A US military affairs specialist said yesterday the results of the presidential elections in Taiwan and the US are unlikely to have a serious impact on Taiwan-US military relations.
Some in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and analysts have warned that the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) victory in last month’s Taiwan presidential election could harm Taiwan’s defense capability as the KMT attempts to remove barriers to cross-strait trade, investment and tourism and other, possibly more sensitive, obstacles to closer ties with China.
But Mark Stokes, director of US-based think tank The Project 2049 Institute and former country director for China and Taiwan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Washington, said he did not foresee “much of a change in defense relations” between Washington and Taipei.
Speaking to the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Taipei, Stokes said that neither the KMT’s victory in the poll last month nor the post-Bush administration — Republican or Democratic — is likely to alter the “remarkable degree of continuity” exhibited by Taiwan-US defense relations over the years.
Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain is generally seen as friendlier to Taiwan than his Democratic Party counterparts, though the US presidential campaign has seen Democratic senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton attack China on the campaign trail over issues such as the quality of Chinese exports and currency manipulation.
On military preparedness, Stokes said the US was better prepared than ever in the event it would have to intervene in a cross-strait conflict. For Taiwan’s part, Stokes said that controversy over the long-delayed and eventually reduced special arms procurement package had obscured extensive spending by the Taiwanese military on other items.
Similarly, Stokes said that Taiwan’s election campaign had obscured the reality that most pan-blue-camp and pan-green-camp politicians were a “lighter shade” of blue or green than appearances might suggest and that this would be a factor in future negotiations with China.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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