US Senator Lindsey Graham on Sunday called on the US to keep an open mind about sending troops to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.
In an interview on Fox News, he said that China’s military exercises over the past few days are “setting conditions to blockade Taiwan in the coming months or weeks.”
“We need to respond forcefully,” he said.
Photo: AFP
If China enforces a blockade, the US should cut off oil shipments to China from the Middle East, he said, adding the US should train Taiwanese more aggressively and deploy more forces in the region to deter China.
“I believe in a ‘one China’ policy, but I would be willing to fight for Taiwan,” because it is a democracy that the US has supported for decades, Graham said.
“Strategic ambiguity is not working,” he said, calling for a defense agreement with Taipei, as using US forces to defend Taiwan is “in our national security interests.”
China on Saturday launched three days of drills around Taiwan in response to a meeting between President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California last week.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) yesterday said that using Tsai’s stopover in the US as an excuse to conduct military drills would only exacerbate the antipathy of Taiwanese toward China.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly condemns China’s intimidation as it contravenes the UN principle that international disputes should be resolved peacefully, Wu said at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee in Taipei.
Stopping over in the US on the way to visit Latin American allies is a long-term practice of Taiwanese presidents, rendering the Chinese excuse “invalid,” he said.
Taiwanese bear no hostility toward China, but threatening Taiwan “will only cause the two sides of the Strait to drift further apart,” he said, urging China to stop its military drills.
Nations around the world have repeatedly in the past two or three years highlighted the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait in statements issued after international summits, Wu said.
These nations oppose any attempt, particularly through force, to unilaterally change the cross-strait “status quo,” so they would not approve of China’s military harassment of Taiwan, he said.
Meanwhile, the ministry yesterday thanked the American Institute in Taiwan and the US Department of State for voicing support for Taiwan amid Beijing’s provocations.
The US on Sunday urged China to exercise restraint and not change the “status quo,” adding that it has enough resources to ensure peace and stability in the region.
It is a sovereign nation’s fundamental right to send its head of state to visit other countries — an issue which China has no right to comment on, the ministry said in a statement.
Taiwan would continue to work with like-minded nations to curb authoritarianism, and ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific region, it added.
The ministry also thanked Belgian lawmaker Georges Dallemagne, cochair of the Belgium-Taiwan Friendship Group, for voicing support for Taiwan in an article published in the Liberty Times (the sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) yesterday.
An English version appears in today’s Taipei Times on page 8.
“There is absolutely every reason to ... defend the ‘status quo’ of Taiwan,” he wrote.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
COUNTERING HOSTILITY: The draft bill would require the US to increase diplomatic pressure on China and would impose sanctions on those who sabotage undersea cable networks US lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to bolster the resilience of Taiwan’s submarine cables to counter China’s hostile activities. The proposal, titled the critical undersea infrastructure resilience initiative act, was cosponsored by Republican representatives Mike Lawler and Greg Stanton, and Democratic Representative Dave Min. US Senators John Curtis and Jacky Rosen also introduced a companion bill in the US Senate, which has passed markup at the chamber’s Committee on Foreign Relations. The House’s version of the bill would prioritize the deployment of sensors to detect disruptions or potential sabotage in real-time and enhance early warning capabilities through global intelligence sharing frameworks,
RSS