Randall Schriver, who has been nominated for US assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific affairs, on Thursday said he would make strengthening ties with security partners such as Taiwan a priority if his nomination is confirmed.
“If confirmed, it will be a priority to invest in our security partners in Taiwan and Singapore, and emerging partnerships with countries such as Vietnam,” Schriver said at a nomination hearing held by the US Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington.
“For this administration’s vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific to be realized, we must position ourselves to prevail in the long-term strategic competition we face vis-a-vis the People’s Republic of China,” he told the committee in his opening statement.
Photo: CNA
The US should continue to look for opportunities to cooperate with China where the two countries’ interests overlap, Schriver said, but he acknowledged that finding such opportunities would be a challenge.
“The Chinese Communist Party’s vision for a new security architecture in Asia with China at the center is in many ways at odds with our own aspiration for the region,” he said. “If confirmed, I will approach the duties of my position with an understanding that a rising China presents the most consequential security challenge of my generation.”
In response to a question from Senator Tom Cotton on whether the level of US sales of weapons to Taiwan is sufficient to deter Chinese aggression, Schriver answered: “We have more work to do there.”
Cotton also raised the concern that China always has a quantitative advantage over Taiwan’s military and he asked whether it also had a qualitative advantage right now.
“In certain niche areas they do, but overall, I think Taiwan maintains a qualitative edge to the point where they could deter and hopefully defeat a Chinese invasion,” Schriver said. “There are scenarios short of invasion, coercion scenarios, which are very dangerous for Taiwan.”
Schriver, a former Taipei Times columnist, served as chief of staff and senior policy adviser to then-US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage from 2001 to 2003.
He took the helm of the Project 2049 Institute — a US think tank dedicated to researching security trends in Asia — after serving as deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2003 to 2005.
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs official yesterday said that a delegation that visited China for an APEC meeting did not receive any kind of treatment that downgraded Taiwan’s sovereignty. Department of International Organizations Director-General Jonathan Sun (孫儉元) said that he and a group of ministry officials visited Shenzhen, China, to attend the APEC Informal Senior Officials’ Meeting last month. The trip went “smoothly and safely” for all Taiwanese delegates, as the Chinese side arranged the trip in accordance with long-standing practices, Sun said at the ministry’s weekly briefing. The Taiwanese group did not encounter any political suppression, he said. Sun made the remarks when
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
The Taiwanese passport ranked 33rd in a global listing of passports by convenience this month, rising three places from last month’s ranking, but matching its position in January last year. The Henley Passport Index, an international ranking of passports by the number of designations its holder can travel to without a visa, showed that the Taiwan passport enables holders to travel to 139 countries and territories without a visa. Singapore’s passport was ranked the most powerful with visa-free access to 192 destinations out of 227, according to the index published on Tuesday by UK-based migration investment consultancy firm Henley and Partners. Japan’s and
BROAD AGREEMENT: The two are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff to 15% and a commitment for TSMC to build five more fabs, a ‘New York Times’ report said Taiwan and the US have reached a broad consensus on a trade deal, the Executive Yuan’s Office of Trade Negotiations said yesterday, after a report said that Washington is set to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent. The New York Times on Monday reported that the two nations are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent and commit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to building at least five more facilities in the US. “The agreement, which has been under negotiation for months, is being legally scrubbed and could be announced this month,” the paper said,
RSS