It was strange to see a once-powerful person like former US deputy secretary of defense and World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz addressing more benign issues of trade in a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei this week. The neocon, or hawk, or whatever label the reader prefers, who played such a big role in shaping the US’ aggressive policy in the Middle East spent much of the time talking about Taiwan, Taiwanese people and their democratic “experiment” in glowing, almost emotive terms.
Wolfowitz called himself a friend of Taiwan, and there is no reason to doubt this given his involvement in defense issues affecting Taiwan in the last 25 years or so. And it is a bipartisan friendship as far as Taiwanese politics is concerned: Wolfowitz had no interest in presenting commentary on domestic squabbles.
But he did raise the 1984 murder of writer Henry Liu (江南) on US soil by Taiwan’s security services, and observed that with this killing the goodwill that the Chiang dynasty had generated in Washington over the decades was close to dissipating, threatening to turn Congress against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.
This was a welcome reminder that what Taiwan is now is very different to what it was then. But Wolfowitz’s words also had the flavor of a warning: Taiwan’s security, now as then, hinges on the regard in which Taiwan — or more precisely, its government — is held by Congress and the US administration, and that this affection had been tested in recent years by the Democratic Progressive Party government.
That affection is still there, though a combination of US wars in the Middle East and the pro-China machinations of members of the State Department and their academic networks, not to mention the China lobby, tends to stifle this affection.
That may all be changing, judging from Wolfowitz’s confidence (amid none-too-subtle prodding) that the arms freeze conceded by US Admiral Timothy Keating will be lifted, possibly before the end of the congressional session in September, and hence before the next US president takes office.
Amid gloomy forecasts by local defense analysts, there are increasing reports of activity in and around Congress to deliver the arms that the government agreed to so long ago. And yesterday’s comments by Jason Yuan (袁健生), Taiwan’s new envoy to Washington, that the delivery of the arms is “almost a done deal,” suggest that senior KMT figures know more about maneuvering in Washington than it cares to admit — right down to the visit to Taiwan of a top US figure in the weeks to come.
This is all well and good. If we can assume that Yuan’s comments are a reflection of the reality and not just bluster from an envoy who seems not to know when to close his mouth, then there is hope on the horizon that Taiwan will be able to lurch back in the direction of keeping the Chinese military threat within its capabilities.
But if US President George W. Bush does not live up to Wolfowitz’s expectations and does not release the arms, then these things will become crystal clear: the pro-China group in the State Department will have triumphed, Taiwan’s new envoy will have been discredited even before arriving in the US and Taiwan’s security will be at the mercy of the US electoral process, giving China even more time to tighten the screws.
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