TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — US President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for national security advisor last month stressed Taiwan's strategic importance and the need to arm the country to deter a Chinese invasion.
On Nov. 11, news broke that Trump tapped Representative Mike Waltz to serve as his national security advisor. Waltz is considered a China hawk, serves on the House China Task Force, and is a member of the Congressional Taiwan Caucus.
In his book "Hard Truths: Think and Lead Like a Green Beret," Waltz advocated a five-part strategy to deter China, including accelerating arming Taiwan, re-assuring Pacific allies, and modernizing military aircraft and naval vessels, per Reuters. In late October, Waltz commented on Taiwan's importance while promoting his book at a Reagan Foundation event in California.
Waltz claimed that a month before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv had requested weapons from the Biden administration to deter Putin, but it refused. He said the reason by the White House was that the weapons delivery would be too provocative and escalatory, providing Putin with an excuse to invade.
Waltz said the Biden administration is “applying the same mentality to Taiwan right now.” He said its premise is that the US should not arm Taiwan because it would provoke Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平).
Waltz, referring to these actions as weakness, called them the “exact provocative action.” He accused the Biden administration of having “slow rolled us” into a stalemate by gradually allowing weapons into Ukraine, thus not enabling them to have a decisive effect.
Waltz argued a more effective strategy would be to complete the Keystone XL pipeline and lift the ban on exporting US natural gas to fill the global market with oil and gas. He claimed the subsequent drop in oil prices would put Putin's war machine “on life support," weaken Iran's economy, and lower inflation.
The congressman said that Xi is talking about America's decline and replacing Western values with that of a “techno surveillance state dictatorship.” Referring to China's consolidation of power in the region Waltz said, “The first step was Tibet. The next step was Hong Kong. The next step is Taiwan.”
Waltz said a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would mean "not only would they control 80% of the world's most advanced computer chips, if you look at the geography they would control the shipping lanes into Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, about 50% of global GDP.”
The representative said China's navy and space force have surpassed the US, while Beijing is tripling the size of its nuclear arsenal. He compared Beijing's military buildup to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
He said that China's state-sponsored cyber actors, such as Volt Typhoon, have built “cyber time bombs” in critical US infrastructure. “The first shot in every war game now is fired in space and in cyber,” Waltz said, advocating for the US Space Force.