Trump’s Taiwan Progress A $2.2 billion arms sale comes as Taipei grows more wary of Beijing.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-taiwan-progress-11562971520
Deterring Chinese military dominance in the Indo-Pacific is a top U.S. strategic goal, and the Trump Administration made progress this week with a tentative $2.2 billion arms sale to Taiwan. The next sale should be F-16V fighter jets, which is the island’s most pressing defense need.
The Pentagon on Monday notified Congress of the sale of 108 M1A2T Abrams tanks, 250 Stinger missiles, and transport vehicles. Lawmakers have 30 days to object to the deal, but that’s unlikely given the near-unanimous backing of pro-Taiwan legislation in Congress in recent years.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang called on the U.S. to “immediately cancel” the deal, and on Friday China said it will sanction U.S. companies that participate in the arms sale. That’s mostly symbolic since China doesn’t buy arms from the U.S.
But what Beijing has never understood is its starring role in consolidating Washington’s cooperation with Taipei. Last month’s voyage of the Chinese Liaoning aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait is the type of saber-rattling that increases American support for the island’s democracy, as Taiwanese want little more than to preserve their freedom.
Beijing’s latest power play in Hong Kong is turning even Taiwan’s pragmatic politics further against China. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s approval rating rose 10% this spring after rebuking Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model, and she looks prescient after Beijing’s gambit last month to pass a bill in Hong Kong allowing extradition to Mainland China. Some two million city residents marched against it, and Chief Executive Carrie Lam on Tuesday declared “the bill is dead.”
The extradition fiasco has even changed the pro-Chinese tune of Taiwan’s opposition Nationalist Party (KMT). Han Kuo-yu, a populist star of the KMT running for president in the island’s 2020 election, has campaigned on expanding economic ties to China. But he vowed last month never to allow “one country, two systems,” which Taiwanese would accept “over my dead body.”
This shifting political mood gives Mr. Trump an opportunity to sell Taiwan some 60 fourth-generation F-16V fighters, which Taipei requested in February. The U.S. is obligated under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act to help the island defend itself, and the need is dire. Taiwan’s fleet of fourth-generation fighters, which date to the George H.W. Bush Administration, are outnumbered more than four-to-one by Chinese counterparts. A fighter sale, which China has called a “red line,” has been moving through the federal bureaucracy.
Selling F-16Vs would set off rhetorical fireworks in Beijing, and Mr. Trump might be reluctant given his focus on China trade. The same thinking may be why he hasn’t publicly supported Hong Kong’s protesters. But Hongkongers and Taiwanese know China takes Western silence or accommodation for weakness. Asia’s U.S. friends are counting on Mr. Trump not to defer to China as his presidential predecessors did.
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