Greater pressure to speed up arms sales to Taiwan possible after midterms

TAIPEI – In what would be a welcome outcome for Taiwan, the Democratic blue wave that swept the US midterm elections could see greater pressure on the White House to approve a US$14 billion (S$17.86 billion) arms sales package to the island.President Donald Trump’s Republican administration has slowed down arms sales to self-ruled Taiwan, seeing these as a “negotiating” chip in its dealings with China, which opposes such sales as it sees Taiwan as its territory to be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary.Taiwan officials, meanwhile, has maintained that the island’s approach to relations with the United States is non-partisan.Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) told The Straits Times on Nov 5 that the island’s relations with the US are based on “a principle of non-partisan engagement, fostering broad goodwill, and active communication, which has long enjoyed consistent support from bipartisan members of the US Congress and the executive branch”.Building on this foundation, MOFA will continue to deepen comprehensive cooperation with the US in various fields, including security, trade, science and technology, and education, it added.Speaking to reporters at the legislature where he was attending a session, Defence Minister Wellington Koo said: “The US Congress has consistently supported – on a bipartisan basis – Taiwan’s efforts to beef up its defence capabilities.”He added: “We will also continue to communicate with members of Congress, and of course we will maintain close contact with the US Department of War to ensure that these related arms sales proceed on schedule.”Indeed, experts expected pressure on Trump to rise over the arms sales package post midterms.“I do think that one outcome to the midterm elections could be that Republicans start to break with President Trump on this question, and have... a more independent position on this and do start to raise pressure on the administration to approve those arms sales,” said David Sacks, senior fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.Speaking to the news streaming platform Taiwan Plus, he noted that Congress could try to codify the Six Assurances into legislation. The Six Assurances were conveyed to Taipei privately in July 1982 by the administration of President Ronald Reagan, and later declassified.They include a clause to not set a date for ending arms sales to Taiwan, and were meant to reassure Taiwan after the 1982 Joint Communique on Arms Sales was negotiated between the US and China that said the US would not seek a long-term arms sales policy and would gradually reduce its arms sales to Taiwan.Sacks said Congress would be sending a message that “we can’t control what President Trump says, but at least Taiwan and countries around the world should understand that he doesn’t necessarily reflect mainstream US thinking on this”.While voters in dozens of American cities approved restrictions or outright bans on data centres during the midterm elections, analysts saw little impact on Taiwan’s exports of data centre-related hardware to the US.Roy Lee, a senior deputy executive director and associate research fellow at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research’s Center for International Trade Policy, told Focus Taiwan that there will be continued growth in demand in artificial intelligence.Therefore, a slowdown in the data centre build-out in the US is not likely to have significant impact on Taiwanese hardware suppliers.“There may be a slight slowdown in expansion in the short term, but the overall direction has not changed,” Focus Taiwan reported Lee as saying.Chew Hui Min is The Straits Times’ correspondent in Taipei covering cross-strait relations and Taiwan news.