Editor’s note:
One of the most complicated issues in contemporary international relations is the status of the self-governing island of Taiwan and its government in Taipei, formally called the government of the Republic of China (ROC). Is Taiwan a sovereign state? Who gets to decide? What is the legal relationship between the ROC and the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? How much of US support for Taiwan is grounded in law and how much in policy? Does international law recognize Taiwan’s right of self-defense or the right of its friends to come to its aid?
During 2024-2025, the U.S.-Asia Law Institute (USALI) hosted a series of speakers to address these and related questions from different perspectives. In this October 9, 2025 talk, Julian Ku, the Maurice A. Deane Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at Hofstra University School of Law, explains what international law says about the use of force for self-defense and collective self-defense in a potential cross-strait conflict, and argues that the United States and Taiwan should prepare credible legal arguments now to rally international support.
The following excerpts have been edited lightly for clarity and brevity. A full recording of the program can be found here. The discussion was moderated by Katherine Wilhelm, executive director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute.
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By Julian Ku
My topic for today is to focus on what international law has to say about the use of force, either by Taiwan itself to defend itself or by other countries like the United States to help Taiwan defend itself in a conflict with China.
There are three basic points I want to start from. One, this is a topic the government of China and the government of Taiwan are very aware of and so they’ve taken measures to make advocacy on international law topics very important. China's One China Principle supports the legality of a Chinese military action against Taiwan and it casts doubt on the legality of any US military action to help defend Taiwan. I want to then explore three international law approaches that might limit or prohibit the use of force by China against Taiwan and might also allow or authorize US force to defend Taiwan. I’ll conclude by noting that, while China's position is quite clear and straightforward, the United States and Taiwan are all over the map, and actually this muddles whatever position they might have on whether international law would permit the use of force to help defend Taiwan.
The People's Republic of China has never renounced the use of force as an option for it to use against Taiwan in certain cases. This is enshrined in many documents including Article 8 of the Anti-Secession Law, which was enacted in 2005. Article 8 explicitly points out that in situations where secession has occurred in the view of China, or the possibilities for peaceful unification have been exhausted, the state shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. This enshrines the official position of the Chinese government that it does have the right and the legal obligation to use force under certain situations where Taiwan is seceding or Taiwan is viewed to be doing something that would exhaust the possibility of unification.
What does international law have to say about this? One of the prime goals of the United Nations Charter was to stop, prohibit, or somehow restrict the use of force by states against other states. You see this embodied in Article 2 of the United Nations Charter: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.” It also in Article 51 makes a reference to the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations.
One of the prime goals of the United Nations Charter was to stop, prohibit, or somehow restrict the use of force by states against other states.
China's view of the UN Charter is straightforward. China’s position is: Taiwan is not a state, so therefore China can lawfully use force in Taiwan. If you read Article 2.4 textually, it prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of any state. If Taiwan is not a state, then use of force against Taiwan is not a violation of the UN Charter. The second part is also pretty straightforward: Taiwan is part of China, so the US cannot lawfully use force to defend Taiwan because if the US did use force to defend Taiwan, it would violate the territorial integrity or political independence of China and violate Article 2.4.
This is a partial explanation for why it's important for China to not just promote the One China Principle but also to make sure other countries sign on to this principle. … China's One China Principle, according to a recent study, has been explicitly endorsed by roughly 142 countries around the world, around 74 percent of the members of the United Nations. China's One China Principle is that there is only one China but, importantly, Taiwan is part of China. The legal significance of that is … if China uses force in Taiwan and Taiwan is part of China, it’s using force within China, so therefore it’s not an international conflict. It’s not something that would implicate the United Nations Charter. It would not violate Article 2.4. And other countries can’t get involved and use force to help Taiwan defend itself against China. To some degree, 142 countries have already pre-agreed to the idea that Taiwan is part of China, and therefore although they don’t say this explicitly, potentially they've also agreed to the general idea that the use of force in Taiwan by China would not violate the United Nations Charter.
Now I’m going to go through three alternative views of Taiwan which would argue for limiting or restricting the use of force by China against Taiwan.
Alternative 1: Taiwan is a separate state
If Taiwan is a separate state, then that would obviously have a different implication for what the UN Charter would say about Taiwan. The United States does not take a position [on whether Taiwan is or is not a state]. It’s not just America. There are forty or so countries that have effectively taken an agnostic position on whether Taiwan is a separate state. …
If Taiwan is a separate state, then the use of force would violate Article 2.4 of the UN Charter. However, even if Taiwan is a state, it's not clear it has the right of self-defense, because the UN Charter mentions only the inherent right of a member of the United Nations. It also is not clear that the right of collective self-defense would extend to Taiwan.
If Taiwan is a separate state, then the use of force would violate Article 2.4 of the UN Charter.
We've had this argument already because there was something called the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, and it was not a member of the United Nations. The United States nonetheless took the position that it had the right to exercise collective self-defense to help defend the Republic of Vietnam against outside invasion. The US government took the position that because it's an inherent right of self-defense, it should not be interpreted to be limited to members of the United Nations. A state, if it exists under international law, does not lose its right of self-defense just because the United Nations Charter exists. It’s hard to imagine the United States government backing off that position. I think other countries would find it plausible that if it’s a state, it still has self-defense and collective self-defense protections.
However, very few countries actually recognize Taiwan as a separate state explicitly. Therefore, this argument, while the cleanest for the purposes of international law … rests a lot on the more complicated question of whether Taiwan is accepted as a separate state, which is hotly contested.
Alternative 2: Taiwan is a de facto regime
The second approach which has been discussed in some of the academic literature is that Taiwan is a de facto regime. It’s a regime which governs a territory for a very long period of time and has established long-standing customs, rules, laws, population, but it's not recognized by other states as a separate state. This is not a unique situation to Taiwan. There are other examples. Other countries will say: ok, we will not recognize you as a state but we will treat you as a de facto regime for this particular territory. Sometimes it’s during a wartime situation. For example, the Confederate States of America were a de facto regime. The British government dealt with them as a de facto regime and did receive their ambassadors. North Vietnam, East Germany, North Korea - until relatively recently, the United States treated them as non-recognized but de facto regimes.
Some scholars have argued that state practice shows that these de facto regimes are treated as partial subjects of international law and therefore have both rights and duties under international law. Professor [Jochen] Frowein, a leading scholar on de factor regimes, argues that state practice strongly suggests that the prohibition of the use of force applies to de facto regimes as well as recognized states.
[S]tate practice strongly suggests that the prohibition of the use of force applies to de facto regimes as well as recognized states.
Going back to the Vietnam example, we did have this conversation then. Many states said the United States was violating Article 2.4 when it bombed North Vietnam, even though the United States said well, North Vietnam has not been recognized as a state. There is a certain amount of intuition to this argument. There are some international documents that support this idea: the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States in Accordance with the UN Charter was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1970. It is not a binding legal document but some people have argued it has important legal force because so many states embraced it. One of the ideas in this document is that every state has a duty to refrain from the threat or use of force as a means of solving international disputes, including territorial disputes. A 1974 General Assembly resolution defined aggression as a use of force against another state, and added an explanatory note to make clear that it doesn't have to be a state that's a member of the United Nations or a recognized state.
There is a certain amount of state practice that supports this idea. The United States actually did invoke a version of this idea when it was involved in the Syrian conflict during the ISIS wars in 2014-2015 period. The United States invoked the right of collective self-defense to use force to defend its Syrian allies even though it didn't recognize them as a state.
Alternative 3: China cannot suppress the Taiwanese people's right to self-determination
One final theory. this is the most speculated and perhaps complicated version, but it does fit the intuition of many people I know in Taiwan, people who are deep “green.” The idea is that what's really at stake here is the Taiwanese people's right to self-determination. The right of self-determination is something that exists under international law. It's historically been thought to be mostly invoked by colonies in the imperial and decolonization context, but there have been scholarly arguments that it could extend - and the Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged this in their Quebec decision - to a definable group that's lost meaningful access to the right to pursue its political, economic, social, and cultural development.
This argument was most popular in Taiwan during the Chiang Kai-shek era, when Taiwanese independence activists argued that a foreign regime - that was China - was suppressing the Taiwanese people's right to self-determination. Some version of this has been invoked more recently, that Taiwan exercised the right of self-determination in their 1991 constitutional reforms.
