American Institute in Taiwan Chairman Ray Burghardt said on Tuesday that the US had never interfered in direct Taiwan-China negotiations and would never do so.
“We have always maintained the firm belief that only the political leaders in Taiwan can judge the topics, the pace and the timing of what they talk about with the other side,” he said.
Burghardt, the keynote speaker at a Washington seminar on China-Taiwan-US relations, said Taipei’s political leaders were the only ones who could make decisions about opening political talks with Beijing.
An academic at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, Bonnie Glaser, said a “narrative” persisted that one of the reasons President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was reluctant to accelerate the pace of discussions with China on sensitive political issues and military confidence building measures (CBM) was because the US opposed such an agenda.
“It would be wrong for the US or any other outside country to second-guess those elected leaders on whether they should take up CBMs,” Burghardt said.
“It would be totally inappropriate, presumptuous really, for outside countries to suggest to Taiwanese leaders what or when or where they should talk,” he said.
Burghardt, his voice raising for emphasis, said: “Under no circumstances has the US ever discouraged in any way directly or subtly or implicitly, in no way have we ever cautioned Taiwan ‘we don’t want you to talk about this or that.’”
“Never, ever,” he added.
The seminar was jointly organized by CSIS and the Brookings Institution, also in Washington.
Burghardt said that in the early days of the Taiwan-US relationship there was a tendency in Washington to treat Taiwan as an “issue” or as an “annoying problem.”
However, since then the relationship had become “close and serious, and important.”
Burghardt said Washington’s current national security team gave Taiwan more time and treated it with more “interest and respect” than any other he had worked with over the years.
“I give a lot of credit to former assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell for his leadership establishing that kind of relationship and that kind of improvement,” Burghardt said.
He said that the US now briefs Taiwan on high-level meetings with the China and on the overall US strategy toward Asia.
At the same time, he said, Taipei briefed the US on “various channels of communication with Beijing.”
Burghardt said the US military relationship with Taiwan was “stronger than ever.”
“In the past year I have participated in more military interactions than I can count,” he said.
The military relationship, he said, included joint assessment and analysis of what Taiwan needed to maintain its deterrent capability, including high-tech and low-tech items.
“It’s not only things you might buy, but it includes things you might make yourself,” he said.
Taiwan was getting better every year at the indigenous manufacture of weapons.
Asked what it would take for “unification to happen,” Burghardt said that within Taiwan there was a deep-seated sense of separate identity and this issue would have to be addressed by “anyone who contemplated the idea of unification.”
He said that he did not “buy the scenario” that the human rights situation or democracy within Taiwan had eroded over the last few years.
Burghardt said one of the most important things the US could do for Taiwan was to help the nation with its “deterrence capability” to make coercion more difficult.
He said Taiwan should be strong enough to defend itself against a blockade or an invasion for a sufficient period of time to “give pause to someone contemplating such hostility.”
This was, he said, an important aspect of giving Taiwan the confidence to negotiate from a position of strength.
Burghardt said there would be no continuing improvement in cross-strait relations unless Taiwan felt confident in its own security.
“If you want to stop cross-strait progress, the fastest way to bring it to a halt would be to remove Taiwan’s sense of security and sense of deterrent capability. Beijing is never going to accept that logic, but we believe it deeply, as does Taiwan,” Burghardt said.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods