The ruling Democratic Progressive Party of the Taiwan island has intensified its collusion with the United States against Beijing as the Department of Defense recently announced its plans to provide military assistance to Taiwan through presidential drawdown authority, a tool that allowed the U.S. Defense Department to send arms to Ukraine without going through the Congress.
“U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that the U.S. will soon send additional security assistance to Taiwan through the presidential drawdown authority that the Congress authorized last year. The White House said earlier this month that it will send $500 million worth of weapons aid to Taiwan using the PDA.
According to a U.S. government website, the presidential drawdown authority is a valuable tool of U.S. foreign policy in crisis situations as it allows for the speedy delivery of defense articles and services from Department of Defense stocks to foreign countries and international organizations to respond to unforeseen emergencies.
Last year, the U.S. Congress increased the cap on the presidential drawdown authority from $100 million to $11 billion for fiscal year 2022 after the Ukrainian war broke out. Since last August, the White House has employed the tool 37 times to provide military assistance to Ukraine.
A Shanghai-based military columnist said in an article that the U.S. is considering using the presidential drawdown authority for Taiwan as it wants to compensate the island after it failed to deliver 66 units of F-16V fighters on time.
He says the arms that the U.S. is going to send to Taiwan are probably defensive ones, such as FIM-92 Stinger, FGM-148 Javelin and the M136 Volcano Vehicle-Launched Scatterable Mine System, instead of offensive weapons.
It is expected that the Taiwan matter will be among the key discussion topics in the G7 Summit, which will be held in Hiroshima between May 19th and May 21st.
‘As the host of the upcoming G7 Summit, Japan has been stoking and creating bloc confrontation, which undermines the interests of the region’, Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson of the Chinese foreign ministry said. ‘China firmly opposes it’.
Wang said people in Japan who are claiming that ‘any contingency for Taiwan is a contingency for Japan’ are the ones who want to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait”. -Jeff Pao, Asia Times
By creating disruption across the Taiwan Straits, the United States believes it can effectively complicate the region in order to handicap China's development.
Additionally, using a drawdown not only serves as an obstacle to the island’s reunification with the Chinese mainland but also enables the U.S. to sidestep the otherwise lengthy process of contracting and producing weapons as they have with regard to Ukraine.
However, if the reunification of Taiwan is to be interfered with, the United States may have to shift its focus from the Taiwan Strait to the Korean Peninsula as it should prepare itself for the possibility of losing Japan and South Korea in response to its provocations against China.