Hartford Courant
Date: July 28, 2018
By: John Pomfret

The State Department’s recently reported request for Marines to return to Taiwan for the

Pilots stand in front of AH-64E Apache attack helicopter before the commissioning ceremony in northern Taiwan July 17. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen commissioned the country’s first AH-64E Apache attack helicopter squadron. (Chiang Ying-ying | AP)

first time since 1979 to defend the de facto U.S. embassy there is not an isolated event. Instead, it underscores what appears to be newfound willingness within the U.S. government and Congress to challenge China and pay more attention to Taiwan’s defense.

For several decades, Washington followed a policy that shied away from irritating China when it came to Taiwan. As the island of 23 million evolved into one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies, with a boisterously free press, successive American administrations were careful not to provoke Beijing even as they tried to shelter Taiwan diplomatically and provide for the territory’s defense.

An influential report written in 2008 by a retired U.S. naval commander was embraced by officials from the Obama administration because it argued that the United States no longer needed to sell Taiwan big-ticket items, such as fighter jets, or support its submarine program, which would anger Beijing. Instead, the author, William Murray, contended that Taiwan could forgo an air force and a big navy and focus instead on making itself a “porcupine” by adding smaller weapons systems and mobile infantry units that could defend Taiwan’s beaches from an all-out Chinese assault. The logic, in the words of Thomas Hammes, a former Marine Corps colonel now at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, was that “a grizzly bear can eat a porcupine anytime it wants to, but it just isn’t worth the pain.”
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