Taipei is the question Kyiv keeps answering. Every lesson the Ukrainian battlefield produces (about drones and jamming, about civilian resilience, about how fast a society can militarize its own industrial base) arrives in Taiwan as an urgent hypothetical. My engagement here began with research and conference work and became a standing commitment. The Indo-Pacific is where emerging technology and geopolitics get tested against each other next, and it deserves the same first-hand discipline.
The work has run through the island’s distinctive institutions. I presented OSINT for Identifying Chinese Infrastructure Projects at the China and the World Conference, organized by Doublethink Lab (first in Taipei, later in Johannesburg), and I work with the civil-society researchers who watch Beijing’s techno-economic strategy the way threat-intelligence analysts watch infrastructure. That strategy was the subject of a separate briefing I gave the DoD’s Irregular Warfare Center.
The technology and manufacturing ecosystem is the other half. Taiwan is a dense fabric of fabs, precision manufacturers, drone startups, and civil-defense innovators asking pointed questions about what Ukraine proves. The problems here are comparative: which wartime adaptations transfer across the two theaters, which depend on Ukraine’s specific geography, and where Taiwanese industry can build ahead of need.
The people make the corridor real. Taiwanese researchers and founders, the international policy community that rotates through Taipei, and the Ukrainian voices increasingly invited to speak there. Connecting those rooms to the ones in Kyiv is the job. The Mandarin I started years ago at Peking University, on a Gilman year, still pays its way.
I call Taipei the horizon deliberately. It isn’t the field yet, and the work here is about keeping it that way by moving the lessons faster than the conflict.
That deterrence is a logistics problem before it is a doctrine, and that the cheapest time to learn a war’s lessons is before it starts.