Taipei, Jan. 18 (CNA) Any assumption that the United States would ultimately abandon Taiwan would be far off the mark because Taiwan could play an important role in the triangular relations among the U.S., China and Taiwan, visiting U.S. scholars said Tuesday.
"The most important part of the triangle of course is Taiwan, standing between these two great powers and improving relations," said Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for public policy research, in an interview with Central News Agency.
He said Taiwan can help the U.S. by getting China to open more but Taiwan will not be able to maintain peaceful openness between the two major powers if it cannot defend itself.
That is why the U.S. should make sure that Taiwan has strong defensive capability, he said.
"There is approximately no chance that the U.S. will abandon Taiwan," he said.
Taiwan is strategically useful to the U.S., and support for Taiwan is an extension of the U.S. upholding its own values and a projection of its values to free people around the world, he added.
"That's the way that ultimately that needs to be understood by the PRC," he said.
In the same interview, Dan Blumenthal, Director of Asian Studies at the AEI, said that if the U.S. does not take a step in the next few months to support Taiwan -- whether on arm sales or deeper bilateral economic integration -- people in Taiwan will start to question the U.S.' role as a reliable partner.
"The U.S. is at a critical juncture," he said.
On the Taiwan-China issue, Blumenthal said that there are many developed countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom and Spain, which have territorial issues but they all try to settle the disputes by democratic means, such as referendums or peace negotiations.
China has said that the Taiwan question touches its core interests of sovereignty and territorial integrity and is fundamental to China-U.S. relations.
But Blumenthal said China will not be universally accepted as a truly great power "if it does not change its attitude on Taiwan."
He predicted that there will be no tangible outcome of the state visit to the U.S. by Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is scheduled to arrive in Washington Wednesday.
The visit holds more meaning for Hu on the domestic political front because he is scheduled to leave office next year, said Blumenthal, who served as senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia in the U.S. Secretary of Defense's Office of International Security Affairs from 2002-2004.
Blumenthal said he would refer to U.S.-China relations as a rivalry rather than a cold war.
The best way to avoid long-term rivalry would be through democratic reform in China, because it currently has all the "hardware" to be a successful power but not the "software" of human rights and individual liberty, he said.
The U.S. tended to think that as China became more integrated into the world economy, China would inevitably change and evolve into a democracy, but things have not worked that way because political reform is still not happening, he said.
The symbolism of Hu meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, while the 2010 Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo is still in jail in China shows the world that China cannot continue on its current path, he said.
On the significance of Taiwan's live-fire missile drill one day before Hu's arrival in the U.S., Blumenthal said he saw it as more coincidental than provocative.
There was no similarity between that drill and China's test of its J-20 stealth fighter jet during U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' recent visit to China, he said. (By Chris Wang) enditem /pc