Taiwan wavers on F-16 deal

TAIPEI — Taiwan said Monday that it needs fighter jets which are more advanced than the upgraded F-16 announced by the United States, suggesting that it was dropping its bid for dozens of the aircraft.

LOL … Phase Three of the F-16 issue: after Phase Two in which the US refused to sell C/Ds, Ma now rejects upgrades to A/Bs in preparation for asking for F35s - something it knows the US will never agree to.  They will say they tried but its hands are tied because the US doesn’t want to antagonise China and undermine the development of peaceful cross-strait relations TM. 

This is all the more funny given a speech Ma made last week in which he hailed his administration’s substantial arms purchases.

I suspect the ultimate goal is to make Taiwan’s air defence so weak as to make defence of Taiwan unfeasible therefore creating the right conditions for presenting some form of annexation as an inevitable fait accompli.

But let’s not focus entire on Ma’s goal to sell Taiwan off. Everyone has known what his ultimate agenda has been all along. The US however, has been pulling out of its commitments to Taiwan since 1997 and has essentially signalled that it is happy to concede Taiwan to a PRC sphere of influence.  It is a strategic error it, by most of all the Taiwanese people, will come to bitterly regret later on.

Ma pressing on Diaoyutais may hurt US ties: experts

As The View From Taiwan (see links) has pointed out ad nauseum, Ma’s policy on the Senkaku Islands  is to try a wedge between the US and Taiwan and between Japan and Taiwan whilst simultaneously moving the country closer to China. 

Remember when Ma was citing one of former President Chen’s greatest crimes as hurting Taiwan-US ties by being provocative?  Turns out Ma is not only a bumbler but actually disruptive:

Weighing the pros and cons of the situation, the US could be seeing Taiwan as a problem in this issue, he (George Washington University’s Robert Sutter) added.

“You could come to the conclusion that the US government would prefer that Taiwan not further complicate the situation,” he said.

At a time when Washington is trying to iron out problems surrounding the islands, Taiwan taking a more assertive stance “is something that is probably not welcome,” Sutter said.

Ma’s actions of sending coastguard boats to protect fishing vessels approaching the islands and becoming involved in a water canon fight with the Japanese “do not fit well with what the US wants to do.”

Sutter said Taiwan could be seen by the US as being “disruptive.”

Meanwhile Steven Philips of Towson University utterly missed the point:

Taiwan does not have to win the Diaoyutais conflict, but it does not want to be seen as losing, he added.

Ma’s actions over the islands were “an attempt to raise up Taiwan’s international status” as much as they were an attempt to win sovereignty, Phillips said.

Phillips said that Taipei’s claims to the islands were the weakest of the three claimants and there was a danger that the issue could damage the country’s credibility.

Ma’s actions were nothing to do with raising Taiwan’s international status or win sovereignty.  They were about demonstrating Taiwan could be a useful partner in a United Front with the CCP and China over ‘core issues’ that Beijing regards as red lines in the sand.  Whilst Phillips is right that the issue could damage the country’s credibility it is interesting that he said Taipei’s claims to the islands were the weakest of the three (China, Japan and Taiwan).  That can be read in two ways of course.  If you read ‘weakest’ as carrying the least weight and attention in the game of international diplomacy and geo-strategic competition then he is right.  If you read ‘weakest’ in terms of the location of the islands, and historical interaction with them then I think he is wrong.  Of course an important distinction to make here is that Ma wasn’t claiming the Senkaku’s as being part of Taiwan’s inalienable sovereign territory but as part of the R.O.C’s sovereign territory.  That’s a huge difference.  Ma’s government played the issue to domestic audiences as a fight for Taiwan’s territory and fishing rights but internationally as a fight by the R.O.C, which by virtue of the mythical ‘1992 Consensus’ and the colonialist enabling One China Principle, also validates the PRC’s claim on the islands.  We can see this in the fact that despite PRC vessels (fishing and military though it is hard to tell the difference when the former acts as a proxy for the latter) repeatedly encroaching upon the islands, Ma made no mention of them and no Taiwanese fishing vessels or Coast Guard Administration ships came into conflict with them.  

