Former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison and Matt Schlapp, political director to former US president George W. Bush, are among those set to speak at a Taipei security forum on Wednesday, the organizer announced yesterday.
Morrison, who served as Australian prime minister from 2018-2022, and Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, will join other former American officials, including Van Hipp Jr, a former US Army deputy assistant secretary, and Peter Su, the ex- Taiwan country director at the Pentagon’s Office of Secretary of Defense, at the 2025 Taipei Security Dialogue, organized by the Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
The Taiwan military-funded think tank said the annual forum brings together experts and leaders from the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Australia, to address the threat posed by China to peace in the Indo-Pacific.
Photo: Reuters
Other guests set to attend the one-day seminar in Taipei include Takahiro Sasaki, a retired rear admiral of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force; Karsten Schneider, a retired rear admiral of the German Navy; and Peter Olive, a former commodore in the Royal Navy, among others, it said.
The seminar will be divided into several different topics, spanning social resilience and defense deterrence, and the trends and impact of new technologies such as AI and Unmanned Aircraft Systems as tools of war, among others, it said.
The scholars and opinion leaders will each provide suggestions as to how best to jointly build consensus and enhance cooperation between democracies to uphold peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region, it added.
AGING: While Japan has 22 submarines, Taiwan only operates four, two of which were commissioned by the US in 1945 and 1946, and transferred to Taiwan in 1973 Taiwan would need at least 12 submarines to reach modern fleet capabilities, CSBC Corp, Taiwan chairman Chen Cheng-hung (陳政宏) said in an interview broadcast on Friday, citing a US assessment. CSBC is testing the nation’s first indigenous defense submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, Narwhal), which is scheduled to be delivered to the navy next month or in July. The Hai Kun has completed torpedo-firing tests and is scheduled to undergo overnight sea trials, Chen said on an SET TV military affairs program. Taiwan would require at least 12 submarines to establish a modern submarine force after assessing the nation’s operational environment and defense
A white king snake that frightened passengers and caused a stir on a Taipei MRT train on Friday evening has been claimed by its owner, who would be fined, Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) said yesterday. A person on Threads posted that he thought he was lucky to find an empty row of seats on Friday after boarding a train on the Bannan (Blue) Line, only to spot a white snake with black stripes after sitting down. Startled, he jumped up, he wrote, describing the encounter as “terrifying.” “Taipei’s rat control plan: Release snakes on the metro,” one person wrote in reply, referring
The coast guard today said that it had disrupted "illegal" operations by a Chinese research ship in waters close to the nation and driven it away, part of what Taipei sees a provocative pattern of China's stepped up maritime activities. The coast guard said that it on Thursday last week detected the Chinese ship Tongji (同濟號), which was commissioned only last year, 29 nautical miles (54km) southeast of the southern tip of Taiwan, although just outside restricted waters. The ship was observed lowering ropes into the water, suspected to be the deployment of scientific instruments for "illegal" survey operations, and the coast
Taiwan’s two cases of hantavirus so far this year are on par with previous years’ case numbers, and the government is coordinating rat extermination work, so there should not be any outbreaks, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) said today in an interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper). An increase in rat sightings in Taipei and New Taipei City has raised concerns about the spread of hantavirus, as rats can carry the disease. In January, a man in his 70s who lived in Taipei’s Daan District (大安) tested positive posthumously for hantavirus, Taiwan’s
RSS