Former vice president Mike Pence’s policy-advocacy organization, Advancing American Freedom, is urging GOP lawmakers to take a strong stand in support of Taiwan’s defense against Chinese aggression.
In a new memo distributed to Republican members of Congress last week, obtained by National Review, Pence’s Advancing American Freedom group warned that “Maintaining Taiwan’s independence is essential to America’s foreign policy.”
The note, titled “Taiwan Today, Guam Tomorrow,” outlined the stakes of Beijing’s aggression against the island country and made the case that supporting Taiwan is morally and strategically right.
“Amidst rising isolationist sentiments, National security conservatives must make the affirmative case to the American people for why the U.S. should defend Taiwan,” the memo stated.
Supporting Taiwan through arms transfers is a mainstream Republican policy view, though Pence’s team sounds concerned that the party’s views on the democratic country could eventually dovetail with growing GOP skepticism of assisting Ukraine in its defense against invading Russian forces.
Advancing American Freedom argued that American strategy in the Indo-Pacific “runs through” the island and that to abandon it is to isolate U.S. allies and embolden the Chinese regime to deploy nuclear weapons against Japan, South Korea, and others.
It added that the “CCP wants to dominate the world and will not stop in Taiwan,” citing Chinese aggression near Japan’s Senkaku islands, Beijing’s recent claims to the Ryukyu island chain, and other activity in the South China Sea.
“CCP plans to use Taiwan as an ‘unsinkable carrier’ to attack American fleets and bases across the Pacific,” the note stated.
The memo also cited Taiwan’s role as the world’s leading producer of advanced semiconductors, saying that a CCP-controlled Taiwan would withhold those chips from the U.S. and that a Chinese invasion would cause a global economic recession.
It also highlighted the contrast between democratic Taiwan and the CCP’s authoritarianism.
Overall, AAF argued, “the U.S. must promptly arm Taiwan and encourage it to invest further in its defensive capacity—even as we must continue to rebuild our own military at home—in order to establish deterrence against the CCP.”
The memo could be read as an implicit response to former president Donald Trump’s comments regarding Taiwan in a Bloomberg interview earlier this summer, when he accused Taiwan of taking America’s semiconductor-chip production and called on the country to pay Washington for its support.
Trump was reported to have made similar comments during his presidency, though he appointed officials with a hawkish approach to managing Washington’s relationship with the island. The Trump administration authorized arms sales to Taiwan, celebrated Taiwanese democracy as proof that China can abandon its authoritarian government, and loosened long-standing rules against U.S. interactions with Taiwanese counterparts in a show of support against Chinese saber-rattling.