Congress Military Aid Package Gives Taiwan $2 Billion to Deter a China Invasion

Welcome back to Foreign Policy‘s SitRep.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Washington is set to put Taiwan’s military on the porcupine diet, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken makes a high-stakes visit to Chinaand Congress (finally) passes more military aid for Ukraine.

The Porcupine Gets Its Quills

For years, the United States has tried everything to get Taiwan onto a “porcupine strategy,” making the island a pricklier target that might make China think twice about attacking it.

US officials have authorized Taiwan to buy an asymmetric toolkit of coastal defense cruise missiles, loitering munitions, and shoulder-fired weapons that could sink Chinese boats before they land and bog down the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in a block-by-block fight if it gets ashore. Taiwan has instead mostly opted for a more conventional diet of submarines, fighter jets, and tanks.

On Tuesday, Congress passed a massive foreign aid bill after a grueling six-month political battle that allocates $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific, including a sizable chunk of change—to the tune of $2 billion—for Taiwan and other allies to purchase weapons . While the package doesn’t legislate what will be heading over, the Biden administration might manage to finally get Taipei to go along with the porcupine strategy for good.

Defense diet. “The US has more say—a lot more say—in how the money will be spent because it’s US taxpayer money,” said Ivan Kanapathy, a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former National Security Council official during the Trump and Biden administrations.

A congressional aide who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about ongoing military sales told Foreign Policy that the United States has managed to speed up some of the $19 billion in military sales to Taiwan that have been backlogged for years—a list that includes 66 F-16 fighter jets, Patriot air defense batteries, and other big-ticket items, some of which have caused concern in Washington for being decidedly un-porcupine.

New pot of money. But now, Taiwan will be getting more military aid through presidential drawdown authority—the same mechanism that the Biden administration has used to give Ukraine weapons right off of the Pentagon’s shelves—as well as through Foreign Military Financing, a program run by the State and Defense departments that provide grant money to fund foreign militaries.

Shifting Taiwan onto the US military’s dole will give the Pentagon more leverage to focus on providing Taipei weapons from Washington’s priority list. The US government is also looking into building more weapons on the island, as Taiwan has done with its attempts to build itself a fleet of submarines.

“The challenge that Taiwan has is, in essence, they need two types of militaries,” said Heino Klinck, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia. “One to deal with steady-state operations such as competing with PLA incursions into the [air defense identification zone]. And then they need a different type of military to deal with the worst-case scenario—an invasion.”

Growing pains. Building up both of those capabilities is difficult to do for all the obvious reasons, not least being the cost. US officials have long urged Taiwan to spend more on its military. It has boosted spending by more than one-fifth, to about 2.6 percent of GDP, the highest figure in its history. Taiwan has also acquired US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers and SeaGuardian drones.

But there is pressure for Taiwan to do even more as Chinese military exercises in the region have intensified—dating all the way back to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in August 2022. According to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, the number of Chinese aircraft crossing the median line in the Taiwan Strait or entering the island’s air defense identification zone surged by 50 percent in the first six months of 2023.

“The Chinese have been establishing this new normal,” Klinck said. “There’s no warning time anymore in case the Chinese were to do something.”

Let’s Get Personnel

US President Joe Biden has tapped Lisa Grande as the new special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues. Grande had been running the US Institute of Peace and was previously the United Nations head of humanitarian and development operations in Yemen.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1782741467338830278 Gene. Gwyn Jenkins, currently vice chief of the defense staff, to be national security advisor. He will take over from Tim Barrowwho is set to be the next British ambassador to the United States, replacing Dame Karen Pierce.

On the Button

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Cover story. Iran tried to keep up the story that Israel’s retaliatory strikes last week failed to hit their targets—military assets near the city of Isfahan—with a bit of a switcheroo: replacing the air-defense radar that destroyed Israeli missiles with a different, undamaged one to make it look like the Russian-made S-300 air defense battery at Natanz was still in operation.

The Economistwhich nabbed the https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1783119895158243406suggested that the deception likely wasn’t enough to fool US and Israeli spies who have high-end satellites that would be able to see that the defensive weapon was missing a key component, but it seemed to be convincing enough to enable the Iranian regime to maintain the fiction to its own constituents that the Israeli attack didn’t cause any major damage and thus didn’t warrant a reprisal.

Let’s just talk. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week touched down in China for high-stakes diplomatic meetings with top Chinese officials as part of the Biden administration’s ongoing campaign to ease relations with its top geopolitical rival. Among the many items on the agenda is China’s economic support for Russia as it carries out its war in Ukraine.

“The basic view here of how China is supporting Russia is changing, from primarily civilian assistance to actually this is, in effect, military support,” said Jacob Stokes, an expert on the Indo-Pacific with the Washington-based Center for a New American Security Think Tank.

Another big question on everyone’s minds in Washington is whether Blinken will be able to secure a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping or whether Xi will give him the diplomatic cold shoulder. “If he doesn’t meet with Xi, that’s a clear barometer of where the relationship is,” Stokes said.

Better late than never? US allies in Europe and Ukraine are breathing a huge sigh of relief after Congress passed the military aid bill, which allots some $60 billion to Ukraine. But Western defense officials widely agree this won’t be the last tranche of aid that Ukraine needs, and US allies are unnerved about whether such support for Ukraine will continue, as Robbie and our colleague Rishi Iyengar report.

It’s noteworthy that most Republicans who backed the effort came from the old guard—party elders who currently hold powerful committee chairmanships but won’t do so forever. Of the 112 Republican House members who opposed the aid package, 71 have been elected since 2018, as Politico notes, representing a new generational shift that has US allies worried.

In addition to the aid package, it was revealed yesterday that the Biden administration secretly sent the long-range variant of the US Army Tactical Missile System to Ukraine last week, which the Ukrainian military immediately put to use by hitting a Russian airfield in Crimea.

Snapshot

Put on Your Radar

Thursday, April 25: Blinken is on day two of a three-day trip to China.

Monday, April 29: European Commission presidential candidates debate.

Embattled Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez—who is considering signing as his wife faces a corruption investigation—is set to announce his future plans.

Togo holds parliamentary elections.

Tuesday, April 30: Daniel Kritenbrink, the State Department’s top official for East Asia and the Pacific, is set to testify on US policy toward Taiwan before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Quote of the Week

“It’s pure bullshit. Pillar 2 is blatant, methane-wrapped bullshit. …Why do I call it bullshit? Because it’s been cobbled together to make it look like there’s more to AUKUS than subs—there isn’t.”

—Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr taking a dim view of the AUKUS alliance’s efforts to focus on cutting-edge technologies.

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Speaking of failed bids, in the midst of the congressional battle over the foreign aid bill, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed an https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1780767303732199917 to use “space lasers” to combat migrants at the US southern border. She did not elaborate on what that meant. The amendment did not pass.