The US needs to ask itself a “big dramatic question” about Taiwan, a foreign policy expert told a Washington conference on Wednesday.
Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said that historically the US military had been so powerful that it could operate with impunity “ten or twenty or thirty miles” off the coast of China.
However, those days are over, he said.
Now, with the growth of China’s own military and the technical development of new weapons systems, he said the US had “less supremacy, less dominance.”
He also asked the conference — organized by the National Bureau of Asian Research — to consider if the US needed to “weaken” its defense commitment to Taiwan.
O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy who specializes in US defense strategy and the use of military force, stressed that he was not suggesting that the US should pull back from the Western Pacific.
“Does our strategy for the defense of Taiwan have the ability to survive for another decade or two?” he asked.
He said that in the past the US had the ability to help protect Taiwan “in any kind of way that we wished.”
“We could stop an amphibious assault, stop a naval blockade, stop anything else that China might attempt,” he said.
However, that is no longer the case, he said.
“We don’t have the same immunity from Chinese actions in and around Taiwan that we had before,” he said.
“If China blockades Taiwan, rather than breaking the blockade, do we counterblockade?” he asked. “Do we mobilize international sanctions that have the effect of imposing a blockade? In other words, it might be time to get a little more creative about our war planning.”
O’Hanlon added: “China cares more about Taiwan than we do — it’s just a fact.”
“And yet, we do care about Taiwan. We care about it at least as much as we care about Georgia,” he added.
While O’Hanlon said it was not a perfect analogy, he likened a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. Washington, he said, simply told Moscow that if it overthrew the Georgian regime, the Russian-US relationship would not “be the same.”
The US, O’Hanlon said, did not really know what that meant — but Washington was deadly serious even though it did not launch a single war plane or issue a single military threat during the crisis.
He concluded: “Countering a Chinese blockade of Taiwan is going to get harder, but there are other military and economic steps we could take.”
EXPANSIONIST: China deploys an average of 40 to 50 warships and coast guard vessels daily in the South China Sea, despite pledges not to militarize the region, an official said China is attempting to expand its influence across the First Island Chain and increase pressure on Japan by sending coast guard vessels into waters off of Taiwan under the pretext of maritime negotiations with Japan and the Philippines, a national security official said yesterday. China’s recent actions in the waters east of Taiwan and Japan and the Philippines’ exclusive economic zones (EEZ) are attempts to establish dominance in First Island Chain waters, said the official who declined to be named, adding that this is “expansion disguised as law enforcement.” Framing China’s actions solely as a cross-strait issue is a serious misjudgment that
Through analyzing fossil evidence, a research team at National Taiwan University (NTU) discovered the largest endemic bird to have lived in Taiwan, naming it Pavo miejue, or extinct peafowl (滅絕孔雀). The Mikado pheasant, which is printed on the back of the NT$1,000 bank note, was previously believed to be the biggest endemic bird to Taiwan. The research team’s findings suggest that Pavo miejue lived during the Pleistocene epoch tens of thousands of years ago. It is the first endemic extinct bird species discovered and formally named in Taiwan. The study was coauthored by NTU Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修),
Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport is to suspend its automated Skytrain service connecting Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 starting on July 1 to facilitate connection works for the upcoming Terminal 3, the airport operator said today. Passengers and staff who need to travel between the two terminals after the suspension can instead use the Taoyuan MRT or the airport's 24-hour shuttle bus service, Taoyuan International Airport Corp said. The Taoyuan MRT Airport Line directly links the two terminals, while the shuttle buses are to operate around the clock, the company added. The Skytrain provides free transportation between the airport’s two terminals for travelers and
Taiwan ranked 42nd in terms of peacefulness among 163 countries, down five places from last year, according to this year’s Global Peace Index. With an overall score of 1.751, Taiwan dropped from 37th last year, the report published by the global Institute for Economics and Peace showed. The overall score measures a country’s level of peacefulness using 23 quantitative and qualitative indicators across three domains — ongoing domestic and international conflict, societal safety and security, and militarization. While Taiwan ranked 42nd worldwide, it was listed in ninth place among the 19 Asian-Pacific countries in the report, after New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia,
RSS