NewsMax.com
Thursday, March 15, 2001

And if Beijing continues to add strike missiles along its coastline near Taiwan, it was told in no uncertain terms Thursday, it can expect Washington to boost the island's defenses with high-tech weapons.

That message from the Bush-Cheney administration was delivered in person by the commander of U.S. Pacific forces, Adm. Dennis C. Blair.

It came only weeks before President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are to decide whether to beef up the defenses of the tiny island that has been threatened by attack and invasion from the mainland Chinese.

And it is a marked departure from the much softer policy pursued toward China by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Ever since the Chinese civil war, when the non-Communists split from the Communists and in 1949 set up their own government on the island, the mainlanders have regarded Taiwan as a breakaway territory they are determined to "reunify," with military force if necessary.

By U.S. law, Washington is committed to supplying the little democracy with weapons needed to defend itself.

According to the Associated Press reporting from Beijing:

Two days into his six-day visit to China, his third visit in two years, Blair told a press briefing that "there will be a point at which that missile buildup will threaten the sufficient defense of Taiwan and which it is the United States' policy to maintain.

"It's important that the Chinese make the connection between what they deploy on their side of the Taiwan Strait and the types of technologies that the United States might make available to Taiwan to provide for its sufficient defense."

China is vehemently opposed to Taiwan receiving from the United States the technology for a theater missile defense.

And it extends that argument to include hostility toward Bush's proposed National Missile Defense system to protect the United States from attack by rogue states, which Beijing contends will start a new arms race and undermine China's nuclear deterrent.

The Chinese army's chief of general staff, Fu Quanyou, who met with Blair on Wednesday, urged the Bush-Cheney administration "to stop arms sales to Taiwan immediately so as to avoid damaging Sino-U.S. relations," according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration
China / Taiwan

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