Congress takes the first step towards direct military aid to Taiwan
The Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 provides direct military aid to Taiwan of nearly $ 4.5 billion over the next four years.
The vote in Congress comes just days after Washington sold $ 1.1 billion worth of arms to Taiwan. (illustrative image)
AFP
Washington’s first direct military aid to Taiwan passed a key milestone in the US Congress on Wednesday, with the vote likely to provoke Beijing’s ire.
“This is the most significant revision of American policy towards Taiwan” since 1979, when Washington recognized Beijing while agreeing to maintain the island’s self-defense capacity, assure Senators Bob Menendez and Lindsey Graham, head of this initiative.
Their bill, approved by the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, provides nearly $ 4.5 billion in direct military aid to Taiwan over the next four years. It also calls on the US president to impose sanctions on major Chinese financial institutions in response to any “escalation of hostile acts against Taiwan”.
Meaningful reconciliation
The “Taiwan Policy Act of 2022”, as it is called, also provides for granting the island the status of an “important non-NATO ally”. This vote in committee is only the first step in a long legislative process: the text must now be adopted in plenary session in the Senate, then in the House, before being promulgated by Joe Biden.
But it still marks a significant rapprochement between the United States and Taiwan, at a time when relations between Beijing and Washington are at their lowest in recent decades. The White House is therefore navigating this dossier with great caution.
“We will continue to communicate directly with Congress on this text,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre evasively said Wednesday. Before assuring that the Biden administration “will continue to deepen its partnership with Taiwan with strong diplomatic, economic and military support”.
Sale of weapons and tour of the Pelosi
The congressional vote comes just days after Washington sold $ 1.1 billion worth of arms to Taiwan, and just over a month after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which angered Beijing. China had therefore launched the most important military maneuvers in its history around the island.
Prior to the visit to Taiwan of Nancy Pelosi, number three in the United States and the oldest American official to visit the island in decades, Joe Biden’s entourage had already quietly argued in China that she did not represent non-administrative politics, being Congress is a separate branch of government.
China considers Taiwan, with a population of around 23 million, one of its provinces, which has yet to successfully reunify with the rest of its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war (1949). In seven decades, the Communist army has never been able to take over the island, which has remained under the control of the Republic of China, the regime that once ruled mainland China and now only rules Taiwan.
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