Academic warns of pan-blues' impact on Taiwan-US ties

US strategy in the East Asian region will be affected if the pan-blue camp continues to lean toward China and remains unwilling to show that Taiwan is determined to defend itself, a US academic said on Friday.

Robert Sutter, a visiting professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University, made the comments while attending a conference on East Asian Security and Taiwan held by the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

Sutter also offered a pessimistic view of Taiwan's future, saying that China's growing strength could result in Taiwan becoming further isolated in the international arena, while pushing the US and Taiwan further apart.

He said that President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) had not taken advantage of the Bush administration's goodwill over the past six years and accused him of promoting provocative policies.

Regardless of whether the US will have a Democrat or Republican president after 2008, the administration will place China in the mainstream and a trend toward marginalizing Taiwan will become unavoidable, he said.

Former US Ambassador to China James Lilley, who also attended the event, said that Americans are realists and that the situation was not as bad as Sutter described it.

Lilley nonetheless added that the US was annoyed by Taiwan's unwillingness to defend itself while asking for US protection, and that the US and Taiwan should work together in examining how Taiwan could effectively defend itself.

He said that although the US and China are monitoring each other's military development and Beijing still uses the US as the virtual enemy in its military exercises, they were moving away from military confrontation toward economic cooperation.

The development of the Chinese market is an unstoppable trend and the US is hoping to become part of that trend through cooperation with Taiwanese businesses, he added.

Taiwan's representative to Washington David Lee (李大維), in his opening remarks at the conference, said that recent incidents, such as Chinese submarines violating Japanese territorial waters, together with China not having renounced the use of military force against Taiwan, show that China poses a threat not only to Taiwan, but also to East Asian regional security and stability in general.

Lee said that Taiwan fully understood that maintaining strong defense capabilities was a premise for maintaining peace and the ability to deter any action that may endanger regional security.