During the past weeks, US Congress has become more assertive on Taiwan policy. On May 26, a record 45 senators wrote a letter to US President Barack Obama urging him to “act swiftly and provide Taiwan with the F-16C/D aircraft that are critical to meeting our obligations pursuant to the TRA [Taiwan Relations Act] and to preserving peace and security in the Taiwan Strait.”
Yesterday, the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee was scheduled to hold a hearing on US policy toward Taiwan, examining developments over the past few years and looking toward the future.
This closer scrutiny is good. At pivotal moments in history, Congress has played a key role in shaping US policy toward Taiwan and its people. In early 1979, after the administration of then-US president Jimmy Carter had severed diplomatic relations with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Congress stepped in and drafted the TRA, which stipulates that peace and security in the Taiwan Strait and a peaceful resolution to Taiwan’s future are key elements of US policy.
A few years later, in the early and mid-1980s, Congress again played a key role: This time in Taiwan’s transition to democracy. Then-senators Ted Kennedy and Claiborne Pell, together with representatives Steven Solarz and Jim Leach, held frequent hearings and made statements urging the KMT to lift martial law and establish a multiparty political system.
This happened in 1986 and 1987, after which Taiwan made its momentous transition to a fully democratic political system. The first elections for all seats of the Legislative Yuan took place in 1992 and the first presidential elections by popular vote in 1996.
During the years of former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), Congress yet again played a key role, this time in convincing the administration of former US president Bill Clinton to allow Lee to visit his alma mater, Cornell University. As chairman of the board of the American Institute in Taiwan it was my honor to welcome Lee to Cornell.
In the aftermath of the Cornell visit, China started to rattle its saber and launched missiles against Taiwan, which led to the Taiwan Strait Crisis in the spring of 1996 and necessitated the sending of two US carrier battle groups into the area around Taiwan.
Regrettably, the Clinton administration drew the wrong conclusions from the chain of events and started to make conciliatory gestures toward the People’s Republic of China, culminating in the infamous “three noes” pronounced during Clinton’s June 1998 visit to Beijing: “We have a ‘one China’ policy that we don’t support a ‘one China, one Taiwan’ policy or a ‘two Chinas’ policy. We don’t support Taiwan independence, and we don’t support Taiwanese membership in international organizations that require statehood.”
Congress was quick to rebut Clinton, saying that the new formulation was a major change of policy which was not in keeping with the TRA: The Senate passed SCR-107, affirming US commitments to Taiwan, by a vote of 92 to zero, while the House passed a similar measure, HCR 301, by an equally overwhelming vote of 390 to 1.
Clinton did try to do some damage control by asserting that the future of Taiwan needed to be determined “with the assent of the people of Taiwan” in speeches in early 2000, but the Clinton White House clung to the new formulations — which are perpetuated to this day — and Congress got busy with other burning issues.
At the present time, the renewed interest by Congress could focus on righting the wrongs of 1998 and insisting that its interpretation of the “one China” policy only means that it recognizes one government as the government of China: The one in Beijing, and no more than that.
However, as far as Taiwan is concerned, the US needs to demonstrate some new vision. We need to lift the artificial restrictions which we have imposed on our relations with the democratic nation of Taiwan, we need to make defensive weapons such as the F-16s available according to the TRA and we need to work more diligently to ensure that Taiwan is allowed to contribute fully to the international community and become an equal member in all international organizations.
Muddling through along the lines of present policy is no option: The future of a democratic country is at stake.
Nat Bellocchi served as US ambassador to Botswana and is a former chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan. The views expressed in this article are his own.
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action. In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them. Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
The Legislative Yuan on Friday held another cross-party caucus negotiation on a special act for bolstering national defense that the Executive Yuan had proposed last year. The party caucuses failed to reach a consensus on several key provisions, so the next session is scheduled for today, where many believe substantial progress would finally be made. The plan for an eight-year NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.59 billion) special defense budget was first proposed by the Cabinet in November last year, but the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) lawmakers have continuously blocked it from being listed on the agenda for
On Tuesday last week, the Presidential Office announced, less than 24 hours before he was scheduled to depart, that President William Lai’s (賴清德) planned official trip to Eswatini, Taiwan’s sole diplomatic ally in Africa, had been delayed. It said that the three island nations of Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar had, without prior notice, revoked the charter plane’s overflight permits following “intense pressure” from China. Lai, in his capacity as the Republic of China’s (ROC) president, was to attend the 40th anniversary of King Mswati III’s accession. King Mswati visited Taiwan to attend Lai’s inauguration in 2024. This is the first
RSS