On Monday last week, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) carried a report under the headline “Does Taiwan’s military stand a chance against China? Few think so.”
The report said that many US military experts are worried that Taiwan’s military is poorly prepared for combat and its conscripts have low morale, and it suggests that Taiwan’s armed forces should train together with those of the US and other countries.
Among various critical remarks about Taiwan, it said that the Taiwanese military is riven with internal problems, many of which have built up over years of calm across the Taiwan Strait and economic prosperity in the nation. It added that Taiwan’s 80,000 military conscripts and nearly 2.2 million reservists are poorly prepared and their morale is low, which calls for urgent solutions.
Why did this article appear in the WSJ, and what kind of stance does this newspaper have?
While the US media is free and open, news outlets still differ in their respective stances about politics and other matters. The WSJ belongs to the News Corp media conglomerate, which also includes Fox News, the New York Post, the Australian, and British newspapers the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.
News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch is a conservative media mogul, but the WSJ is a special case among the group’s media assets in that conservatives think it is a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, but liberals think it speaks for the Republican Party. In other words, it is a relatively centrist newspaper, despite belonging to the right-leaning conservative News Corp.
Retired US generals tend to lean on the conservative side, without necessarily being members of the Republican Party, so News Corp often employs them as advisers and guest researchers on military affairs, which happens less often among liberal-leaning mainstream media.
Over the years, a pattern has emerged in which, when the Pentagon wants to communicate and let something be known to the outside world, it often does so through the WSJ.
The WSJ has on more than one occasion expressed views about the Taiwan Strait situation. On the last such occasion, news about joint training by US and Taiwanese armed forces was also revealed through the WSJ.
This indirectly confirmed the idea that although the Pentagon is more cautious than the US Congress about going down an “anti-China” path, it is more aggressive than the US Department of State and the US president. After all, the military need not worry about political and diplomatic costs, so it can get straight to the point.
Consequently, we can infer that the WSJ’s recent report about Taiwan’s military preparedness indicates the US armed forces’ willingness to count Taiwan’s armed forces among their allies. Of course, the Pentagon will stubbornly deny this, because if it was going to admit it, it would not need to do so through the media — a word from a US Department of Defense spokesperson would be enough.
From the US military’s perspective, however strong Taiwan’s military might be, the Pentagon would still hold its friends to high standards. After all, Taiwan’s armed forces are in the front line of resistance against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s maritime expansion.
The Chinese Communist Party is the one which should be worried, because the indications are that in the future, US Navy warships will not just patrol the Taiwan Strait from time to time. The day when the armed forces of the US and Taiwan cooperate against those of communist China might not be far off.
Wang Wen-sheng is a retired political operations officer and is enrolled in a doctoral program at Jindal University in India.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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