The United States believes in the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all member states, but we do not believe that sovereignty offers a grant of immunity when governments massacre their own people.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at the United Nations. This is not something either China or Russia likes to hear.  I wish though that western intervention had a post 1945 history of intervention to prevent civilian massacres. Sadly, it is closer to the truth that western intervention, covert and overt, and arm sales have been probably the largest single source of conflict and instability in the world since the end of WWII. Why? Two main reasons spring to mind - one, control of oil supplies or ensuring a steady supply at prices favourable to us and two, the military-industrial complex directly profits from conflict, be it dirty wars in Central and South America or Africa, major incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq or the war on drugs and the war on terror.  In the post WWII era of constant conflict, one constant is easily discernable - war is business and the business of war is the most profitable of them all.

Why The Cairo Declaration Did Not and Does Not Represent US Position On Status of Taiwan

The Cairo Declaration was not an agreement legal in international law and was based on a basic untruth: Taiwan was not a part of the ROC at the inception of the ROC, a fact made obvious by the 1912 ROC Constitution which clearly states the territory of the ROC and omits Taiwan (Sun Yat-sen was quite clear that he regarded Taiwan as part of Japanese territory at the time). Conclusion: Taiwan cannot be ‘reunified’ or ‘retroceded’ to a Chinese polity that when initially formed made no claim upon it. 

Washington should abide by the “one China” principle and take “concrete actions to oppose Taiwanese [and Tibetan] independence. History demonstrates that whenever each side handles relatively well the issues bearing on the other side’s core and major interests, then Sino-US relations are quite smooth and stable. But when it is the contrary, there are incessant troubles.

Xi Jinping - Chinese Vice President addressing the US-China Business Council

First, this is a not so veiled warning to the US to continue kow-towing to Beijing on all and any issues Beijing unilaterally decides constitute its ‘core interests’. It speaks volumes for how Beijing is controlling the debate by fabricating tensions with the US as a negotiating strategy.  

Second, notice that Xi’s only major public address was to a business council? That wasn’t an accident.  One of the major reasons that US foreign policy has in recent years failed Taiwan time and time again is because of pressure inside the Beltway from businesses and people directly invested in China.  China has successfully used trade to surround the US government on non-trade issues. “Shhh … don’t make trouble with China or we’ll lose our investments”.

Another strategy is pure misinformation:

… a Chinese press release said that US President Barack Obama “rejects” any call for Taiwan’s independence. The press release, issued on Wednesday in Washington by the Chinese delegation led by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平), China’s likely next leader, appeared to show that the US had changed its wording regarding its stance on Taiwan’s independence from “not support,” to “reject.”  According to a Xinhua report on Wednesday, Obama told Xi that the US “rejects any calls for Taiwan independence” and added that his country “wants to see the peaceful development of cross-strait relations move forward.”

Tosh.  They did this the last time a major Chinese General visited the US. He unilaterally claimed the US Government had changed their position only for his comments to be firmly denied later on.

That said, US Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican who chairs the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, put her finger right on the real problem - unneccessary US concessions emboldening China’s ‘peaceful’ uprising:

“From failing to bring up human rights issues in formal talks to caving to Chinese pressure not to sell new fighter aircraft to Taiwan, the administration’s China policy has consisted of one dangerous concession after another”

Maybe the US doesn’t believe that it will pay a price for this later.  Perhaps they are content with just the 23 million people of the country of Taiwan and the Tibetans, the Uighurs in East Turkestan and the Falong Gong paying this price for their trade-determined realpolitik.

I would have more sympathy …

… for PRC suspicion of US imperialism and hegemony if the Chinese regime didn’t repress the peoples of China, Tibet and East Turkestan with such bloody and murderous zeal.

The US has itself to blame for being so transparently hypocritical in it’s geopolitical strategy, setting a terrible example for China to emulate as it seeks to recreate the Qing/Yuan dynastic imperial borders and reestablish itself as The Central Kingdom.

I fear only the weight of sheer demographic pressure and environmental collapse will convince the US, Russia and China to reconsider their prioritisation of hegemonic aspirations over and above a sustainable human existence.  I also fear it will takes the lives of millions, if not billions, before calmer heads intervene, by which time it may just all be too late.

“Washington has served as Beijing’s pro-KMT surrogate. No matter how moderate an individual DPP leader may be, in China’s eyes, the entire party is disqualified from governing because someone within it may take positions displeasing to China.

China would clearly prefer a return to Taiwan’s one-party rule — that would facilitate eventual political integration with China’s authoritarianism. Sadly, Washington has decided that Beijing should not only have a vote in Taiwan’s election, but a veto.”

Joseph Bosco, a former China expert with the Pentagon.

Ooh, snap.

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