Australian Ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd on Friday said that if Taiwan were to fall to China’s occupation, it would unleash China’s military capacities and capabilities more broadly.
He also said his country is working with the Pentagon on the US Department of Defense’s review of the AUKUS submarine project and is confident that all issues raised will be resolved.
Rudd, who served as Australian prime minister from 2007 to 2010 and for three months in 2013, made the remarks at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado and stressed the longstanding US-Australia alliance and his close relationship with the US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, who initiated the review.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“We’re working with Bridge and the team on the AUKUS review ... and we are confident that we’ll work our way through each and every one of the issues which he has raised in the context of this internal Defense Department review,” Rudd said, referring to Colby.
“Bridge has been around my place a lot of times, and so we have known each other for a long period of time, and that’s why I’m confident, quite apart from the mature relationship within our two defense establishments ... that we’ll work our way through this stuff,” he said.
The US-Australia alliance has endured through 15 presidents and 15 prime ministers from different parties, Rudd said.
In 2023, the US, Australia and the UK unveiled details of the AUKUS plan to provide Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines from the early 2030s, part of efforts to counter China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region.
It is Australia’s biggest ever defense project.
The Pentagon in June said it was reviewing AUKUS to ensure it was “aligned” with US President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda, amid concerns about the ability of the US to meet its own submarine needs and whether Australia’s vessels would be used in support of US policy.
On Sunday last week, Australian Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy responded to a report that Colby had pressed Australia and Japan to clarify what role they would play if the US and China went to war over Taiwan by saying Australia would not commit troops in advance to any conflict.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has also rebuffed US requests to commit to lifting defense spending from 2 percent to 3.5 percent of GDP, saying that Australia would spend what was needed for its defense.
The reported call by Colby on Australia to clarify its role regarding Taiwan raised eyebrows, given that Washington itself maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity” and not directly saying how it would respond to any Chinese attack on Taiwan.
Rudd said Trump viewed unpredictability as one of his strengths as a leader, whereas China’s communist leadership craved predictability.
“Being unpredictable is no bad thing in terms of the way in which the Chinese view their strategic future on the critical question ... [of] the future of Taiwan,” he said.
Rudd added that Taiwan currently occupied Beijing’s entire military strategic focus, and if it were to fall, China’s “capacities and capabilities would be unleashed more broadly.”
“I believe that logic is galvanizing here in the United States as well as across allies,” he said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS