Adm. Samuel Paparo speaks at the Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium in Honolulu on Aug. 15, 2024. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
WAIKIKI BEACH, Hawaii — Preventing a forceful takeover of Taiwan by China is strategically important to America because the “knock-on” effects of such a conflict would foment global chaos and misery, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said Thursday.
“The interconnectedness of the world economy and its knock-on effects is a matter of importance to all of us,” Adm. Samuel Paparo said during a symposium hosted by the Global Special Operations Forces Foundation at Waikiki Beach.
“And this is why the matter of the Taiwan question and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait is important to all of us,” Paparo told an audience on the final day of the Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium.
China regards the democratically governed island as a renegade province that must, at some point, accede to Beijing’s control.
China’s military in recent years has increasingly encroached on Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, the area just beyond its airspace.
In May, China simulated bomber attacks and ship-boardings during two days of military exercises around Taiwan.
U.S. Pacific Fleet, which Paparo commanded until May when he took the reins at INDOPACOM, routinely sends warships through the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate U.S. support for Taiwan and for freedom of navigation.
At the symposium, attended by personnel from special operations units from more than two dozen nations, Paparo offered up brief opening comments before fielding a range of questions that began with, “Why should we care about Taiwan?”
The question reflected the debate over American involvement in Ukraine, which is defending itself against an invasion by Russia, as well as other global hotspots.
An isolationist wing of the Republican Party opposes providing further shipments of arms to Ukraine.
Former president and this year’s Republican nominee Donald Trump has long questioned American involvement with NATO. Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance, said shortly after the Russian invasion in 2022 that he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
Some observers have expressed concern that the U.S. abandoning Ukraine would only embolden Beijing to take Taiwan by force.
The Taiwan Relations Act, passed by Congress in 1979, however, instituted a policy of maintaining “the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”
Paparo also cited events in Ukraine in arguing that Taiwan’s security is of strategic consequence.
“It is important to all nations that matters not be settled by force,” Paparo said. “This is the matter at hand in Ukraine. This is the matter at hand in the Middle East.”
The “knock-on effects” of unsettling the so-called international rules-based order “results in tremendous disorder and tremendous misery,” he said.
“These principles of sovereignty, the principles of freedom of movement — of goods and services, of ideas and of people — have lifted 60% of the world out of poverty since the end of the second World War,” he said. “This is what these principles have brought the world.”
The future of Taiwan must be settled under “the principles of self-determination, peacefully, through negotiation,” he said.
