Washington’s latest US$1.83 billion arms sale to Taiwan is “uncommonly modest and inherently defensive” a security-focused think tank said.
“As illustrated by the defensive nature of this arms deal, Taiwan poses no military threat to China, but China poses an increasing threat to Taiwan,” a paper published on Friday by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) said.
Former US government official and now senior adviser to CNAS Patrick Cronin and research associate Harry Krejsa published the paper in the National Interest magazine.
They said that while Taiwan has faced criticism over the years that its defense community was more interested in high-tech “prestige” weaponry than cheaper, less glamorous defensive capabilities it was more likely to need, “by even the latter metric this sale is a humble one.”
Cronin and Krejsa said that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) over his last two terms had elevated economic interdependence and diplomatic rapprochement with China as the key to preserving Taiwan’s security, “reducing the role of military deterrence.”
“The psychological and political dimensions of a commitment to Taiwan’s defense is perhaps more important than the absolute dollars involved in implementing that defense. If Taiwan was more dependably spending the political capital necessary to meet its goals for defense investment, it would likely find a more willing partner in the United States to face those political risks together,” they said.
Cronin and Krejsa said that Taiwan had not spent enough on defense during the Ma administration, adding that the psychological and political dimensions of statecraft were as important as money spent on weaponry.
Looking ahead, they said there were reasons for optimism.
Cronin and Krejsa said that the Democratic Progressive Party was calling for a renewed focus on deterrence.
“If the next administration is able to demonstrate that Taiwan is committed to the difficult choices necessary to protect everything their experiment in culturally Chinese democracy has built, they will continue to find a stalwart partner in the US,” Cronin and Krejsa said.
In another development on Friday, US-Taiwan Business Council president Rupert Hammond-Chambers issued a strong response to comments by Chris Nelson of the well-respected newsletter Nelson Report that the Taiwanese military was not ready to integrate new advanced weapons systems into its doctrine, manpower or training.
Hammond-Chambers said the administration of US President Barack Obama had been “fantastically disingenuous” in the way it had dealt with arms requests from Taipei.
He said the latest arms package was “driven by politics, the politics of US-China relations.”
Hammond-Chambers added: “This is about the minimum necessary to comply with the Taiwan Relations Act while avoiding any disruption to bilateral relations with Beijing.”
“The People’s Republic of China looms like an 800-pound gorilla over this entire broken process. In one place their threat to Taiwan grows daily, in another the US refuses to respond to that threat in a meaningful way for fear of upsetting the aggressor,” he said.
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