Taipei, Oct. 5 (CNA) A strong security partnership between the United States and Japan is vital for Taiwan's security and confidence, and China's growing military prowess is aimed at more than just unifying Taiwan, former Japanese and U.S. officials said Tuesday at a symposium.
"A strong U.S.-Japan alliance allows Taiwan to feel secure" and Taiwan's security would be badly damaged if the U.S. could not respond in the region quickly enough due to a lack of presence in Japan, said Dan Blumenthal, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who served as senior country director for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia under the U.S. State Department.
Blumenthal was speaking at an international symposium on "50 years of U.S.-Japan Security Alliance and the Security of Taiwan" in Taipei.
The U.S. and Japan signed a treaty of mutual cooperation and security in 1960 to strengthen Japan's relations with the West during the Cold War. At the "two-plus-two" Security Consultative Conference in 2005, the Taiwan Strait was explicitly included for the first time as a common interest.
Blumenthal said, however, that insecurity has often been ignored in Washington and that the current U.S. administration tends to embrace slogans without strategic thinking.
With China's rapidly growing economic and military power, the balance of power in East Asia has changed as China "has unmasked itself," showing that its military expansion means more than just the eventual unification of Taiwan, Blumenthal said. China has clear goals in its military buildup because it is "quite unhappy with many political arrangements in the Asian Pacific region," he said.
China has been trying to throw its weight around in Asia, he said, evidenced by a series of international events this year, including the crisis on the Korean Peninsula and disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
The U.S.-Japan security treaty was more than just a bilateral partnership but also "public goods" that played a stabilizing role in East Asia and will benefit Taiwan and other countries, Japanese Congressman Shigeru Ishiba, who served as Minister of Defense in the former Liberal Democratic Party administration, wrote in a thesis delivered at the symposium. He did not attend the symposium due to a political commitment in Japan.
Japan and Taiwan have been "sandwiched" between a pair of superpowers -- a rising China and a "declining U.S." -- and both need to find a position that serves their national interests, said Gen Nakatani, a congressman who served as head of the Japan Defense Agency under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
The inclusion of the Taiwan Strait in the 2005 two-plus-two declaration is Japan's "commitment as a country" and is expected to be kept in place regardless of which party is in power, Nakatani said.
The one-day symposium was organized by the Taiwan National Security Institute and gathered scholars and former officials from Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. (By Chris Wang) enditem/bc