Taiwan is a crucial partner to the US in the semiconductor industry, US academics said in an article published on Monday in US magazine Foreign Affairs.
Hoover Institution fellows Larry Diamond and Jim Ellis, and Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, discussed in the article how to strengthen the semiconductor supply chain without endangering Taiwan.
The US needs reliable international partners to enhance its chances of prevailing in the economic, technological and strategic competition with China, the authors said.
Photo: screen grab from a Ministry of Foreign Affairs Webcast
“No partner is more important in this effort than Taiwan,” with whom the US can work to reconfigure and strengthen its semiconductor supply chain, they wrote.
The US needs to forge a cooperative strategy to pursue two objectives simultaneously without undermining each other — safeguarding the security of global supply chains for semiconductors and ensuring Taiwan’s security, they wrote.
The US and Taiwan can both benefit from the bilateral partnership on this front, as the US needs investment from Taiwan to expand semiconductor manufacturing on its soil while Taiwan needs the security assistance of the US to protect both its semiconductor industry and its democracy, they wrote.
A treaty precluding double taxation and a free-trade agreement would further help to enhance economic and technological ties between the US and Taiwan, they added.
The authors also reiterated the importance for the US to deliver effective weaponry to Taiwan, “especially the kind of mobile weaponry that can help turn Taiwan into a ‘porcupine’ that the People’s Liberation Army would be unable to swallow.”
In related news, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday reaffirmed the nation’s close economic and trade relations with the US after former US president Donald Trump accused Taiwan of taking chip business away from the US.
In an interview on Fox News that was aired on Sunday, Trump was asked if the US should help defend Taiwan if it means going to war with China.
“If I answered that question, it’ll put me in a very bad negotiating position,” Trump said. “Taiwan [is] smart, brilliant, they took our business away. We should have stopped them. We should have taxed them. We should have tariffed them.”
In Taipei, ministry spokesman Jeff Liu (劉永健) told a news conference yesterday that “Taiwan cooperates and exchanges closely with the US, and the economic, trade and industrial structures of the two sides are complementary and mutually beneficial.”
Asked by reporters at the Legislative Yuan about the issue yesterday, Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) said that Taiwan has good relations with the US executive branch, as well as the two major parties in the US Congress.
Additional reporting by CNA
A signaling system malfunction disrupted high-speed rail (HSR) services beginning at 8am today, with trains temporarily reduced to three northbound and three southbound trains per hour as authorities conduct inspections. The malfunction occurred on a section of track in Miaoli County during pre-operation checks early this morning, forcing northbound and southbound trains to use a single track, the HSR operator said. The regular schedule has been replaced with three hourly trains offering only nonreserved seating in each direction, stopping at every station, it said, adding that business class cars would still have reserved seating. Departures from terminal stations are scheduled at the top
DRONE CENTRAL: Taiwan aims to become Asia’s democratic hub for drones, with most exports focused on high-quality military-grade models, an official said Taiwan’s drone industry is expected to expand significantly by 2030, producing 100,000 units per month and exporting half of them, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Current drone production capacity is about 15,000 units per month, but the industry can quickly scale up as demand increases, Industrial Development Administration Director-General Chiou Chyou-huey (邱求慧) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s drone output grew 2.5-fold last year to NT$12.9 billion (US$408.3 million) under a government program to develop the uncrewed vehicle sector, he said. The Executive Yuan in October last year approved plans to invest NT$44.2 billion into domestic production of uncrewed aerial
VERBOSE VESSELS: A CGA cutter and a China Coast Guard exchanged verbal barbs for more than a day in Taiwanese-controlled waters before the Chinese vessel left The Taiwanese and Chinese coast guards had a standoff near the strategically located Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the north of the South China Sea, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said yesterday. The two sides engaged in intense radio exchanges over sovereignty claims during the 33-hour standoff. China Coast Guard vessel 3501 eventually left the restricted waters, 26.6 nautical miles (49.2km) west of the Pratas Islands, at 5pm yesterday, the CGA said. Lying approximately between southern Taiwan and Hong Kong, the Taiwan-controlled Pratas are seen by some security experts as vulnerable to Chinese attack due to their distance — more than
WARNING: China should stop engaging in actions that undermine regional peace and stability, as it would only build resentment among people across the Strait, the CGA said China has deployed more than 100 navy, coast guard and other vessels in waters from the Yellow Sea to the South China Sea and the western Pacific since US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) met in Beijing, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said yesterday. “In this part of the world, #China is the one & only PROBLEM wrecking the #StatusQuo & threatening regional peace & stability,” Wu wrote on X. In a separate post, he said Beijing was coercing Taiwan’s maritime domain, calling it illegal and provocative, after the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) expelled a
RSS