If they are a people that has such a right, there is some evidence that international law prohibits the use of force to suppress a right of self-determination. There is a UN General Assembly resolution. There is a lot of broad language saying the right to self-determination is important and should not be suppressed through the use of force. There isn’t a lot of state practice here, but Portugal's use of force against its former colonies was condemned in 1972. Other states have sometimes intervened in support of the right of self-determination. Bangladesh was once part of Pakistan; India intervened to support East Pakistan/Bangladesh, and it invoked the right of self-determination of the people of East Pakistan. The most recent example: the people of Kosovo were arguably exercising a right of self-determination. The NATO countries intervened in 1999, on both humanitarian grounds but arguably, maybe, to protect the right of self-determination, but this was not explicitly made by those states at the time. So the practice of a foreign state supporting self-determination is much less well-supported as a matter of state practice.
There is a lot of broad language saying the right to self-determination …should not be suppressed through the use of force.
If there was a conflict over Taiwan, which alternative do we think would fit or work? The reality is that if there is a conflict over Taiwan, all of these thing are in play, and we're probably going to get a mix of all these different theories. For political reasons, the current government in Taiwan cannot say it's not a state, nor will it ever say it's a de facto state. The government is incentivized to make the argument: we’re a state, you can't use force because we’re a state.
The US position is already murky with respect to what Taiwan is. The US could make the argument that: we’re not saying Taiwan's a separate state, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have the right to avoid the use of force by China. I think this fits with the intuitions of current US government policy and falls under the umbrella of the de facto regime theory for why you can’t use force under international law.
I do think the self-determination argument has the most moral force. When people think about Taiwan, the reason people get fired up is that they say: the Taiwanese people are real people, and why can't they choose their future? But legally it has some challenges. It's disfavored by many other states that don't want their own self-determination movements. Spain is a great example of a state that's very much against self-determination mostly because of domestic issues.
US and Taiwan need to be prepared
There is almost no dispute that Ukraine is a state. It’s a member of the United Nations. And that did not prevent Russia from invading Ukraine. … So if there was a conflict [over Taiwan], given that most countries have endorsed the view that Taiwan is part of China, I think it will be very hard for the United States and Taiwan to make the de facto regime argument or self-determination argument appealing to the vast majority of countries in the world. I foresee the US losing a General Assembly resolution and being condemned for trying to defend Taiwan.
What we're facing here is the possibility of the America-alone scenario. That is something people need to think seriously about. Even if there's a good or reasonable international law argument as to why China should not be able to use force against Taiwan, that argument is not a slam dunk. In a real-world situation, the US and Taiwan could face a scenario where they are on the wrong end of international law, and the question is, can you still act in that situation?
The United States has not been deeply constrained by Article 2.4 in other areas, so it's hard to imagine it will be deeply constrained here. But other countries that would be important in any conflict over Taiwan - I’m thinking of Japan, Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines - are much more deeply constrained by these principles. Having a credible, clear, straightforward argument as to what international law says about a conflict over Taiwan is crucial.
The US does need to start legal war-gaming. I do worry that a conflict could really happen now, especially after what we've seen in Ukraine. The US needs to be prepared to be on the losing end of UN General Assembly resolutions but also be prepared to make credible, serious international legal arguments that could at least rally its allies to support Taiwan in the event of a conflict.
The US needs to be … prepared to make credible, serious international legal arguments that could at least rally its allies to support Taiwan in the event of a conflict.
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Wilhelm: You're making an argument about the legality of what the United States and Taiwan might do. What about first asking about the legality of an attack on Taiwan? If China's attack on Taiwan is illegal under international law, does that create room for new arguments about legality of the defense?
Ku: The legality of the attack turns on whether we accept any of these three theories. The only way to attack the legality of China's act is to adopt one of these other theories.
Wilhelm: You don't see any room for an argument that, sure, Taiwan is legally part of China, but it's still illegal for China to use military force against peaceful civilians who haven't provoked or threatened China?
Ku: That was probably the better explanation for what happened in Kosovo. The argument made by NATO countries was that intervention was necessary to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe because Serbia was likely to engage in mass atrocities. That was invoked also in Libya in 2012. That does turn a lot on the nature of the Chinese attack. If the Chinese attack is presumed to cause not just a military attack but lead to humanitarian atrocities - the standard is murky. The idea of responsibility to protect was promoted in the early 2000s, but no consensus was reached other than that the UN Security Council should authorize the use of force to protect and prevent humanitarian catastrophes. I wouldn’t say there’s a broad international consensus as to what the standard would be, or that it’s even permissible. It’s arguably a minority position, but if it is [accepted], the threshold would be pretty high: not just a military attack, but one with grave humanitarian consequences, that would justify the need to intervene militarily.
