Beijing would not invade Taiwan if it believed that US allies and partners would respond by severing trade ties, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard on Wednesday, as expert witnesses urged lawmakers to acknowledge that allies’ strategic contributions go beyond defence spending.
Noting that China is “an export-driven economy”, Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said that “if they believed trade with US allies and partners would stop if they attacked Taiwan, they would never do it”.
Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province, to be eventually united with the mainland, by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state but Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island militarily.
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Mastro and other witnesses at the committee hearing stressed that US allies and partners could provide Washington much more than just financial aid to help deter China militarily.
“Too often burden-sharing is scoped down to a single figure, which is, ‘how much is a country spending [as a] percentage of GDP on defence?’” said Randall Shriver, board chairman of the Project 2049 Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
“That doesn’t always tell the whole story,” he said, noting that the Philippines has been making more military sites available to the US despite only spending 1.5 per cent of its GDP on defence.
Since his return to the White House in January, US President Donald Trump and his advisers have emphasised requiring allies and partners to spend specific percentages of their GDPs on defence, at times threatening to withdraw US military support if they fail to do so.
Speaking at his nomination hearing this month, Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defence for policy, said that Taiwan should be spending about 10 per cent on its defence instead of current levels of “well below” 3 per cent of GDP.
Witnesses on Wednesday said that US allies could offer everything from airspace clearance for US military aircraft to investments in US shipbuilding or other specific capabilities to deter Chinese aggression – as well as steadfast loyalty.
“I think it counts that Australia has fought alongside us in every war since World War I,” Shriver said.
Victor Cha, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, said that Washington needs its Indo-Pacific allies to “build a collective economic deterrence framework” to fight the potential of “opportunistic aggression” from Beijing.
In return, witnesses said, the US needed to provide its Asian allies and partners humanitarian, development, technological and political support.
“The best way to encourage any sort of burden-sharing is not to publicly criticise allies and demand it, but instead, the United States needs to offer more than security protections,” Mastro said.
Examples of that support, though, include programmes that the Donald Trump administration has dramatically scaled back, witnesses said, including the US Agency for International Development – which provided humanitarian and development assistance abroad – as well as news outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.
Shriver pushed for a speedy review and resumption of aid programmes as well as educational and cultural programmes, including Fulbright scholarships, which provided grants for US citizens to study, teach, and conduct research abroad.
The need, according to Mastro, is urgent.
“When I speak to the Chinese military directly, and I ask them about their military activities in [Asia], they tell me that they are specifically designed to demonstrate to [US] allies and partners that the United States cannot help them,” she said.
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