Former US national security adviser John Bolton on Saturday called for US troops to be stationed in Taiwan, harkening back to the allies’ arrangement prior to 1979.
Given the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, Bolton called for Taiwan to be protected through political and military deterrence.
That means increasing defense budgets and tightening coordination between the two militaries, he said.
Photo: screen grab from the Internet
It could also mean stationing troops in Taiwan as the US did before formal diplomatic relations were severed in 1979, a move Bolton said would benefit both sides.
Bolton, who served from 2018 to 2019 under former US president Donald Trump, made the comments in a prerecorded address to the Global Taiwan National Affairs Symposium organized by Taiwanese independence groups.
The call comes after Foreign Policy magazine in November last year reported that US troop numbers in Taiwan — while present for more than a decade — had increased since Trump’s presidency thanks to “intense lobbying” by Bolton.
Bolton rejected calls to create an Indo-Pacific “NATO” due to historical and contextual differences with Europe, but considered the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue a positive step toward countering Chinese aggression in the region.
The more creative the approach, the better, he said, praising closer military cooperation through groups such as the AUKUS alliance between the US, UK and Australia, which he suggested Japan join to ensure greater flexibility.
Bolton also agreed with former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s suggestion to station US nuclear weapons in Japan to make it a more important regional player.
Taiwan faces an excellent opportunity, as the global community is becoming more aware of the Chinese threat and is more willing to extend a helping hand, he said.
As for growing calls for the US to abandon its long-held policy of “strategic ambiguity,” Bolton said there is already legal precedent to form an alliance under the Taiwan Relations Act.
Formally recognizing Taiwan’s independence is important politically and militarily, Bolton said, adding that this view was considered extreme in 2000, when he called for diplomatic recognition in the Taipei Times.
The US has long been one of Taiwan’s greatest friends, and with assistance from others such as Japan, help for Taiwan is limitless, he said.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS