The United States has unveiled a weapons aid package for Taiwan worth up to $US345 million ($519 million), in a move likely to anger China.
Key points:
- The White House said the package would include defence, education and training
- The goals are to help Taiwan counter China and to deter China from considering attacking
- The package is in addition to nearly $28.5 billion in military sales of F-16s and other major weapons systems
Congress authorised up to $US1 billion worth of Presidential Drawdown Authority weapons aid for Taiwan, which strongly rejects Chinese sovereignty claims, in the 2023 budget.
Beijing has repeatedly demanded the United States, Taiwan’s most important arms supplier, halt the sale of weapons to the island.
The White House said the package would include defence, education and training for the Taiwanese.
Washington will send man-portable air-defence systems, or MANPADS, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, firearms and missiles, according to two US officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters ahead of the announcement.
The goals are to help Taiwan counter China and to deter Beijing from attacking, by providing Taipei enough weaponry that it would make the price of an invasion too high.
While Chinese diplomats protested against the move, Taiwan’s trade office in Washington said the United States’ decision to pull arms and other material from its available stores would provide “an important tool to support Taiwan’s self-defence”.
In a statement, it pledged to work with the United States to maintain “peace, stability and the status quo across the Taiwan Strait”.
The package is in addition to nearly $US19 billion in military sales of F-16s and other major weapons systems that the US has approved for Taiwan.
Delivery of those weapons has been hampered by supply-chain issues that started during the COVID-19 pandemic and have been exacerbated by the global defence industrial base pressures created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The difference is that this aid is part of a presidential authority approved by Congress last year to draw weapons from current US military stockpiles — so Taiwan will not have to wait for military production and sales.
This gets weapons delivered faster than providing funding for new weapons.
The Pentagon has used a similar authority to get billions of dollars worth of munitions to Ukraine.
Arming Taiwan before an attack
Taiwan split from China in 1949 amid a civil war. Chinese President Xi Jinping maintains China’s right to take over the now self-ruled island, by force if necessary.
China has accused the US of turning Taiwan into a “powder keg” through the billions of dollars in weapons sales it has pledged.
The US maintains a “One China” policy under which it does not recognise Taiwan’s formal independence and has no formal diplomatic relations with the island in deference to Beijing.
However, US law requires a credible defence for Taiwan and for the US to treat all threats to the island as matters of “grave concern”.
The need to get stockpiles of weapons to Taiwan now, before an attack began, was one of the lessons the US had learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Pentagon deputy defence secretary Kathleen Hicks said earlier this year.
Ukraine “was more of a cold-start approach than the planned approach we have been working on for Taiwan, and we will apply those lessons,” Ms Hicks said.
She said efforts to resupply Taiwan after a conflict erupted would be complicated because it was an island.
China regularly sends warships and planes across the centre line in the Taiwan Strait that provides a buffer between the sides, as well as into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone, in an effort to intimidate the island’s 23 million people and wear down its military capabilities.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for China’s embassy in Washington, said in a statement on Friday that Beijing was “firmly opposed” to US military ties with Taiwan.
The US should “stop selling arms to Taiwan” and “stop creating new factors that could lead to tensions in the Taiwan Strait”, Mr Liu said.
Source: ABC News