Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) yesterday said that a warning by the US’ top commander for the Indo-Pacific region about significantly increased Chinese military aggression toward Taiwan underscores that peace in the Indo-Pacific region is a “core interest” of the US.
Before the start of a legislative plenary session, reporters asked Koo about remarks from US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo that China’s aggressive military actions toward Taiwan have increased 300 percent over the past year.
Closing the Taiwan Strait, one of the world’s major trading channels, could be more devastating than for the world than the Great Depression in the 1930s, Paparo on Thursday last week told the US Senate Committee on Armed Services when asked why Americans should care about protecting Taiwan, US Naval Institute News reported.
Photo: Chen Yi-kuan, Taipei Times
A blockade in the waterway would expose the US’ dependence on Taiwan for semiconductor production, which is essential to modernizing and growing the domestic economy, the report quoted Paparo as saying.
War in the Indo-Pacific region could cause “a 25 percent reduction in GDP in Asia, an effect of 10 to 12 percent GDP reduction in the United States of America, unemployment spiking at 7 to 10 percent” above normal levels, “and 500,000 excess deaths of despair,” he said.
Even a successful US intervention “would halve that impact, so still a grave result” and “a lot of human misery,” he added.
Koo said that Paparo’s remarks were proof that stability and prosperity in the world hinge on stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region.
It also showed that maintaining the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait is practically a consensus among countries around the world and something that requires an active effort to maintain.
Koo referenced a leaked Pentagon internal memo as evidence of the US’ commitment to deterring a Chinese annexation of Taiwan.
The memo, leaked during US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s tour of Asia last month, reportedly directed the prioritization of deterring China’s capture of Taiwan while scaling back its support for Ukraine amid Russia’s ongoing invasion.
China is the Pentagon’s “sole pacing threat,” and denial of a “Chinese fait accompli seizure” of Taiwan while simultaneously defending the US homeland is its “sole pacing scenario,” the memo reportedly said.
Taiwan is stepping up plans to create self-sufficient supply chains for combat drones and increase foreign orders from the US to counter China’s numerical superiority, a defense official said on Saturday. Commenting on condition of anonymity, the official said the nation’s armed forces are in agreement with US Admiral Samuel Paparo’s assessment that Taiwan’s military must be prepared to turn the nation’s waters into a “hellscape” for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Paparo, the commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, reiterated the concept during a Congressional hearing in Washington on Wednesday. He first coined the term in a security conference last
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