Taipei, Mar 26 (EFE).- Taiwan’s Defense Minister Wellington Koo said Thursday that Taipei has received a «letter of guarantee» from the United States expressing its willingness to approve new arms sales, amid expectations surrounding the meeting of US and Chinese leaders in Beijing.
The defense ministry maintains close communication with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency of the US—the body responsible for managing overseas arms sales—regarding the projects, quantities, amounts, and timelines that would be offered to Taiwan, Koo said, state news agency CNA reported.
Currently, the matter remains under internal review and no notification of delay has been received, the minister added, without providing details about the type of weapons involved or the total cost of the operation.
These statements came a day after US President Donald Trump announced that he will travel to China on May 14 and 15 to meet with his counterpart, Xi Jinping, a visit that had been scheduled for late March but was postponed due to the Iran war.
Among the topics that could be discussed at this meeting is, precisely, the sale of weapons to Taipei.
In a phone call in early February, Xi urged Trump to handle the issue of arms sales to Taiwan with prudence and stressed that the island was the «red line» in relations between the two powers.
Subsequently, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing US officials, that Washington had halted the approval of a major arms package to Taiwan out of concern that the move could jeopardize the upcoming Trump-Xi summit.
In any case, the US government notified Congress in December about eight potential arms sales to Taipei, valued at around $11.1 billion, marking the largest arms package acquired by the island to date.
Beijing authorities consider Taiwan to be an «inalienable» part of Chinese territory and have not ruled out the use of force to take control of it, a stance rejected by the Taiwanese government, which says that only the 23 million inhabitants of the island have the right to decide their political future.
For more than seven decades, the US has been in the middle of the disputes between both sides, as Washington is the main arms supplier to Taipei and, although it does not maintain diplomatic ties with this territory, it could defend it in the event of conflict with Beijing. EFE
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