Audience: In my lifetime we’ve had [US intervention in] Cuba, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Afghanistan several times, Iraq, Iran oil platforms, drone killings, Islamic State, Libya, and Syria twice. Most of those had some humanitarian element to them. I find it surprising that humanitarian intervention is not more in your slides. It’s not just a question of war crimes. When you are talking about an attack on Taiwan, it’s almost inevitable that some of that attack will have to be on civilians. …If you were a [US] government lawyer, what advice would you give?
Ku: As a government lawyer, I would have no problem advising the US government that it would be legal to use force to defend Taiwan. All of these arguments are perfectly reasonable and in fact pretty persuasive. But here's the problem: it doesn’t win a majority of the countries. The last slide is really about international public opinion. It's not just about use of military force; it's about legitimacy, about persuading countries that you're in the right. Ukraine does have that, generally speaking, over Russia. That is an asset in the broader political struggle. That’s what I’m worried about. The limited concern I would have is convincing other countries that we’re not in Iraq 2003. Other countries were very reluctant and are going to be more reluctant the next time the US government says: trust us.
All of these arguments are perfectly reasonable and in fact pretty persuasive. But here's the problem: it doesn’t win a majority of the countries.
I would like to give some force and strength to this legal argument, and I think it requires a little bit of support beforehand. Rather than after the fact dress up the action with some sort of legality, walk out to the allies now and say this is why this is illegitimate now. China should not even be talking about this. It’s illegitimate for them to even be threatening this. That's where this type of stuff is important, even if we never hopefully never get to military conflict.
On humanitarian intervention, to the extent the US government has justified most of its actions, it often invokes self-defense. The US has a very capacious definition of what constitutes self-defense under Article 51. Self-defense is probably the preferred explanation for why the US feels it has the right to use force. The US has been more reluctant to endorse humanitarian intervention than the UK. It does run into the same problems, which is that we had this fight in the early 2000s and there were a lot of countries that were unwilling to endorse a broader perspective. But I suppose the moral force of the argument is always quite strong. Once you start painting the scenario of what would happen to Taiwan in such a conflict, that sort of marries the legal argument, which I don’t think is well accepted, with a very strong, powerful moral argument.
Wilhelm: The question of what Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia think - they matter more than just as votes in the General Assembly. They would be essential participants in some way if the US was going to try to intervene. It's always been very unclear what Japan would do in this scenario, and whether Seoul would agree to allow US forces based in South Korea to be used. Could you talk about those considerations? In some other writings, you have detailed that Japan’s view of collective self-defense is even more narrow than some other states take.
Ku: Japan is complicated because it's intertwined with their constitution, which famously has no army and limits them to self-defense. I don’t think humanitarian intervention gets Japan anywhere under their constitutional theory. That was reinterpreted in the early 2010s to include collective self-defense. What that means is not super clear either, but at least it means it has been interpreted to allow Japan to support the self-defense of its allies in defending Japan. But generally speaking, Japan is one of the countries that has a relatively narrow definition of self-defense. US self-defense could be preemptive in many circumstances. There are certain ideas about immanence that Japan has at least historically endorsed.
Japan has shifted a lot in the last twenty years. For Japan in particular, the US needs to come up and can come up with a plausible legal justification, and the de facto argument is the one I would go with. Here is a situation where we have a dispute over what should happen to this place, but the one thing we all know is that the use of force should not be used to resolve it. Another theory Japan might argue is that they have an island that is less than100 kilometers from Taiwan, so any conflict there is directly impinging on their defense.
The Japanese are historically very formalistic, from the American perspective, in how they interpret international law. Coming up with a relatively formalistic approach would be helpful for rallying allies like Japan, which are constrained by their constitution to adhere very closely to international law and the UN Charter.
Wilhelm: Your main suggestion is that this should be discussed now, and the US and Japan should at least privately work this out, even if they don't publicly put all their cards on the table?
