It is going to take “Herculean” efforts to persuade US President Barack Obama and his closest advisers to sell F-16C/D fighters to Taiwan, US-Taiwan Business Council president Rupert Hammond-Chambers said on Wednesday.
He said he believed the US administration would agree to “retrofit” Taiwan’s fleet of 145 F16s, but sounded very doubtful about the future sale of new fighters.
Taipei has asked to buy 66 new F16s and the request is “under consideration” by the White House.
Recently published Pentagon studies show that the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait has tilted solidly in China’s favor and that Taiwan’s air force is in desperate need of new fighters.
Addressing a forum on “China Policy Challenges for the New Congress” on Capitol Hill, Hammond-Chambers said that the Obama administration seemed to be increasingly “risk adverse” when it came to selling arms to Taiwan.
Given Beijing’s forceful opposition to the sale of F16s to Taiwan, he said it was going to be particularly difficult to secure the sale.
Hammond-Chambers told the forum, organized by the International Assessment and Strategy Center, that the military threat from China was the single most important dynamic of those issues that define what it means to be Taiwanese.
He said there was a deep-rooted and ever-increasing suspicion about China’s intentions for Taiwan.
Hammond-Chambers said he could not remember a period in which there had been less ambition for the bilateral relationship.
“There is little ambition to take advantage of reconciliation across the Strait or to seize this as an opportunity to improve our relationship. Taipei and Washington seem distracted with their relationship with Beijing and that is unfortunate,” he said.
Senior US officials were spending the bulk of their time reassuring allies in East Asia and looking for ways to “beef up” security relationships with those allies, he said.
However, he did not believe this would spill over into the US’ relationship with Taiwan.
“I don’t see the commensurate adjustment in the US-Taiwan security relationship that we are seeing with [South] Korea, Japan, Australia and others,” he said.
US Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a member of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs, said China was governed by a regime of “tyrants and gangsters.”
He said that Taiwan had elected a government that believed in “acquiescing” and taking a “soft approach” to Beijing.
Rohrabacher said Taiwan was “petting” the Chinese dragon even though it knew the dragon was full of teeth and fire and blood.
North Korea was China’s “puppet and lap dog,” he said, adding that China was using the North to try to intimidate Japan.
“They are trying to make the people of Japan cower in the same way that the people of Taiwan have decided to cower, but they are not going to succeed,” he said. “The Japanese people are tough and courageous.”
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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