US policy on Taiwan under US President Barack Obama has taken a “hazardous” turn that appears to be moving toward support for Beijing’s interpretation of its core interests, the US-Taiwan Business Council said in a special commentary released on Monday.
The Obama administration appears to be “telegraphing its willingness to moderate legacy Taiwan support and cede more control to China in the dynamics and direction of cross-strait affairs,” said the report, titled The American Defense Commitment to Taiwan Continues to Deteriorate.
For the first time in about a decade, the US has the opportunity to reassess Taiwan’s defense requirements and future US security support for its longtime ally, the commentary said.
Although last year “started off strong on Taiwan defense issues,” with the Jan. 29 notification to Congress of five separate arms sales programs worth US$6.4 billion, the programs “were not intrinsically controversial,” since the great bulk of the money involved UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters and PAC-III missile defense batteries. Those items were leftovers from former US president George W. Bush’s April 2001 arms package, it said.
Another notification in August involved a small US$250 million package to upgrade radars on Taiwan’s Indigenous Defense Fighter — again a non-controversial program.
“On both occasions the arms sales notified were originally intended to address the military threat posed by China dating back before April 2001,” the report said.
As a result, the arms sold to Taiwan are “a solid decade out of date,” it said. “China rolls out its J-20 [stealth aircraft] prototype, and America enters the 6th year of deliberation over whether to provide Taiwan with additional F-16s — a platform already in its inventory.”
Although the Obama administration has been right to encourage cross-strait economic liberalization and support President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in signing the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), China’s military posture has failed to dovetail with those developments, the report said.
“It is not acceptable to point to the ECFA as the only dynamic aspect of today’s cross-strait development,” it said. “China’s military investments are having a huge impact on the cross-strait status quo.”
“China is playing relentless offense on Taiwan, and at some point the US has to step up and make it pay for its actions,” the commentary said, adding that Washington “must be as outspoken in [its] opposition to China’s strategy of military coercion as [it is] in [its] support of the ECFA and other positive trends.”
However, such a response has yet to materialize, it said.
“Two years into Mr Obama’s term in office, we have yet to see a single material action that suggests US willingness to make China pay a real cost for its aggressive cross-strait posture,” the chamber report said.
In addition to giving Taiwan and China the impression that it doesn’t care enough to act, US inaction will likely have an impact on the calculations of South Koreans and Japanese, who risk seeing this as “a drawn-out withdrawal of US interests in North Asia.”
The report called for the de-politicization of the process of arms sales to Taiwan, saying that indecision on the US side had forced Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) to return more than US$1.4 billion in unused budget to state coffers since 2007.
The council’s criticism was not only focused on Washington, however, pointing to Ma’s failure to meet his campaign promise on national defense.
“As the US shows increasing angst over selling arms to Taiwan, President Ma and his colleagues have determined that they no longer need stand by their ‘defense spending at 3% of GDP’ commitment, as there is little demand from Washington that they do so,” the report said.
“The overall consensus is that Taiwan isn’t spending enough on national security,” it said, adding that forecasts for this year put direct defense expenditure at 2.16 percent of GDP, a figure that would rise to about 2.73 percent of GDP if non-direct expenditures were factored in.
If Taiwan’s economic -expansion continues apace, the share of defense spending to GDP could fall below 2 percent, it said.
The Ma administration’s failure to substantially increase direct and non-direct spending is taking place during a period when Taiwan has to take on “significant new commitments,” it said.
This “budget squeeze” has “tipped the scales so that the MND is laboring under tremendous budget shortages.”
A likely consequence is that Taiwan will almost certainly have to “refocus its force modernization plans” over the next half-decade and look for lower acquisition cost solutions and the prioritization of mid-life upgrades rather than the acquisition of new, more modern platforms.
Looking to the future, the council said a classified assessment of Taiwan’s air power capabilities to Congress — scheduled for release last year, but likely delayed until the second quarter this year — would hopefully provide a blueprint for US security cooperation with Taiwan.
However, the council said it feared the report “will have been written from the perspective of what the administration is and is not prepared to do when it comes to supporting Taiwan defense, rather than being based on the actual threat facing Taiwan.”
CALL FOR PEACE: Czech President Petr Pavel raised concerns about China’s military maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait and its ‘unfriendly action’ in the South China Sea The leaders of three diplomatic allies — Guatemala, Paraguay and Palau — on Tuesday voiced support for Taiwan’s inclusion in the UN on the first day of the UN General Debate in New York. In his address during the 78th UN General Assembly, Palauan President Surangel Whipps Jr urged the UN and all parties involved in cross-strait issues to exercise restraint and seek a peaceful resolution. “The well-being and prosperity of nations and their economies are intrinsically linked to global peace and stability,” he said. He also thanked partner nations such as Taiwan, Australia, Japan and the US for providing assistance
CROSS-STRAIT CONCERNS: At the same US Congress hearing, Mira Resnick said a US government shutdown could affect weapons sales and licenses to allies such as Taiwan A Chinese blockade of Taiwan would be a “monster risk” for Beijing and likely to fail, while a military invasion would be extremely difficult, senior Pentagon officials told the US Congress on Tuesday. Growing worries of a conflict come as China has ramped up military pressure on Taiwan, holding large-scale war games simulating a blockade on the nation, while conducting near-daily warplane incursions and sending Chinese vessels around its waters. US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said a blockade would be “a monster risk for the PRC [People’s Republic of China].” “It would likely not succeed, and it
IMPORTS: Fifty-four million imported eggs with a value of more than NT$200 million had to be destroyed, mostly because they expired in storage facilities Minister of Agriculture Chen Chi-chung (陳吉仲) last night announced that he would resign from his post. Local media on Sunday reported that Chen had resigned due to controversy over the ministry’s egg import program. Later that same evening, the Executive Yuan said that Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) had asked the minister to stay on to resolve the issue. Chen Chi-chung last night made public his decision to resign on Facebook, saying that this time he would not be dissuaded. Chen Chi-chung earlier yesterday apologized for the furor surrounding the egg import program, but added that misinformation had made the problems worse. The government was
‘HARASSMENT’: A record 103 Chinese warplanes were detected in 24 hours, posing severe challenges to security in the Taiwan Strait and the region, the ministry said Taiwan yesterday told China to stop its “destructive unilateral actions” after more than 100 Chinese warplanes and nine navy ships were detected in areas around the nation. The Ministry of National Defense (MND) described the number of warplanes detected in 24 hours as a “recent high,” while Beijing has so far refrained from issuing any official comment on the sorties. “Between the morning of September 17th to 18th, the Ministry of National Defense had detected a total of 103 Chinese aircraft, which was a recent high and has posed severe challenges to the security across the Taiwan Strait and in the region,”