China’s pomp-filled National People’s Congress, the yearly agenda-setting meeting of the country’s rubber-stamp legislature, Beijing announced that it would ramp up its military spending by nearly $250 billion this year, an increase of more than 7%, as it continues to modernize its armed forces. Beijing has been bolstering its military rapidly while pressing, with increasing assertiveness, territorial claims over disputed islands across the South China Sea — and its claim over the democratically governed island of Taiwan.
China considers Taiwan a renegade province and President Xi Jinping has vowed to reassert Beijing’s control over the island for years, by force if necessary. But Taiwan has had vital backup for decades from its biggest international partner, the U.S., which is obligated under domestic American law to provide the island with sufficient means to defend itself from any aggressor.
American military ships and aircraft continually ply the South China Sea’s waters and skies around Taiwan, demonstrating, the U.S. military says, the right to free navigation in international space. The freedom of navigation operations have led to some tense encounters in recent years.
Over the past week, Taiwan’s government and many of its 23 million people have watched and considered President Trump’s aggressive posturing with Ukraine, and his blowup with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House last Friday in particular, with unease.
“I think these events in their totality are deeply unnerving for the people of Taiwan,” Russell Hsiao, the executive director at the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington, D.C., told CBS News. “This seeming about-face from the United States in its position of support for Ukraine, I think, raises some doubts among people in Taiwan whether this could potentially happen to them as well, in the heat of a battle against China – to have its most important and principal security partner essentially pull the rug from underneath them.”
Taiwan’s history with the U.S., and with Trump
Since 1950 – the year after communist forces won China’s civil war against the Nationalists, who then fled to Taiwan and eventually established their own, democratic administration – the U.S. has sold more than $50 billion worth of weapons to Taipei, including HIMARS rocket systems, F-16 jet fighters and dozens of advanced Abrams battle tanks, according to the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
