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3 F-16s:
Don't ask, don't sell By Peter
Lee
There is a good reason for politicians
to support United States arms sales to Taiwan.
It's good politics. And that's true on both sides
of the Pacific.
As Jens Kastner reported
in Asia Times Online on June 22, President Ma
Ying-jyeou has made his stated eagerness to
purchase 66 F-16 fighters (and dispel concerns
that he cares more about closer ties with the
People's Republic of China (PRC) than the security
of Taiwan) a cornerstone of his campaign for
re-election in January 2012. [1]
In
Washington, the potential F-16 sale has garnered
support across a broad political spectrum in
congress, from anti-communist conservatives to
pro-democracy liberals. Beyond
Taiwan-love, the movement
draws some of its political heat from the desire
to rebuke China for its unnerving growth and
assertiveness, as well as for human rights and
regional security transgressions.
However,
good politics may not be good geopolitics.
The Barack Obama administration is clearly
loath to pick a fight with China at this juncture
over the always contentious issue of Taiwan arms
sales, having just achieved a partial reset of
relations with Beijing after a particularly
difficult year.
The genuineness of Ma's
enthusiasm for the F-16 deal is also open to
question.
As a 2009 WikiLeaks cable
revealed, Ma's US diplomacy is based on "no
surprises". Presumably to contrast Kuomintang
(KMT) sobriety and responsibility with the
loose-cannon radicalism of his opponents in the
independence-friendly (and confrontationally
inclined) Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Ma
promised the United States:
Taiwan would not ask for a certain
kind of transit just to show that the US would
grant it; Taiwan would not ask for certain
weapons systems just to show the US would sell
them; and Taiwan would not insist on certain
names [ie descriptors used for Taiwan in
international organizations] just for domestic
political considerations. [2]
When
the cable was released in June 2011, a DPP
legislator, Peng Shao-chin, harrumphed:
Could it be that the appeal for a US
arms sale publicly made by Ma several times was
just for show? I wonder if it was because of the
US' reluctance or Taiwan's lack of interest that
there has been no progress made in the arms
deals." [3]
Legislator Peng may be
unfair.
Ma has, by his calculation, called
for the US to approve the sale of the F-16s "19
times". No formal Letter of Request (LoR) has been
received by the United States from the ROC
government ... because the US steadfastly refuses
to accept the letter.
On June 27, Wendell
Minick reported in Gannett's Defense News:
Taiwan's June 24 petition to submit
a letter of request (LoR) for new F-16 fighter
jets was blocked by the U.S. State Department
under orders from the U.S. National Security
Council, sources in Taipei and Washington said.
A U.S. defense industry source said that
Taiwan's de facto embassy in Washington, the
Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative
Office (TECRO), was preparing to submit its
fourth LoR for price-and-availability data for
66 F-16C/D Block 50/52 fighters to the American
Institute in Taiwan (AIT). But it was told by
AIT that the LoR would not be accepted. AIT
declined to comment.
"AIT is not opposed
to the sale," the source said. "This is a State
Department and National Security Council issue."
The issue has become a Catch-22 for
Taiwan, in which TECRO cannot submit an LoR to
AIT because it is under State Department orders
to deny it, and then TECRO is told by the State
Department that the LoR cannot be processed
because it was not received, he said.
[4]
The Obama administration was not
the first to refuse F-16 LoRs. The George W Bush
administration refused three letters of request
for the jets in 2006 and 2007.
Don't
ask, don't sell It is not clear whose
political interests this procedure is meant to
advance.
Is Ma, under the "no surprises"
rubric, declining to disrupt US-Taiwanese
relations by submitting a request he knows the
Obama administration dislikes? Or is the Obama
administration providing political cover to Ma by
giving him the opportunity to pander to the
Taiwanese electorate by stating his desire for the
planes ... while avoiding complication in his
relations with Beijing by actually putting the
request into the pipeline?
The United
States is unlikely to be eager to do Ma political
favors, despite an apparent preference for keeping
the KMT's hand on the tiller and the security
situation in the Taiwan Strait off the rocks.
