Conservatives Argue: US Defense ties with Taiwan are too restricted

Two right-wingers writing in the National Review, Gary Schmitt, from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Neo-Con organization whose program to take out Iraq inspired our current debacle there, along with Dan Blumenthal of the American Enterprise Institute, argue that restrictions on US ties with Taiwan hamper our defense efforts.

As important as these measures are, neither Taiwan nor the United States is getting its money's worth because of the unnecessary restrictions placed on our military-to-military ties with Taiwan. In some cases these restrictions are just petty, such as requiring Taiwanese military personnel to wear civilian clothes when they train in the United States, or forbidding Taiwanese pilots from wearing name badges on their flight suits during U.S. training. In other cases, they are far more serious and debilitating. Chief among these cases is the self-imposed prohibition on trips by U.S. generals, admirals, and senior defense officials to Taiwan.

Occasionally even the wigged-out right wing nationalist and corporatist wing of our political spectrum says something intelligent, and they have a very strong point here. Read on:

Should deterrence fail and conflict erupt in the Taiwan Strait, we currently face the prospect of managing an ad hoc coalition. Senior officers from Taiwan and the United States will have had little opportunity to discuss routinely and in depth how to fight together. The mid-career officers who are currently the backbone of professional-service relationships with Taiwan cannot be expected to make strategic decisions with the full confidence of their governments during wartime. A general officer tasked with executing a contingency plan would benefit greatly from familiarizing himself with Taiwan's command centers, terrain, and operational capabilities. Indeed, one only has to think back to the difficulties the American military had operating with its key NATO allies — with whom they had trained and held high-level exchanges for years — in Kosovo to realize just how difficult a situation we might face in the case of a military conflict in the Strait.

Yup. I made the same points in the earlier exchange about an invasion of Taiwan.

Taiwan