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I want to be clear from the outset that I am not a Donald Trump supporter … far from it. I dislike pretty much everything the U.S. president-elect says and represents. I find his personal behaviour and public belligerence disgraceful.

But this past weekend, I found myself stridently defending one of his first open forays into foreign policy.

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In the interests of full disclosure, I should state that I lived as an expat in Taiwan from 1992 to 1998, the years during which that country made its difficult and dramatic transition from dictatorship to democracy.

I was working as an editor at Taiwan’s English-language daily newspaper and had a front-row seat to the extremely courageous decision that the Nationalist (KMT) government made in the mid-1990s to rewrite the constitution and allow free elections, which the authoritarian governing party of the time must have known would inevitably lead to it being ousted from power. In the years since, the KMT has traded the presidency with its opposition back and forth twice.