Senator Roger Wicker, a member of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei that the US must help Taiwan if it is attacked by China.
“When dictators make bold threats, we should pay attention to what Xi tells the world over and over again: He wants to unify Taiwan with the mainland by force if necessary,” he said.
“We have no alternative but to take it seriously.”
“Strong rhetoric will only do so much,” Wicker said, and the United States now needed to increase its investment in Taiwan’s defense systems after pledging more than $150 million in July.
In Washington, Republicans offered bipartisan support for Pelosi’s visit, even as the Defense Department and the White House weighed the risks of the House speaker landing in Taipei.
“Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan and the President [Joe] Biden should make it very clear to President Xi that there is nothing the Chinese Communist Party can do about it,” said Republican Sen. Ben Sasse.
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Japanese lawmaker and former foreign minister Taro Kono said it was up to Pelosi to decide whether she wanted to travel. “If Speaker Pelosi wants to come to Asia, I think that’s her freedom to do that,” he said.
Kono said it was time to expand security agreements such as the Quad and the AUKUS nuclear submarine program to give regional governments greater ability to deal with China’s growing military ambitions.
“We need some kind of mechanism to defend our values like democracy or the rule of law and freedom,” he said.
Tomohiko Taniguchi, a diplomacy expert at Keio University in Tokyo, said governments needed to move quickly.
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“A crisis scenario around Taiwan is so acute that we do not have the luxury of talking about building multilateral institutions from scratch or waiting for an extended period for existing institutions, such as NATO, to extend their arms to this part Of the world”. he said
The Labor government has maintained a bipartisan position on Australia’s “one China policy”, which recognizes China’s claim to Taiwan but does not endorse it while urging the US to support the status quo .
Former coalition defense minister Kevin Andrews, in Taipei for the forum, said the world was in the midst of a new Cold War.
“We need the intellectual clarity and moral courage to call out this Cold War and name the perpetrators,” he said.
“This is not a big game. It is a real threat to the security of the world, no more than in this country and in this region.”
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