Lin Min linmin67@hotmail.com U.S. officials are intensifying efforts to build a giant stockpile of armaments in Taiwan in a bid to transform the Chinese island into a weapons depot, The New York Times reported Oct. 5 in a story that sounds like interfering with the domestic affairs of another country is just business as usual. Taiwan needs to become a “porcupine” with enough weapons to hold out if the island is blockaded and attacked, the paper quoted U.S. officials as saying. To transform Taiwan into a “porcupine,” an island bristling with smaller, mobile armaments such as man-portable Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, the Biden administration has been persuading Taiwan to order more of such weapons instead of conventional ground war weapons such as tanks — making it more costly to attack. The efforts to turn Taiwan into a weapons depot represented the Biden administration’s latest move to play the Taiwan card to contain China. In a significant shift from his predecessors’ strategic ambiguity, U.S. President Joe Biden has said four times that his country would “defend” Taiwan militarily if it was attacked, although his administration officials would walk it back each time he said it. A look at who advise Biden on Taiwan policy provides some insights on why the Biden administration has been gradually advancing ties with the Chinese island by using salami-slicing tactics and hollowing out the one-China principle. It is worth noting that the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Center for a New American Security (CNAS), has openly boasted that many of its “experts and alumni” have taken leadership roles within the Biden administration. Ely Ratner, now assistant U.S. secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, was the think tank’s executive vice president and director of studies before becoming a Defense Department official. Ratner served from 2015 to 2017 as deputy national security adviser to Biden, when he was vice president. Ratner was known to be a China hardliner, once saying that the Trump administration was insufficiently hawkish toward China. CNAS co-founder Michele Flournoy has been a warmonger and a China hawk. In an opinion piece published in Foreign Affairs in 2020, she said the U.S. needed to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.” Flournoy helped persuade U.S. President Barack Obama to intervene militarily in Libya in 2011, when she served as undersecretary of defense for policy. She also crafted the Obama administration’s policy of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, ramping up the war in the Asian country. The list of the think tank’s financial backers reveals the military-industrial complex’s influence on the Biden administration’s Taiwan policy. According to MRonline.org, CNAS is funded by the Pentagon and by military-industrial complex corporations such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, as well as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office. A review of 50 major U.S. think tanks conducted in late 2020 by the U.S. Center for International Policy found that CNAS was the single largest recipient of defense contractor money from 2014 to 2019. The report identified 29 different defense companies that have contributed to the think tank, with Northrop Grumman – the 5th-largest U.S. defense contractor in 2019 — as their biggest financial backer. The rot in the U.S. political system does not end at paid influences from the defense industry. Taiwan authorities have also been paying public relations companies to lobby American politicians. Data from the U.S. Department of Justice shows that Taiwan authorities have spent over US$3 million a year buying influences in Washington, D.C. This, combined with the U.S. determination to contain China, means the bitter bickering surrounding the Taiwan question will continue to weigh on the relationship between the world’s two largest economies. However, the U.S. defense industry is embracing this as a boon. Jay Malave, Lockheed’s chief financial officer, said the company sees many billions of dollars’ worth of opportunity in international sales, according to a Financial Times report in August. (The author is a deputy editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily.) | 