On April 16, former US national security adviser John Bolton called for US troops to be stationed in Taiwan to deter China from launching an invasion. Contrast this with US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley’s comment earlier this month, that the US can provide Taiwan with Ukraine-style assistance.
“We just need to help the Taiwanese to defend it [Taiwan] a little bit better,” Milley told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services budget hearing.
Bolton’s solution would have a greater deterrence effect and Taiwan’s history tells us the reason.
On May 1, 1951, the US military established the Military Assistance Advisory Group, Taiwan (MAAG) to provide defense assistance to Taiwan in a region threatened by communist China and war on the Korean Peninsula. In addition to Taiwan proper, the advisory group was stationed across Taiwan’s outlying islands, including Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu.
After Washington and Taipei signed the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty in 1954, it paved the way for the establishment of the US Taiwan Defense Command (USTDC), which was tasked with a combat role — defending Taiwan and the Pescadores (Taiwan proper and the Penghu islands) in the event that war broke out with China.
In other words, wherever Taiwanese troops were garrisoned, there were always members of the MAAG on hand in a consultancy-based role. However, were China to launch an invasion, the USTDC’s area of combat would have been limited to defending Taiwan proper and Penghu.
During this period of active defense assistance by the US military, the First Taiwan Strait Crisis and Second Taiwan Strait Crisis occurred. Despite the presence of MAAG advisory groups, Chinese forces initiated an unrelenting series of attacks on Kinmen and Matsu.
However, China restricted its military campaign to these areas — which were not included in the mutual defense treaty — precisely because Beijing did not dare to initiate a head-on conflict with US combat forces stationed on Taiwan proper and the Penghu islands.
Returning to the present, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US had been providing military training and other assistance to Ukraine’s military following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Secure in the knowledge that it would not have to face US forces in direct combat, Moscow initiated a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. However, US troops stationed in eastern European NATO member states have created a “trip wire” that the Kremlin does not dare cross.
During a speech in December last year, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe said that “if Taiwan has a problem, then Japan also has a problem,” adding that Taiwan-Japan relations are comparable to the US-Japan alliance.
Abe’s remarks demonstrate that were a war to break out in the Taiwan Strait, it would trigger a far more complex situation than the Russia-Ukraine war. Whether considered from the perspective of the US-Japan alliance, or the AUKUS security alliance between Australia, the UK and the US, there would likely be a rapid response to a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan.
During an interview with CNN last year, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) confirmed that a small number of US troops were in Taiwan training Taiwanese forces. In the words of Milley, to send a clear signal to Beijing that Taiwan would be a “very, very difficult objective to take,” Ukraine’s experience shows that the only effective solution is for US combat troops to be regarrisoned on Taiwan.
Ou Wei-chun is chief legal officer of a private company.
Translated by Edward Jones
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