Taiwan could become a campaign issue in this year’s US presidential elections.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is set to vote on a resolution this week at its annual winter meeting supporting Taiwanese democracy and “the timely sale of defensive arms.”
Introduced by Oklahoma committee member Carolyn McLarty with 22 co-sponsors, the resolution is expected to pass without difficulty.
It is based on wording from the Republican Party’s 2008 platform, which stated that the US “will help Taiwan defend itself.” A copy of the resolution will be sent to all Republican presidential candidates for guidance in future foreign policy debates.
“Taiwan is potentially the biggest foreign policy challenge that a new president will face, so we want our candidates to know our position and help them formulate their own,” Indiana RNC member James Bopp told the Washington Times.
“China may try to manipulate our foreign policy and become aggressive toward the rest of the world to distract attention from its own developing economic crisis,” he said.
The Washington Times commented: “Republicans have long been strong champions of democratic Taiwan, but the issue has barely emerged in the more than a dozen debates and hundreds of campaign events the presidential candidates have held.”
The newspaper added that backers of the resolution were “mystified” by their candidates’ silence on Taiwan, particularly as US President Barack Obama, a Democrat, has shown an “apparent indifference” to Taiwan’s security and the threat posed by Beijing.
“We would like this to be an issue for the candidates in debates. So far, it hasn’t been,” said Demetra DeMonte, another resolution co-sponsor.
The move comes as Daniel Twining, a senior fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund, has written an article for Foreign Policy magazine about the “gathering debate” in Washington over whether Taiwan is a spoiler rather than a partner in Obama’s new strategy to “pivot” towards Asia.
“Arguments to let Taiwan go, get strategy backwards. Cutting off an old US ally at a time of rising tensions with an assertive China, might do less to appease Beijing than to encourage its hopes to bully the US into a further retreat from its commitments in East Asia,” Twining wrote.
“Most importantly, it would resurrect the ghosts of Munich and Yalta, where great powers decided the fate of lesser nations without reference to their interests — or the human consequences of offering them up to satisfy the appetites of predatory great powers,” he wrote.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift