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Taiwan should be more proactive on security: researcher

Taiwan should play a more proactive role in the US-Japan security arrangements in the Asia-Pacific region, a researcher with the private policy research institute Taiwan Thinktank said yesterday.

Lai I-chung (賴怡忠), director of Taiwan Thinktank's internat-ional affairs department, said that Taiwan should not simply envisage that a US-Japan-Taiwan triangular structure can form a security bloc against China.

Instead, he said, Taiwan should actively help implement the US-Japan security arrangements so that an Asia-Pacific strategic order conducive to the development of maritime democracies can be built in all of the region.

Once a new Asia-Pacific strategic order is built, Taiwan can engage in exchanges with other countries in the region more freely, which will in turn help deepen Taiwan's democratization and accelerate economic and social reforms at the same time, Lai said.

According to Lai, Taiwan Thinktank, which is tailored after the US' Rand Corp, has successfully integrated opinions in Taiwan and initiated the common focus on a "US-China-Taiwan" triangular relations framework in the past to a new "US-Japan-Taiwan" strategic vision.

Taiwan Thinktank is working on a two-year program aimed at working out a three-side cooperation agenda among Taiwan, Japan and the US after the establishment of the US-Japan Security Consultative Committee late last year, Lai said.

The program is aimed at establishing areas for cooperation among the three potential strategic partners; finding out ways to build a composite security consultative mechanism; and tapping the possibility of such cooperation, Lai said.

He said that Taiwan Thinktank is scheduled to sponsor a sym-posium, entitled "US-Japan-Taiwan Strategic Dialogue," to be held at the Westin Taipei today and tomorrow, to allow strategists from the three countries to exchange views on US-Japan-Taiwan alliance relations in the wake of the establishment of the US-Japan Security Consultative Committee, particularly on issues pertaining to security, economic and political integration.

Well-known personalities expected to attend the symposium include Randall Schriver, formerly a US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs; Robin Sakoda, a top aide to former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage; and Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan Business Council.

Speaking about regional politics, he said that in the face of Taiwan's constitutional re-engineering and Japan's new constitutional agenda, as well as probable leadership changes in Taiwan and the US in 2008, the US, Japan and Taiwan need to build mutual trust via institutional systems and the sooner this happens, the better.
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