Power Under Pressure: The Fight to Protect Taiwan’s Energy Lifelines from Beijing’s Aggression 

A livestream of the conversation will begin here at 1:00pm ET on Monday, November 17.
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Taiwan imports roughly 98 percent of its energy, making it one of the world’s most energy-insecure economies. This vulnerability creates an opportunity for Beijing to pursue its campaign to force Taipei’s capitulation through gray-zone tactics, using economic, legal, and cyber-enabled economic warfare to throttle Taiwan’s fuel supply without firing a shot. A successful Chinese campaign to disrupt Taiwan’s LNG supply would force the island into difficult choices between powering civilian infrastructure or maintaining industrial production – including the semiconductor manufacturing that produces a super-majority of the world’s advanced chips.

This summer, teams from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Taipei-based Centre for Innovative Democracy and Sustainability (CIDS) at National Chengchi University conducted a tabletop exercise examining how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might escalate military, diplomatic and economic pressure towards an unacknowledged quarantine, interrupting and potentially blocking Taiwan’s energy imports. The exercise revealed that while Taiwan must urgently address its energy vulnerabilities, coordinated actions by the United States, Japan, Australia, and European partners can significantly impact Beijing’s strategic calculus.

To discuss findings from this tabletop exercise and actionable steps Taiwan and its partners can take to build resilience and strengthen deterrence, FDD hosts a panel of exercise participants including RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, senior director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) and Craig Singleton, senior director of FDD’s China Program. This conversation is moderated by Politico China Correspondent Phelim Kine.

Craig Singleton

Craig Singleton is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he also serves as senior director of FDD’s China Program. He previously spent more than a decade serving in a series of sensitive national security roles with the U.S. government, where he primarily focused on East Asia. In that capacity, Craig regularly briefed federal law enforcement, U.S. military personnel, foreign governments, congressional oversight committees, and the White House on a wide range of issues, including China’s overseas military expansion, Chinese malign influence, and North Korea. Craig is a regular contributor to numerus notable news outlets.

RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery

RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He also directs CSC 2.0, having served as the Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s executive director. Previously, Mark served as policy director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, coordinating policy efforts on national security strategy, capabilities and requirements, and cyber policy. Mark served for 32 years in the U.S. Navy as a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer, retiring as a rear admiral in 2017.

Phelim Kine

Phelim Kine is a China correspondent for Politico. He writes on Indo-Pacific-related news for the Global Security team and is host of the weekly China Watcher newsletter. Kine has more than two decades of experience reporting in and on China in roles ranging from features writer at Taiwan’s China News to working as managing editor at the Cambodia-based Phnom Penh Post and researching China in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. He was a financial sector reporter at Dow Jones Newswires in Beijing for three years before moving to Indonesia as the DJN bureau chief in Jakarta.