Ku: Right, and I think we also need a broader public conversation. The Taiwan government is not able to do this. They’re constrained by their complicated status and political commitments and their constitutional limitations. Normally this would all come from Taiwan. Countries outside Taiwan who think they might be involved in a conflict should be thinking, just like we are currently thinking about the military aspects. We’re war gaming. It’s not wrong to start thinking about the legal war game and start airing these arguments in public forums. I am worried that the idea of China using force in Taiwan is becoming normalized. That needs to be de-legitimized and a credible legal argument that it is a violation of the UN Charter is one way to push back on that.
I am worried that the idea of China using force in Taiwan is becoming normalized. That needs to be de-legitimized and a credible legal argument that it is a violation of the UN Charter is one way to push back on that.
Audience: With the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, how would that change your calculus? And on state practice, the PRC actually supported the independence of East Timor against Indonesia in the 1970s and argued vehemently at the UN for East Timor's independence with the use of force. How would that modify your analysis?
Ku: The Japan Treaty is fascinating because it's a one-way treaty. The US has to defend Japan, but Japan doesn't have to do anything for the US. It means the US is committed to support Japan in defense of the territories it administers, which arguably includes the Senkakus, even disputed territories. In a situation where Japan credibly feels like their territory is being threatened, that would be a straightforward application of the treaty. The problem is the Chinese are very smart and they know this. It would be very savvy, if they want to embark on this, to split off the different countries and not give Japan any excuse to invoke self-defense. They don’t need to threaten Japan in order to carry out their operations [against Taiwan]. The geography is not quite so tight.
On East Timor, China is always pro-former colonies or colonies. The big divide in self-determination is over whether the right of external self-determination extends beyond the former colony situation. For East Timor, it's clearly a former colony, though it's complicated because it's Indonesia. China has been relatively aware of the concern about self-determination in Taiwan, so they have always taken the position that it should be limited to a narrow set of circumstances in the post-colonial situation. They’re not alone in this view.
I’ve been watching Chinese foreign policy pretty closely for the last decade and they really are driven by Taiwan. Self-determination, they’re all over that. They're very careful to be consistent with their position on Taiwan. Kosovo, Ukraine, they want to be very clear: this has nothing to do with Taiwan. Other governments are not focused on this. Taiwan is one of 5,000 things the US government cares about. Taiwan is number one or number two for Chinese foreign policy, so they tend to be very good at focusing on all the details, everything that might implicate their Taiwan position. That creates an asymmetry that's hard for the US to catch up on.
One of the things that you have to establish is that you are a “people” under international law to have the right of self-determination. The scenario has often been described that you are being oppressed by an outside force - some other people are oppressing you. That could arguably fit with the [Chinese] mainlanders moving to Taiwan in the 1940s and then dominating the government and preventing the Taiwanese people who have a separate dialect, culture, and history from controlling their future. The argument is a little murkier now. The Taiwanese people, so many generations out, have lost a little cohesion. The people of Taiwan are more like each other, there is much more of an amalgamated society. and also those people are arguably in control of their government. Here, the outside force would have to be China. They have internal self-determination; they are running their own state. The argument is harder to make now, ironically because of Taiwan’s democratization.
Wilhelm: How is “peoples” defined in both theory and practice? Does it have to turn on shared ethnicity and language, or could it turn on having a political community that self-identifies?
Ku: The most powerful examples that have been accepted in international law are where there are different racial, ethnic, and language groups. The classic scenario is a foreign power, often European, dominating another people of different race, religion, and language. But there are lots of people who invoke the right of self-determination even without all those differences: Quebecois, Scottish, Catalonians. The idea has been expanded and is contested. A purely political separation seems less to fit under the classic scenario.
Professor Jose Alvarez: To the extent that we are looking for legal examples where courts have accepted this, a leading example of quite flexible determination of what is a separate group that is subject to oppression would be the cases of Rwanda with Tutsis and Hutus. … If the people are defining themselves to be separate through a political determination, and that is what’s being oppressed, then you have an additional argument that I think would help Taiwan. That is, what is being oppressed here is, for example, the ability of Taiwan to self-govern itself so that it is unable to conclude any human rights treaty - it has to go through all these hoops to abide by them through national law. That’s a political infringement that isn’t directly connected to its ability to declare independence. Or its inability to be an observer in the World Health Organization and participate on vaccinations or health for its own people. There are a variety of things where China has closed the door to what many people would call sovereign status, just not an official status but the ability to take advantage of this interconnected world including international organizations.
