UK Foreign Secretary suggests sending weapons to Taiwan amid fears of potential Chinese invasion
DHARAMSALA, 29 June: UK’s Foreign Secretary has suggested that the UK should provide military aid to Taiwan instead of waiting until it is too late.
UK’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss made the remarks while appearing before the foreign affairs committee on Tuesday, reports the Mail Online.
“There is always a tendency, and we’ve seen this prior to the Ukraine war, of wishful thinking, to hope more bad things won’t happen and to wait until it is too late,” she has said and added that the UK should have done things earlier.
“We should have been supplying defensive weapons into Ukraine earlier. We need to learn that lesson for Taiwan. Every piece of equipment we have sent takes months of training, so the sooner we do it the better.”
Though the official position of the UK maintains that the dispute between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) should be resolved “through dialogue, in line with the views of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” the development came amid fears that China will invade Taiwan.
China constantly provokes Taiwan with repetitive incursions of Chinese warplanes into Taiwan’s air defence zone.
Besides, Beijing claims self-ruled and democratic Taiwan as its own and views it as a wayward province to be reunified with China by force if necessary.
Taiwan has been self-governed since 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang troops fled to the island after losing China’s civil war to Mao’s Communist Party.