Ma is widely understood to be the
architect of Taiwan's gradual, calculated drift
into the arms of Beijing, and his protestations of
anti-PRC militancy do not carry a great deal of
weight in Washington.
A refreshingly tart
Congressional Research Service report on the
history of Taiwan arms sales noted Ma's
mainland-friendly shenanigans and his apparent
reluctance to pour money and political capital
into a buildup of Taiwan's military forces.
One visualizes the author's lips pursed
with disapproval as she describes how US
assistance to Taiwan in the aftermath of Typhoon
Marakot in 2009 was treated:
In his national day address on
October 10, 2009, President Ma recognized
mainland China for its aid that "exceeded those
of all other nations," without mentioning the
United States in his speech.
In the
United States, considerable efforts are underway
to build political momentum for a sale despite the
apparent qualms of the Obama administration.
On May 26, a missive signed by 43 US
senators urging Obama to accept the letter or
request was made public. Many of the signers were
the president's Republican adversaries, eager to
raise him on a cleft stick on the politically
difficult matter. However, Democratic senators
such as Jay Rockefeller, a longtime supporter of
Taiwan, Ohio's Sherrod Brown and outgoing Virginia
senator Jim Webb also signed.
Terri Giles,
executive director of the Formosa Foundation, a
US-based non-profit advocating heightened
awareness and support of Taiwan, told Asia Times
Online that "the Taiwan issue is one that
[congress] is very serious about".
She
described efforts to decouple Taiwan arm sales -
and Taiwan policy in general - from China policy,
stating, "The more we can take China out of the
equation the better."
She looks forward to
a relationship with Taiwan in which issues like
arms sales are regular, continuous and normalized
- not occasional, fraught exercises that serve as
the focus for aggressive Chinese lobbying and
horse-trading.
What may doom a
congressional united front on Taiwan, however, is
overreach - the apparently irresistible temptation
for ideological conservatives to turn every issue
into an opportunity to challenge, discredit and
confound the Obama administration and its agenda.
After the mid-term congressional elections
and the accession of Republicans to control of the
House of Representatives, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a
conservative congressperson from Florida, took
over the House Foreign Relations Committee and
convened a hearing on "Why Taiwan Matters".
Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of
state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, was
unable to attend - apparently the president of
Mongolia was in town - but the hearings went ahead
anyway.
Clearly, in the eyes of pro-Taiwan
conservative congresspeople, the F-16 issue is now
politically in play.
The Wall Street
Journal puckishly titled its coverage of the
Ros-Lehtinen hearings, "Never Fear Taiwan -
Congress is Here." It noted the general
finger-in-the-eye-of-the-Obama-administration
spirit, quoting Ros-Lehtinen's warning of a "new
spirit of appeasement in the air", and Dan
Burton's resentful insinuation that the
non-appearance of Kurt Campbell and other
administration officials demonstrated "an absence
of concern that is remarkable ... I think they
were afraid because they don't have the answers."
The committee also heard a case for the
F-16 sale put forward by the US-Taiwan Business
Council.
Commerce certainly has its place
in these proceedings, since the 66 F-16s would
represent more than US$3 billion in revenue for
Lockheed Martin, much of it distributed in
politically influential states like Texas.
Texas-style hardball, aka the forcible
collision of political and economic interests, is
already on open display in the F-16 matter, as the
Washington Post reported:
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who
represents a state where F-16s are assembled,
has been the most outspoken on the issue and is
holding up a full Senate vote on the
confirmation of William J Burns as deputy
secretary of state until Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton moves forward on the
fighter jet issue.
An amendment Cornyn
introduced last year requires the State
Department to produce a report that would assess
whether Taiwan's air force needs the jets.
In a speech last week at the Heritage
Foundation, Cornyn said he is negotiating with
Clinton to have that report released in exchange
for the confirmation vote. [5]
Burns
may well join Mark Lippert cooling his heels
waiting for his confirmation.
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