TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – United States President Donald Trump should sell new fighter jets and anti-missile systems to Taiwan, former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Director Stephen Young said Saturday.
Young, who headed the U.S. representative office in Taipei from 2006 to 2009, was speaking at a Taipei seminar about the Chinese threat to the Indo-Pacific area.
As China was getting stronger and posing an increasing threat to Taiwan, the island nation needed to upgrade its naval capabilities, Young said.
He also said that the Trump Administration should do even more by carefully analyzing Taiwan’s defensive needs and by supplying a new generation of fighter jets and even more sophisticated anti-missile systems, the Central News Agency reported.
The former U.S. diplomat cautioned against believing that China would never do such a “crazy” thing as launching a military attack against Taiwan. President Xi Jinping (習近平) has already made his views clear that he will not fear any consequences, CNA quoted Young as saying.
The fact that China was unwilling to help Trump resolve the North Korean crisis might have contributed to the U.S. president’s move to listen more to Congress and improve relations with Taiwan, Young suggested.
The former AIT director also praised the island country’s determination to produce its own weapons systems, especially a submarine of its own, in order to make up for the military hardware that the U.S. and other nations were unwilling to provide. Young said that Taiwan should do its best to make the cost of a Chinese attack as high as possible, CNA reported.
