As the T-shirt slogan goes: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you." A shame that President Chen Shui-bian
Surely the eccentricity of the garb could only have served to hammer home its message, which would dovetail nicely with what Chen had to say to his guests, namely to reiterate the hope that the weaponry the US chooses to sell to Taiwan in the near future -- remember that word "sell," nobody is asking for a handout here -- will be determined by Taiwan's defense needs and not be some woolly headed notion of regaining China's favor after the resolution -- or partial resolution -- of the spy plane incident last week.
The president was far too diplomatic to stress that under US law, as manifested in the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), Washington was obliged to base its decisions only on assessments of Taiwan's defense needs. Given that a US Navy assessment of those needs has recommended that Taiwan be provided with the AEGIS-equipped Arleigh-Burke class destroyers that it has asked for, as well as better equipment to counter China's potential submarine menace, the question of what Taiwan should receive should really not merit so much speculation. It's the simplest of practical syllogisms: the TRA says Taiwan must be provided with what it needs, the US Navy says Taiwan needs the ships, so sell Taiwan the ships.
Logical rigor has unfortunately never been a determinant of policy, nor have the requirements of US law. After all, the Third Communique with China signed, strangely enough, by that militant anti-communist Ronald Reagan, maintains that weaponry sold to Taiwan will diminish in quantity and will not improve qualitatively. China has made much of this agreement in seeking to stop Taiwan getting AEGIS. Probably we cannot expect the Bush administration to openly repudiate the agreement as being illegal under US law, but we can hope that Bush will pay more attention to legal niceties than his predecessors.
But two things concerning Chen's remarks Saturday are worth stressing. First, Taiwan is not going to attack anyone. In this sense US handwringing about what weapons are "defensive" in nature (Patriot is but submarines aren't, it is claimed) is really a paper-thin pretext for refusing to give Taiwan what it wants so as to mollify China. The truth is that Taiwan has absolutely no intention of starting a war of aggression with anyone -- crackpot notions about "retaking the mainland" are as dead as Chiang Kai-shek
Secondly, Taiwan doesn't want to improve the means to defend itself only because it seeks to formalize its independence. Actually most Taiwanese are not opposed so much to retying bonds with China as they are to having a shotgun marriage with the communist thugs who now run that country. In this situation Taiwan can only negotiate from a position of strength. As long as China thinks it can get what it wants by force, it has no incentive to change its deplorable ways. And this goes beyond the "Taiwan question," affecting all China's international commitments -- which it commonly breaks -- from trade and IPR protection to nuclear proliferation. That China has aggressive ambitions in the South and East China Seas should be obvious after the events of the last two weeks. The last century's preeminent historical lesson from Munich to the Gulf War was surely that potential aggressors must be made to understand that aggression will not be allowed to succeed. And the US must realize that in this respect arming Taiwan is the best investment in regional security it can make.
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