Taiwan's president is pitching a stronger, better-defended Taiwan as a benefit to the whole region, a message aimed squarely at Washington and Beijing.

• Lai Ching-te met a visiting delegation from the US Foundation for Defense of Democracies, led by China program chair Matt Pottinger.
• His line: peace comes from strength, strength from resilience, resilience from unity — and Taiwan's freedom affects the whole Indo-Pacific, not just Taiwan.
• Last month's Han Kuang military exercise added civilian drills for the first time across a 17-million-person area, practicing how to keep communications running when mobile networks slow to a crawl and how to move medical care underground.
• Undersea cable cuts to outlying islands, the Hualien earthquake, and the use of low-orbit satellites all fed into how the drills were designed.
• Pottinger said Taiwan's training is getting closer to real scenarios and reaching more people, which is how deterrence gets built.

Outlook: Taiwan will keep building backup communication networks and deepening drills with US and other democratic partners, with the message that readiness itself is the deterrent.