U.S. Has Secretly Expanded Military Ties With Taiwan

Over the past three years, the Clinton administration has quietly forged an extensive military relationship with Taiwan, authorizing the Pentagon to conduct the kind of strategic dialogue with Taiwan’s armed forces that had not been permitted by any previous administration since 1979, according to U.S. and Taiwanese sources.

The secret expansion of military ties began after the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1996, in which China fired missiles into the waters near Taiwan and the United States countered by sending two aircraft carriers to help protect the island. A Pentagon review later concluded that the United States needed to broaden its contacts with Taiwan’s armed forces.

The broadened ties with Taiwan are particularly sensitive because they could further roil the unsettled relations between the United States and China.

The government in Beijing considers Taiwan to be a province of China. Two decades ago, when the United States established diplomatic ties with China and withdrew recognition from Taiwan, the Pentagon restricted military contacts with Taiwan essentially to two areas: arms sales and intelligence-sharing.

But after the 1996 crisis, the United States opened the way for a much more extensive relationship with Taiwan, encompassing visits by Taiwanese military leaders to Washington and a sharing of ideas between uniformed officers about military strategy in East Asia and about Taiwan’s response to an invasion.

“The discussions have turned from procurement to the policy level,” one Taiwanese source said. “It’s things like: ‘What are your aims? What do you think? What do you see happening in the next five years?’ We never had that sort of conversation with the Pentagon before. . . . We share with the United States the action plan [for what Taiwan would do] if we were attacked.”

Recently, Sha Zukang, a senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official, warned Washington in a published interview that “conducting any form of military cooperation with Taiwan would seriously interfere in China’s internal affairs, seriously violate China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and seriously contravene” communiques between the United States and China.

At the moment, the United States does not have any military relationship with China comparable to the one with Taiwan.

On Wednesday, President Clinton said he was temporarily postponing a planned trip to Taiwan by a group of U.S. military experts who were supposed to assess Taiwan’s air-defense needs. But the Pentagon’s secretly expanded military ties with Taiwan are not affected by Clinton’s action--and address much more than Taiwan’s possible needs for new hardware.

Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui appeared to refer fleetingly to Taiwan’s deepening military rela

tionship with the United States in a little-noticed portion of a radio interview earlier this month in which he ignited an international controversy by referring to his government’s relationship to China as that of one state to another. Beijing has threatened to respond with military force if Taipei ever formally declares independence.

“In the foreseeable future, the security cooperation between Taiwan and the United States will remain an important factor in maintaining stability in the Taiwan Strait,” Lee said in the interview with a German radio station. He didn’t explain what he meant by “security cooperation.”

China is said to have become increasingly concerned about the growing contact between the Pentagon and Taiwan’s military. It objected strongly to the visit to Washington last October by Tang Fei, the chief of general staff of Taiwan’s armed forces, who met with Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

One of China’s biggest worries in recent years has been the possibility of a new quasi-alliance between the U.S. and Taiwan. China already has complained about the recently strengthened military ties between the United States and Japan, and the expanded U.S. links with Taiwan could further complicate China’s military position in East Asia.

Contacts Downplayed but Not Denied

When the United States began exploring during the past year the possibility of establishing a missile-defense system to protect Taiwan, Chinese officials told the administration that they were afraid that doing so would require U.S. and Taiwanese military personnel to exchange information and cooperate with each other in new ways.

Asked recently about the expanded military ties with Taiwan, a senior Clinton administration official sought to downplay their significance, saying, “I wouldn’t call them dramatic.” But he didn’t deny the existence of the contacts.

The Pentagon official in charge of the new military relationship is Kurt M. Campbell, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for East Asia and the Pacific. In response to a query, Campbell said, “Everything we have done has been approved at very high levels.”

Most of the information about the new U.S.-Taiwan military ties was gathered by The Times before the furor erupted over Lee’s comments on Taiwan’s relationship to China.

As explained by Clinton administration officials, there are several purposes for the new military relationship with Taiwan.

One is to reduce the sense of isolation in Taiwan, giving its military leaders a greater confidence in their ties with the United States. Another is for the Pentagon to gain better information about the thinking and plans of Taiwan’s armed forces. A third is to respond to the Republican-led Congress, which has been strongly supportive of Taiwan.

“These ties represent something the United States can do for Taiwan . . . without providing hardware to Taiwan that would offend China,” said one senior Clinton administration official.

The recent military contacts give the Pentagon a considerably more intimate relationship with Taiwan than with China.

The United States had extensive military contacts with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army during the final years of the Cold War in the 1980s, when the Pentagon viewed China as a partner against the Soviet Union.

The Bush administration cut off these ties within days after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. The Clinton administration began to restore the military relationship with Beijing, but the contacts were recently cut off again by China in May after U.S. missiles hit the Chinese Embassy in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade.

When the Carter administration severed relations with Taiwan’s government in 1978, it told Beijing that it was reserving the right to sell military equipment to Taiwan. And the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act required the United States to provide the arms that Taiwan needed to defend the island.

In the years since, most of the disputes between the United States and China over Taiwan have focused on U.S. arms sales, or “hardware.” China opposes American arms sales to Taiwan, both because it argues that they convey an official relationship and because it fears that the weapons strengthen Taiwan’s hand in dealing with the mainland.

In the aftermath of the 1996 confrontation in the Taiwan Strait, the Clinton administration quietly decided to forge the military-to-military contacts with Taiwan, which are known in the Pentagon’s lexicon as “software.”

“Taiwan needs software almost as much as it does hardware,” one administration official said. “It has problems in absorbing the hardware it already has.”

It is not clear, however, whether the Pentagon’s military exchanges with Taiwan are a substitute for weapons systems or whether they are in addition to the new hardware.

The Clinton administration has continued to provide new arms systems to Taiwan, including an expensive early-warning radar system approved in the spring. But it has not supplied as much as Taiwan has requested; for example, the United States has turned down Taiwan’s requests for submarines.

Officials in Taiwan characterize the military ties with the Pentagon as a closely held secret. But some officials connected with the Taiwan military have talked about the ties in public in Washington.

One of them is Alexander C. Huang, a Taiwan scholar and former government official whose father was Taiwan’s chief of military intelligence from 1989 to 1991. The younger Huang worked on military affairs for several years at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington, and is now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Strategic Ties More Valued Than Weapons

During a public forum in Washington earlier this year, Huang suggested that Taiwan’s developing strategic ties with the Pentagon were of greater value to the island’s military than a missile-defense system.

“I don’t care so much if we have a missile-defense system,” Huang said. “We can have a quasi-alliance relationship with the United States without [such a system]. More important are the conversations taking place between [Taiwan’s] Ministry of Defense and the Pentagon.”

The Clinton administration has been under pressure from Congress to provide greater support for Taiwan.

This year, Taiwan supporters--including Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--have introduced the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act, which would authorize the sale to Taiwan of new hardware such as theater-missile defense equipment, air-to-air missiles, diesel submarines and Aegis destroyers.

The legislation also would establish the creation of a direct communications link between the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii and Taiwan’s military headquarters. The bill has not come close to enactment, but a lobbyist for Taiwan said recently that some of the provisions could still be passed in piecemeal fashion in other legislation.