Taiwan shaken by US conference
confusion By Jens Kastner
TAIPEI - Taiwan watchers are in overdrive
about an ominous no-show of senior US defense and
diplomatic officials at an event held annually to
address US-Taiwan defense cooperation as well as
to sort out the island's arms-procurement plans.
Because this year's Taiwan-US Defense
Industry Conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, came
after a series of aggressive moves carried out by
Taiwan's political leadership and elements of the
island's armed forces against US ally Japan over
its stance on the disputed Diaoyutai/Senkaku
Islands in the East China Sea, it is the
prevailing assessment in Taiwan that the
conspicuous absence of the US officials and
Washington's dissatisfaction with Taipei are
connected. Observers with a very close eye on the
pending US elections
have a strikingly different take on the issue,
however.
Militarily, the US and Taiwan are
de facto allies, with the former being the
latter's sole security guarantor and meaningful
supplier of weapons. In the absence of official
bilateral ties, all military-related exchanges are
conducted in various semi-official conferences and
symposiums. Among those, there are the so-called
Monterey Talks that in effect bring together the
Pentagon and Taiwan's national-security officials,
and there also is the US-Taiwan Business Council's
Taiwan-US Defense Industry Conference.
Such meetings have been postponed in the
past and schedules have undergone last-minute
changes, but behind those there always appeared to
have been reasons that were rather weighty, for
example, Hurricane Katrina having struck the US in
2005 or Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to
Washington in 2006. Therefore, most observers in
Taiwan thought, it could not possibly have been a
harmless coincidence that only two days before
this year's Taiwan-US Defense Industry Conference,
Mark Lippert, US assistant secretary of defense
for Asian and Pacific security affairs, who was
reportedly scheduled to deliver a keynote speech,
announced that he would not come and likewise did
Kin Moy, deputy assistant secretary of state in
the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
These observers could not get over the
fact that it was the first time since 2002 that no
senior official from the State Department had
attended that particular conference, and thus they
settled for one explanation.
"We have a
lot of guesses around," Wu Yu-shan, director of
the Institute of Political Science at Taiwan's
Academia Sinica, the island's most renowned
research institution, told Asia Times Online.
"But the most plausible one seems to be a
US gesture of displeasure with the escort of
Taiwan's fishing boats by coast-guard vessels to
the Diaoyutais and the resultant skirmish with the
Japanese boats, for the US is behind Japan on this
issue."
Wu was referring to the
high-profile incident in late September in which
more than 50 Taiwanese fishing boats protected by
coast-guard ships tried to enter disputed waters
around the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands, which are
controlled by Japan but subject to competing
claims by mainland China and Taiwan, after the
Japanese government bought the islands from their
private owner. To stop the Taiwanese from
intruding into what Japan claims as its exclusive
economic zone, Japan Coast Guard ships attacked
the fishing boats with water cannon, which the
Taiwanese coast guard returned, in effect leading
to a somewhat violent clash between the
semi-military law-enforcement forces of a very
close US ally on the one side and those of a de
facto one on the other.
That Taipei
doesn't seem to give a hang about Washington's
sensitivities in this regard was indicated
earlier. For example, in late July, during an ROC
Navy drill held off Taiwan's east coast, a rear
admiral defied orders and commanded his US-made
Kidd-class destroyer and a small associated fleet
out of Taiwan's air defense identification zone.
The naval group surrounding one of the navy's main
surface combatants then sailed full-steam toward
Japanese territorial waters. It did not intrude in
these, but nonetheless alerted the militaries of
Japan and the US.
As if this wasn't enough
of an irritation to the US-Japan security
alliance, Taipei later decided to let the officer
at the center of the mutiny off the hook virtually
unpunished.
