Recent European decisions to allow Ukraine to use medium- and long-range missiles have obscured what is happening in the Pacific, where proclamations and diplomacy are alternating about a concrete fact: more U.S. military aid to Taiwan will soon be leaving, as approved by the Pentagon and Congress. It is a value close to $570 million, the highest amount ever reached in this type of operation, a quantity and variety of goods that will certainly provoke a reaction from China. To deliver the aid, the Biden administration will use its fastest tool, namely the direct shipment of its own stockpiles, a process on which it relies heavily also to support Ukraine’s self-defense, but which is not without problems. Congress has actually given the administration the authority to send up to $1 billion in its own stock to Taiwan each year, but lawmakers have not given the Pentagon an actual budget, and the Department of Defense is certainly reluctant to send equipment that it cannot replace in its own arsenals in the short term. The “$570 million” figure, however, is enough to nearly double what was sent last year to the rebel province — as Taiwan is called by Chinese leaders — and which will materialize by the end of the month with President Biden’s signature.
Today, Taiwan represents the most sensitive issue in relations between Washington and Beijing, with the latter maintaining its sovereignty over the island and announcing its intention to definitively annex it within a few years, if necessary even with the use of force. And it is precisely of force that China has demonstrated so far, which in addition to sending naval units and military aircraft into the sea and skies surrounding the island, has never spared peremptory declarations. One of the latest threats came during the most important Defense summit of the year for the Asian area, the IISS 2024, between May and June, when the Chinese Defense Minister, Admiral Dong Jun, warned that supporters of Taiwanese separatists would be punished. And shortly after, he ordered the armed forces to carry out large-scale exercises around the island. More recently, at the end of last week, the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the military support of the United States, arguing that it would “send the wrong message to the separatist forces for Taiwan independence”. But at a September Indo-Pacific defense conference in Beijing, members of the People’s Liberation Army were more cautious, heeding the invitation of U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who had traveled to China a few weeks earlier to meet with senior government officials and schedule a long-awaited detente call between the commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, Admiral Stephen Koehler, and his Chinese counterpart. Also on the table were several near-misses between U.S. Navy aircraft and Chinese naval aviation.
Between declarations and exercises, the fact remains that Taipei’s armed forces will soon receive refresher courses taught by US military instructors, stockpiles of bullets, armor-piercing devices to neutralize armored vehicles, air defense systems and multi-domain devices and drones. The aim is to allow the protection of the territory in the event of an invasion by discouraging and making Chinese operations as costly and complex as possible, even if repelling a numerically superior force of two orders of magnitude without US intervention still remains a utopia. On the American side, diplomacy has been repeating the same mantra for years: maintaining the right to support Taiwan’s self-defense according to a long-standing government policy enshrined in bilateral treaties. So much so that the spokesperson for the “unofficial” Taiwanese embassy in Washington declared: “Taipei will continue to improve its defense capabilities and work closely with the United States to actively support peace, stability and prosperity in the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific region.”
But the issue of military aid to Taiwan hasn’t always been straightforward: Last year, after discussing an additional package backed by members of the State Department and the White House, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin suspended any further aid that wasn’t covered by funding. The money arrived months later when Congress included $1.9 billion to replenish U.S. missions to the Indo-Pacific. The Pentagon has since been planning how to use the funds, most of which has been earmarked for Taipei. Unfortunately, shipments were plagued by delays, and aid arrived in Taiwan later than expected, with many supplies spoiled from time on docks and some products expired and unsafe for safe use, resulting in damages that the subsequent investigation report estimated at $730,000. Report states: “The delivery of inappropriate items inhibits the Department of Defense’s ability to achieve its established security cooperation objectives and may lead to a loss of partner confidence in the United States.”