Ku: That's a very powerful argument. The key factor here is that they have been oppressed because of their group identity. When you’re being targeted because of your identity in this political community - that typically does strengthen the argument that therefore we’re a group that should have self-determination. But they’re not always the same concept. The group that’s protected from human rights atrocities doesn’t always have the right of self-determination. The argument that Taiwan's inability to participate in international fora - I’m not sure that is typically what the classic cases of self-determination were thinking about. But maybe adapted to the modern era, it's not implausible. Self-determination is a popular concept, but it's very difficult to find examples where there's wide consensus.
Audience: In terms of the US trying to build legal arguments with its allies, focusing on the EU and the UK, what do you think would convince them about supporting the US?
Ku: [Iraq] revealed that there are some differences in their views on how to interpret the right of self-defense. For the Taiwan scenario, with respect the UK, the US should probably draw on the humanitarian argument. What we’re going to want is something that NATO has already endorsed, which it did in Kosovo. Most NATO countries signed on to that, so that example could help shape how they might respond to a Taiwan crisis from a legal and practical point of view. They wouldn’t necessarily intervene, but whatever their justification for intervening to protect Kosovo could be built upon to persuade them to support Taiwan. For European countries, potential human rights violations and preventing catastrophes are the types of arguments that probably do have more push. It's important to get everyone on board because many of the countries that have not signed on to the position that Taiwan is part of China are in Europe.
Wilhelm: We haven't mentioned one way I could envision this happening. If there is an attack on Taiwan, President Lai could immediately declare Taiwan is a state, and President Trump could immediately recognize it. More broadly: what is to be done? Should the US drop strategic ambiguity and say what it would do or more clearly signal what it would do? Are there any tools the UN and international community have to mediate or take preventative measures?
Ku: I call this the green button scenario. The Chinese are coming, press the green button, and all of a sudden we're independent. Change the flags. That would solve our problem domestically. But internationally, a lot of countries have committed to the position that Taiwan's part of China, so we're going to have to reverse that. In weird way, you see this contrast with Palestine that has wide recognition but very little actual control. Taiwan has complete control but almost no actual recognition. The contrast is quite interesting. Palestine has been very powerful in international organizations, in broader public discourse, and NGOs in building support for its statehood argument. Taiwan has been unable to do that because it has an antagonist that has locked up three-fourths of the world. So that scenario doesn’t get us as far as people who are worried about Taiwan would want.
I think it's not a bad idea to drop the ambiguity and say that Taiwan's future is not a matter for China to resolve alone by the use of force. This is a threat to international peace and security.
The reason countries are ambiguous is fear of provoking - why provoke China? But I think it's not a bad idea to drop the ambiguity and say that Taiwan's future is not a matter for China to resolve alone by the use of force. This is a threat to international peace and security. This is something of international concern - this would affect the whole world and the whole world should care. And therefore we oppose use of force, and everyone else should oppose use of force to resolve this problem. You don’t have to say we would use force, but we strongly oppose and we would act to protect and prevent a catastrophe would be a coherent position that a lot of countries could sign on to.
Right now, the economic argument is an easy one to sell: “and also all your computers will collapse.” There’s an economic threat, but I think there’s also the broader claim. There are things we should care about in the world, and Taiwan is one of them. Using force to resolve that is something we should not accept. Technically, that is the US position, but I think we should make it more explicit. In the ideal world, a UN General Assembly resolution would be the way to do it, but you don't want to lose those resolutions.
Just the other day President Lai made a statement that President Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize if he could convince China to stop threatening the use of force against Taiwan. Making it international rather than a purely domestic domestic question is actually better for Taiwan. The more this becomes a question of international concern and potentially a threat to international peace and security, the better it is for Taiwan. It makes it harder, more costly, more dangerous for China to intervene militarily. Taiwan's great weakness is its lack of international standing, to be able to have a megaphone. It needs other countries to make this an international question, not a domestic one.
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Julian Ku is the Maurice A. Deane Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at Hofstra University School of Law.
Suggested citation:
Julian Ku, “What Does International Law Say About Defending Taiwan?” USALI Talking Points, January 12, 2026 2025, https://usali.org/publications/talking-points-what-does-international-law-say-about-defending-taiwan.
The views expressed are those of the speaker, and do not represent those of USALI or NYU.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.