Epoch Times
Date: August 29, 2019
By: Rick Fisher
Taiwan war planes are parked on a highway during an exercise to simulate a response to a Chinese attack on its airfields in Changhua in southern Taiwan on May 28, 2019. (Military News Agency via AP
The Trump Administration on Aug. 20 notified the Congress of its intention to sell 66 new Lockheed-Martin F-16V fighters to Taiwan. While the previous George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations refused to sell F-16V fighters to Taiwan, President Donald Trump is now returning to the longstanding bi-partisan foreign policy of selling necessary weapons to Taiwan.
In doing so, the United States is helping prevent a future “Hong Kong” and is also helping to curtail a costly “Cold War” with China.
Support for “rule of law” is not why China is gathering police and military forces for the possible violent suppression of Hong Kong’s protestors. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is deathly afraid that the protestors’ demands for real democracy could lead to the destruction of its political dictatorship and ambition for global dominance.
The CCP needs to crush Taiwan even more because it is today a full democracy adopted freely by a culturally Chinese “country,” which by simply existing undermines the legitimacy of the Party’s harsh dictatorship. Furthermore, the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) require Taiwan as a base for many of the ten aircraft carrier battle groups it could have by 2050, in addition to bases for nuclear missile submarines, marine amphibious groups, and airmobile armies. [FULL STORY]
