Down the Drain

Although hardly a surprise to anyone following U.S.-Taiwan relations, it appears that the final nail in the coffin is just about to be struck when it comes to the U.S. providing Taiwan with the 8 diesel submarines it promised the island back in 1981.  According to Wendell Minnick of Defense News, Taipei will soon decide to stop funding an office within the U.S. Navy’s submarine department that was intended to work on fulfilling that ‘81 commitment.  But with the U.S. Navy working against the program from the beginning–out of a fear that Congress might become interested in having the U.S. Navy procure less-expensive, non-nuclear submarines should they be built by American contractors–and apparently no one in Europe willing to produce or sell to Taiwan out of concern that the Chinese would be angry with them, the program has slowly but almost surely died on the vine.

Efforts to revive the program appear even more problematic now, with the Obama administration bound and determined to do nothing that risks angering Beijing.  But of course just as the air balance across the Taiwan Strait has gotten out of hand (for lack of sustaining Taiwan’s aerial defense capabilities), so too the naval balance has increasingly and decisively tilted toward the PLA-Navy.  Providing Taiwan with subs was one way to give the island something of an asymmetric defensive capability in the face of China’s naval build-up.  If one didn’t know better, one might think that the U.S. goal here is to hand Taiwan over to the mainland.  If one didn’t know better…

Gary Schmitt is director of advanced strategic studies at the American Enterprise Institute.