US Ambassador to Palau John Hennessey-Niland, who arrived on Sunday with a delegation led by Palauan President Surangel Whipps Jr, is the first US ambassador to visit Taiwan in more than 40 years, signaling that Washington is becoming more active in engaging Taipei, academics said on Sunday.
The delegation is visiting Taiwan to promote tourism to Palau through a “travel bubble,” which would ease COVID-19 restrictions on travel between the two countries.
During a short address after the delegation’s arrival at the airport, Whipps said Hennessey-Niland, who has served as US ambassador to Palau since March last year, was among the delegation.
The visit marks the first time a US ambassador has publicly visited Taiwan since Washington cut ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing in 1979, said Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲), a senior analyst at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
The visit shows that the US no longer treats interaction between its ambassadors and Taiwan as taboo, said Lin Ting-hui (林廷輝), deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Society of International Law.
It also demonstrates that the US is becoming more active in its engagement with Taiwan, he added.
He foresees more cooperation among Taiwan, the US and Palau, as the three countries work together on security and defense, he said.
Taiwan has maritime cooperation agreements with Pacific allies Palau, Nauru and the Marshall Islands, while Palau and the US have cooperated on defense, and Taiwan and the US on Thursday last week signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a coast guard working group, Lin said.
Taiwan could work with its allies and the US to conduct security exercises in the Pacific or even join the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, a biennial defense exercise organized every two years by the US, he said.
Hennessey-Niland’s visit demonstrates that Taiwan-US cooperation has become multilateral, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) said yesterday.
This kind of multilateralism can also be seen in visits that US ambassadors to the Netherlands and Eswatini have made to their Taiwanese counterparts, which is a positive development, he added.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS