The United States’ efforts to support Ukraine with military equipment is “in no way” obstructing its plans to provide arms for Taiwan, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said Thursday at a security forum.
“The U.S. supporting Ukraine is in no way negatively affecting our ability to provide [or] fulfill foreign military sales cases, or otherwise support Taiwan,” Hicks said during a talk at the 2022 Aspen Security Forum in Washington, D.C.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Washington has provided Kyiv with FGM-148 Javelin portable anti-tank missiles and FIM-92 Stinger portable surface-to-air missiles, items that the U.S. has also sold to Taiwan but reportedly faced a backlog.
Hicks stressed that the delivery of those items to Taiwan was “totally unrelated” to U.S. provisions to Ukraine, which she said were drawn from the U.S. stockpiles.
She added that the U.S. had sent “used cars a lot” to Ukraine, but what Taiwan would receive was “a brand new car.”
Asked whether it would be possible for Taiwanese troops to receive U.S. military training at home, a practice that was introduced to Ukraine in 2016 in light of the Russian annexation of Crimea, Hicks did not provide a direct answer.
“I think there’s a lot of they [Taiwan’s military] can do themselves and a lot of partnerships that they have available to them,” Hicks said. “I’ll say that — and you don’t have to be in [the] country to do a lot of that kind of training.”
“Taiwan needs to put its self-defense front and center,” Hicks said, adding that the best way to deter China from launching military aggression against Taiwan would rely on the will of the people in Taiwan to defend the island.
Ukraine’s response to Russia’s invasion has demonstrated “the will of a people combined with [the] capability to stall or even stop a campaign of oppression,” according to Hicks.
Hicks also named some of what Taiwan should do to strengthen its self-defense capability, including improving its noncommissioned officer corps (NCOs), imposing longer compulsory military service, and focusing on asymmetric systems.
At a separate talk, Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant to the U.S. president and coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs of the National Security Council, said that Washington and its partners in the Indo-Pacific region had a “strong, overriding interest in the maintenance of peace and stability” in the Taiwan Strait.
Regarding U.S.-China relations, Campbell estimated that people would see a resumption of more practical and predictable “great power diplomacy” between the two countries in the next few months, a development he said would be “reassuring” to the region.
Campbell said he based his assessment on the fact that China was facing challenges both at home and abroad.
China’s ambitious engagements with other countries in the region have “backfired,” he said, mentioning, in particular, its disputes with Japan over Diaoyutai Islands, called Senkaku Islands by Japan, as well as its border conflict with India.
At the same time, he went on, Beijing’s “zero COVID” policy had slowed the country’s economy down and caused public anger.
“All of that suggests to me that the last thing that the Chinese need right now is an openly hostile relationship with the United States,” he added. “They want a degree of predictability and stability, and we seek that as well.”
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel