It is time for the US to break a Chinese-imposed “embargo” and help Taiwan develop its own submarines, a policy adviser to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said.
“The construction of such a submarine industry would help defend Taiwan,” Peter Navarro, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an article published by National Interest magazine this week.
“It would also create new, high-skilled jobs at robust wage levels — the most critical need of a Taiwan that, like America, has off-shored far too much of its industrial base to China,” he said.
Navarro said that he had just returned from a visit to Taiwan where he conducted lengthy discussions with experts about what it would mean if Beijing controlled the nation.
He said that Beijing would build a submarine base on the east coast and other bases that would significantly extend the effective range of China’s air force.
China has been very successful in bullying other nations into not selling modern diesel-electric submarines to Taiwan and pressuring them not to share blueprints or help Taiwan develop its own submarine industry, he said.
“It is now time for the US to help break this embargo,” he said.
The Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, this week adopted a party platform that for the first time includes the “six assurances” given to Taiwan in 1982 by then-US president Ronald Reagan and is sharply critical of China.
“Taiwan urgently needs to upgrade its defensive capabilities and Taiwan’s leaders clearly understand that such capabilities must be focused on developing a similar set of anti-access, area denial capabilities that China is now using to deter US sea and air power in Asia,” Navarro said.
“One key to any such strategy is the development of a fleet of conventional diesel-electric submarines with state-of-the-art air-independent propulsion systems,” he said.
Navarro cited former Pentagon official Seth Cropsey as saying that a modern, deployable fleet of submarines is critical to the sustained defense of Taiwan.
Now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Cropsey wrote in a recent article that the US could provide design engineers, work with Japanese shipbuilders and relax export controls on items needed to build submarines for Taiwan.
He said that another option would be to use blueprints of an existing model and customize it to fit Taiwan’s requirements.
“Japan is both capable and possibly willing — with the right encouragement — to assist Taiwan in constructing diesel-electric submarines,” Cropsey wrote.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS