates divide political actors into friends and enemies — and implicitly code China as politically left-aligned and Taiwan as right-aligned — conservatives embrace Taiwan and criticize China. Meanwhile, progressives, including the current Lee administration, emphasize engagement with Beijing and largely ignore Taiwan. As Nazi analogies dominate domestic political rhetoric, the Lee administration has remained comparatively restrained in its criticism of Beijing's human rights violations and increasingly assertive rhetoric and actions toward democratic Taiwan.
In America
The United States faces a parallel erosion from the populist right. Under President Donald Trump, commitment to liberal norms has been subordinated to personal loyalty, grievance politics, and a transactional view of power. This tendency extends beyond domestic institutions into foreign policy. Trump's seizure of Venezuela's head of state — and open discussion of unilateral interventions in Greenland and Mexico ー signal a willingness to bypass both domestic and international laws in the name of national interest, however arbitrarily defined.
Such rhetoric may appeal to domestic audiences eager for displays of strength, but it carries strategic costs. A democracy that normalizes extraterritorial capture, regime-change threats, or personalized justice weakens its claim to be defending a rules-based international order, and its professed commitment to defending Taiwan appears conditional and unreliable.
Defending Liberal Constraints
The unifying thread in these cases is the politics of destruction: the belief that defeating one's enemies — at home or abroad — justifies the suspension of liberal constraints. Yet this approach produces the opposite of its intended effect. Democracies that hollow out the rule of law lose the legitimacy required to confront genuine autocracies such as China.
Taiwan's security depends not only on deterrence, but on the credibility of the democratic coalition backing it. That credibility rests on a shared commitment to liberal principles. That is, procedural fairness, equal application of the law, protection of individual rights, and acceptance of political opposition as legitimate.
When leading democracies compromise these principles, solidarity becomes fragile and transactional.
Challenges in Taiwan
This challenge also applies to Taiwan itself. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has rightly emphasized Taiwan's democratic identity in contrast to China's authoritarianism. But democratic legitimacy cannot rest on identity alone. It must also be demonstrated through restraint.
Respect for the procedural rights of opposition (Kuomintang, KMT) politicians, voters, and media outlets is not a concession to political rivals, but a safeguard against democratic erosion. Legal but unprecedented measures ー mass recall campaigns against KMT parliamentarians, denying the license renewal of KMT-allied TV station CTiTV ー undermines Taiwan's democratic credibility. But it also plays into Beijing's claim that liberal democracy is merely factional rule in disguise, rather than a system grounded in neutral rules, pluralism, and due process.
Moral Task of Democracies
Defending Taiwan, then, is not solely a military or geopolitical task. It is an institutional and moral one. It requires democracies to resist the temptation to fight illiberalism with illiberal means — whether through militant prosecutions, populist strongman politics, or extralegal assertions of power abroad.
A principled commitment to liberalism and the rule of law is not a liability in an era of authoritarian challenge. It is the primary source of democratic strength. Only democracies that govern themselves with restraint and consistency can credibly argue that Taiwan's fate is not just a regional issue, but a test of the global democratic order.
If democratic governments continue to treat politics as a zero-sum struggle for survival, their capacity to defend Taiwan will remain compromised. The defense of vulnerable democracies begins at home — with the refusal to become what one claims to oppose.
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Author: Dr Joseph Yi
Joseph Yi is an associate professor of political science at Hanyang University (Seoul) and received Heterodox Academy's 2025 Open Inquiry Award for Courage.
