Bolstering Taiwan’s defenses is an urgent task and essential to deterring the threat of invasion by China, the Pentagon’s top official for Asia said on Wednesday, adding that US partners were stepping up their military presence in the region.
Tensions between Taiwan and China have escalated in the past few months as Beijing increases the pressure with repeated air missions over the Taiwan Strait.
“Without question, bolstering Taiwan’s self-defenses is an urgent task and an essential feature of deterrence,” US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner told a US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing.
Photo: AFP
Ratner added that China’s air and maritime campaigns around Taiwan were “intentionally provocative” and increased the likelihood of miscalculation between armed forces in the Indo-Pacific region.
“They put the prosperity and security of the region at risk, and are part of a pattern of PRC military coercion and aggression against other US allies and partners in the region, including India, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam,” Ratner said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
“We are seeing countries stepping up their military presence in the region and their willingness to support deterrence in a way that we haven’t before,” he said, mentioning joint military activities with Canada, Britain and Japan.
Asked what he saw as the greatest risk to Taiwan, Ratner said: “The China challenge is a today problem, a tomorrow problem, a 2027 problem, a 2030 problem, a 2040 problem and beyond.’
“I don’t think there is a date we ought to pick on the calendar and we ought to make sure that we’re sustaining deterrence from today,” he added.
US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink, who was also at the committee hearing, said that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s “bullying behavior” directed at Taiwan was concerning and destabilizing, and risked undermining peace and stability in the region.
Kritenbrink said he believed these actions posed a risk of miscalculation that could harm the global economy.
“In response, the US has and will continue to make available to Taiwan the defense articles and services necessary to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act,” he said, citing as an example the more than US$32 billion in arms sold to Taiwan since 2009.
Arms sales alone are not enough, as the US also encourages Taiwan to prioritize asymmetric capabilities that complicate China’s planning and coercion, he said.
The US is “firmly committed to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region, where we have an enduring national interest,” he said, adding that Washington would continue to oppose unilateral changes to the “status quo.”
Additional reporting by CNA
SILENCING CRITICS: In addition to blocking Taiwan, China aimed to prevent rights activists from speaking out against authoritarian states, a Cabinet department said The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday condemned transnational repression by Beijing after RightsCon, a major digital human rights conference scheduled to be held in Zambia this week, was abruptly canceled due to Chinese pressure over Taiwanese participation. This year’s RightsCon, the world’s largest conference discussing issues “at the intersection of human rights and technology,” was scheduled to take place from tomorrow to Friday in Lusaka, and expected to draw 2,600 in-person attendees from 150 countries, along with 1,100 online participants. However, organizers were forced to cancel the event due to behind-the-scenes pressure from China, the ministry said, expressing its “strongest condemnation”
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) yesterday said the US faced a choice between an “impossible” military operation or a “bad deal” with Tehran, after US President Donald Trump disparaged Iran’s latest peace proposal. Negotiations between the two countries have been deadlocked since a ceasefire came into effect on April 8, with only one round of direct peace talks held so far. Iran’s Tasnim and Fars news agencies reported that Tehran had submitted a 14-point proposal to mediator Pakistan, but Trump was quick to cast doubt on it. “I will soon be reviewing the plan that Iran has just sent to us, but
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
A group affiliated with indicted Chinese immigrant Xu Chunying (徐春鶯) is to be dissolved for monitoring Chinese immigrants in Taiwan, a source said yesterday. Xu, the secretary-general of the Cross-Strait Marriage and Family Service Alliance, was indicted on March 24 on charges of violating the Anti-Infiltration Act (反滲透法). The alliance “illegally monitored" Chinese immigrants living in Taiwan on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Ministry of the Interior is expected to dissolve the organization in the coming days under provisions of the Civil Associations Act (人民團體法), the source said. Xu, who married a Taiwanese in 1993 and became a Republic
RSS