President Donald Trump's administration is moving forward with an $8 billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan, U.S. officials said Friday. The move is likely to further anger China at a time when a long-running trade war between Washington and Beijing has upended relations between the world's two largest economies and contributed to stock market turmoil.
The State Department told Congress on Thursday night, right after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had signed a memo approving the sale, officials said. Congress is not expected to object to the move. For weeks, lawmakers from both parties had accused the administration of delaying the sale to avoid jeopardizing trade negotiations or to use it as a bargaining chip.
But trade talks in Shanghai at the end of July led nowhere, and Trump said earlier this month that the United States would impose a 10% tariff on an additional $300 billion worth of Chinese imports on Sept. 1. He then partly reversed himself over concerns about the impact on Americans. He decided on Tuesday that he would hold back on tariffs on consumer goods until after the start of the Christmas shopping season.
Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, has been a longtime advocate of arms sales to Taiwan and has pushed for greater U.S. support for its government. Some analysts suggest China could retaliate by punishing American companies with sanctions, which it did last month.
On Friday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, was asked at a news conference in Beijing about the potential sale of fighter jets, hours before the news emerged of Trump's final decision. She said the United States was violating China's sovereignty and interfering in its internal affairs with arms sales to Taiwan.
She said that Beijing would take unspecified "countermeasures" and stressed that the United States would be responsible for the consequences.
The sale of 66 jets to Taiwan would be the largest single arms-package transaction between the United States and the democratic, self-governing island in years. The decision to proceed was first reported Friday by The Washington Post. Communist Party officials in Beijing have strongly objected to the package, which has been a long-standing request from Taiwan.
Chinese leaders have insisted for decades that they will reunify Taiwan with China. Taiwan has had de facto independence since 1949 and is supported by the United States.
As American administrations normalized diplomatic relations with China, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 to set guidelines for ties with Taiwan. The act says the U.S. government must "provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character."
The State Department gave informal notification of the sale on Thursday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Once those committees tell the department to move ahead, which would probably happen within days or weeks, the agency would give formal notification to Congress and await any objections within 30 days.
Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he welcomed the proposed sale. "These fighters are critical to improving Taiwan's ability to defend its sovereign airspace, which is under increasing pressure from the People's Republic of China," Risch said.
The State Department said Friday that it did not comment on arms sales before formal notification to Congress.
Members of Congress expect the entire process to take place without hitches because there is strong bipartisan support for Taiwan and for the United States to take a forceful stand against China.
Congressional officials told The New York Times in late July that trade negotiators had persuaded Trump to delay the F-16 jet sale. Lawmakers had expected Pompeo to give the congressional committees at least informal notification by mid-July, before Congress went into recess, but that did not happen.
The jets would be the fourth package of arms sales to Taiwan from the Trump administration. The first two packages totaled less than $2 billion. On July 8, the administration told Congress it was moving ahead with a $2.2 billion package that consisted mainly of 108 M1A2 Abrams tanks.
In his first term, President Barack Obama approved two large packages worth a total of $12 billion, then moved on sales of less than $2 billion in 2015. President George W. Bush approved packages worth less than $5 billion total in his first term, then pushed through sales worth more than $10 billion in his second term.
A Section on 08/17/2019