Urging Taiwan to Invest in Defense

Last June, a delegation from the Senate Armed Services Committee, headed by Chairman John McCain, met with Taiwan’s newly elected president Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei and urged her to spend more on national defense.

That sounds a like something out of president-elect Donald Trump’s play book except that he seems to want to cozy up to Taiwan, the one country in Northeast Asia that is not pulling its weight in self defense.

Every other country in Asia has been raising defense budgets in the face of growing threats. China’s defense budget has risen by double digits for more than a decade; Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has reversed the pattern of declining defense budgets during his four years in office.

The South Korean National Assembly just last week approved a budget with a four-percentage point increase in defense pending, clearly indicating worry about North Korea’s growing expertise in making nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

Yet while Japan and South Korea have been increasing military appropriations, Taiwan has been cutting back on defense. This is not new. As far back as 2010 the U.S. envoy to Taiwan, William Stanton, had called Taiwan out over its complacent attitude.

Taiwan’s defense spending has slowly but steadily declined as a percentage of the country’s GDP since at least 2008, and now hovers around two percent.

Singapore, a country that does not have 1,500 missiles pointed at her, spends more than three percent of its GDP on national defense. Also telling is that defense accounts for a much larger proportion of Singapore’s budget than it does Taiwan’s.

The U.S. senators who met with President Tsai urged her to raise defense spending to at least three percent of its GDP, something that Taipei has promised to do.

In theory, Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) should look more favorably on defense spending since the DPP officially favors independence from mainland China. Yet defense spending was falling even under the previous DPP administration.

Taiwan politics oscillates between those, mainly in the Kuomintang Party, who want closer economic ties with the mainland, and those in the DPP who worry that the government is getting too cozy with China.

A strong reaction against getting cozier put Tsai in office earlier this year. But records show that it doesn’t make much difference which party is in power as far as defense appropriations go. When the DPP was last in power, under former President Chen Shui-bian, spending dropped from 2.9 percent of GDP in 2001 to 2.1 percent in 2006.

The same political factors exist for both parties. During the bad old days before free elections, the military simply made their demands known and a compliant ministry produced the money.

Now Taiwan has a civilian minister of defense, and he has to ask for, not demand, appropriations. At the same time, the Taiwanese population has developed a taste for social welfare programs, and legislative candidates campaign on promises to supply them.

Moreover, in 2014 Taiwan ended conscription, and moved to an all-volunteer force, which has boosted personnel costs, taking away funds for weaponry.

Under the Taiwan Relations Act passed shortly after Washington de-recognized Taipei, the U.S is obliged to provide weapons to bolster Taiwan’s defenses. But the legislative Yuan has often balked at paying for them.

At the same time, China has been strengthening and modernizing it armed forces with special attention to amphibious operations and denying access to any American forces that might try to come to Taiwan’s rescue if it were invaded.

The largest ship within in the Chinese navy aside from the aircraft carrier Liaoning is the Type 071 amphibious landing dock. China has commissioned four of these ships, and has another two planned. Each can transport about a battalion of troops.

Taiwan’s own defense ministry issued a white paper claiming that China will have the means to forcibly reunify Taiwan and the mainland by 2020. That report, written in 2013, gave Taiwan about a month to hold off the Chinese until help could arrive.

In the last big Taiwan Strait crisis in 1994-1995 Beijing tossed ballistic missiles off the northern coast in order to intimidate the Taiwan electorate from voting for Lee Teng-hui, the first democratically elected president.

At the time, the U.S sent two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Strait as a show of force, and Beijing backed down. It’s a question now whether the U.S. would be able to risk sending carriers into the Strait again.

Todd Crowell is the author of The Coming War Between China and Japan, published as an Amazon Kindle Single.