Then, in early September,
Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou conducted a
whirlwind tour to Pengjia, the Taiwanese island
closest to the Diaoyutais. There, the notoriously
Beijing-friendly president condemned the Japanese
purchase of the Diaoyutais as an "invasion" of
Republic of China territory and shook his fist
against the Japanese while having ROC Air Force
fighter jets carry out fly-bys.
And on
September 18, marking the anniversary of the
Mukden Incident as the beginning of the Japanese
invasion of China in 1931, Taiwanese media
presented footage showing the bombs of a US-made
ROC Air Force F-16 sporting the inscription "The
Diaoyutais are ours."
As this coincided
with the violent anti-Japan protests in mainland
China that erupted after the Japanese purchased
the Diaoyutais, and also because Taiwan's Ministry
of National Defense did not hesitate to expressed
sympathy with the pilots responsible for the F-16
graffiti, the signals sent from Taipei to
Washington and Tokyo were arguably precarious.
Not surprisingly, President Ma now faces
allegations by his domestic political opponents
that his recent moves over the Diaoyutais
challenged US interests in East Asia. They see Ma
as steering directly toward unification with the
mainland and claim that it is part of his master
plan to cut ties with the old friends Japan and US
first to pave the way.
As a sign of how
seriously Ma takes such accusations, he felt
compelled to deliver a counter-statement on
prime-time TV.
"The meeting [the Taiwan-US
Defense Industry Conference] has nothing to do
with the Diaoyutai sovereignty issue. We learned
about [the absence of senior US officials]
beforehand ... The US maintains a neutral stance
on the issue," he said.
Since then, he has
received considerable support from two US moves.
First, the United States' new de facto ambassador
in Taipei, American Institute in Taiwan director
Christopher Marut, described the security
cooperation between the US and Taiwan as "one of
the strongest elements" of the overall
relationship. Second, and likely more important,
the Pentagon released a photograph of Taiwan's
vice-minister of national defense, Andrew Yang,
who did attend the Taiwan-US Defense Industry
Conference, which was taken when he visited the
Pentagon on that occasion. The publication of such
photographs by the US side is highly unusual, as
there is a tacit agreement with Beijing not to
make Washington-Taipei defense ties look official.
The view of John Copper, a professor of
international studies at Rhodes College in
Memphis, Tennessee, seems to deliver at least a
good part of the explanation, if not the entire
one, for the mysterious State Department no-show
at the conference. According to his analysis, it
is all about US President Barack Obama wanting to
avoid the tedious Taiwan issue like the plague
while pursuing his re-election campaign.
"A year or two ago, pro-Obama officials,
media writers and scholars began to write pieces
and make public statements to the effect that the
US could no longer defend Taiwan, and some said
[it] should not anyway. This tune changed as the
US presidential election approached," Copper said.
"The reason seems to be the size of
Taiwan's support base in the US and in Congress
and the fact that any military and security issue
would be a distraction from what the Obama
campaign team wants to focus on."
Copper
argues that the White House in particular does not
want to discuss the sale of F-16C/D aircraft to
Taiwan at this time. Taipei has been requesting
the new fighters for years, and Obama has refused
to release them, but his Republican challenger
Mitt Romney, while in the same breath criticizing
Obama for kowtowing to Beijing by withholding the
aircraft, has said he will give the nod to the
deal if he wins the presidential race. "It is a
sensitive issue and would be a distraction,"
Copper said.
According to Copper, also
related to the senior officials' absence is the
matter that the Obama administration in the
electoral run-up does not want to be forced to
defend the "Asia pivot", which, as a concept that
is half-baked at best in Copper's eyes, provides
Romney with further opportunities to discredit
Obama.
"There are as yet no logistical or
operational plans to accompany the Asia pivot,
making it appear to be little more than a talking
point a present," Copper said. "Then there is the
problem of funding. Defense spending has been cut
already; there might be another huge cut and the
US military will be badly hurt by it. Then the
Asia pivot cannot be turned into a meaningful
policy."
Jens Kastner is a
Taipei-based journalist.
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2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
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