President Trump’s administration plans to sell 18 torpedoes to Taiwan at a time when worsening tensions between the United States and China raise the specter of conflict over the island’s political sovereignty.
“Torpedoes are real important if you want to sink ships,” the Hudson Institute’s Seth Cropsey said. “One of Taiwan’s large military issues at the tactical level is the possibility of a [Chinese military] blockade that would cut the Taiwanese off from importing and exporting. So, the increased ability to sink ships that you get with torpedoes makes sense.”
The new arms sale comes in the wake of a litany of U.S.-China disputes, most recently the recriminations over the coronavirus pandemic that now paralyzes much of the world. Washington and Beijing are making decisions that reveal a willingness to give political offense, while their intensifying rivalry increases the global strategic value of the democratic island off mainland China’s coast.
“They have sent a wrong signal to the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces and gravely undermined the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait as well as the bilateral relations between China and the U.S.,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Wednesday. “China will take necessary measures in response to the U.S. erroneous practices, and the consequences will be borne by the U.S. side.”
That was a response to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to refer to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen as “President Tsai” following her second inauguration this week. The use of the title angers Chinese officials because the mainland government has claimed sovereignty over the island ever since the Chinese Communist Party rose to power in 1949.
“The current nadir in U.S.-China relations frees Washington from the burden of trying to please Beijing and also makes an independent Taiwan more strategically valuable,” said East-West Center Senior Fellow Denny Roy.
The State Department’s willingness to unveil the $180 million missile deal Wednesday evening, an announcement that in an earlier era might have been delayed to a calmer time, underscored the extent of American indifference to Beijing’s pieties. Chinese state-run media responded by asserting that the U.S. weaponry “cannot make any difference in a potential military conflict between the island and the Chinese mainland.”
Taiwanese officials and American analysts are watching China’s military and political posture in the region with heightened wariness. The willingness to give offense isn’t unique to Washington: Chinese communist officials unveiled a new national security law on Thursday that will restrict the independence of the semi-autonomous Hong Kong, in defiance of international agreements that require Beijing to allow the former British colony to retain its traditional freedoms.
That’s an ominous sign for Taiwan, according to one of Taipei’s top envoys to the U.S., because Chinese officials previously have tried to convince the Taiwanese people to accept Beijing’s dominion by outlining a “one country, two systems” proposal modeled on the Hong Kong deal.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision to tighten his grip on Hong Kong suggests that “the PRC no longer cares about what message this is sending to the people of Taiwan,” Vincent Chao, the political director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan’s de facto embassy) in Washington, said during a Wilson Center video conference Thursday. “It signals that things are moving towards a worse outcome.”
American officials have felt an affinity for officials in Taipei for decades, a natural sense of solidarity with a democratic government beleaguered by a communist regime. Yet the Trump administration’s growing belief that China is waging “a cold war” against the U.S., combined with Taiwan’s central location in a chain of islands off the coast of mainland China, is turning the attachment into a strategic flashpoint.
It was Taiwan, after all, that Japanese forces used as a base to invade the Philippines during World War II, as Cropsey recalled. “If Taiwan were taken by the Chinese, the Chinese would have no problem whatsoever in getting out into the Western Pacific or in projecting power to the rest of the first island chain, both south and north,” the Hudson Institute analyst said. The first island chain refers to the string of islands stretching from Japan to the Philippines.
That is well-known in the Defense Department, according to a former Trump administration official who suspects that Chinese military strategists “might be overconfident” about their ability to invade the island. The danger is increased by the likelihood that Beijing underestimates the importance of Taiwan to U.S. military strategists.
“Taiwan could affect the entire Indo-Pacific region,” former assistant secretary of defense Randall Schriver, the Pentagon’s top Indo-Pacific security official in 2018 and 2019, told the Wilson Center. “We need to think of perhaps even breaking some old taboos that have really constrained the defense relationship in the past. The U.S. needs to be able to get to the fight in time to maintain a deterrent quality.”
