Washington will expedite arms sales to Taiwan through various means including the presidential drawdown authority, US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs Ely Ratner said on Thursday.
Ratner was speaking at a hearing held by the US House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the US and the Chinese Communist Party to discuss US President Joe Biden’s China strategy.
Asked about the delay in delivering weapons to Taiwan, Ratner said: “What we are facing is not a backlog as is sometimes described, but rather concerns and slowdowns within all of our industrial base.”
Photo: Screen grab from a video on the US Department of Defense’s Web site
It is a systemic problem that is affecting not only Taiwan, but military production in the US defense industrial base, he said.
“We’re doing everything we can to fulfill our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act [TRA] as quickly as we can” through foreign military sales, presidential drawdown authority and potentially foreign military financing, he said.
As part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, the US Congress authorized up to US$1 billion of weapons aid for Taiwan using the presidential drawdown authority, which authorizes the president to transfer weapons and services from US stockpiles without congressional approval during an emergency.
The US “will soon provide significant additional security assistance to Taiwan through the presidential drawdown authority that Congress authorized last year,” US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told Congress in May.
“Providing these self-defense capabilities to Taiwan is one of the department’s highest priorities,” Ratner said.
“The TRA has formed the bedrock of peace, stability and deterrence in the Taiwan Strait over the last four decades,” he said.
“We’re absolutely committed to ... meeting our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act to assist Taiwan to maintain sufficient self-defense capability. We’ll meet those obligations,” US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink told the hearing.
On US-Taiwan economic relations, US Representative Michelle Steel said that the initial trade agreement reached under the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade, which the US Senate passed on Tuesday, was welcomed, but “it’s still [a] very tiny bit, so we really have to extend that.”
Asking why Taiwan is not included in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), she said: “Why leave them [Taiwan] out of the IPEF if they are a like-minded, true ally.”
Kritenbrink said that the US is focusing on the 14 partners currently in the IPEF, but reaffirmed Washington’s promise to Taiwan.
“We’re very committed to building our partnership with Taiwan, our very important, robust, but unofficial partnership,” and will continue to do so, he said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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