The US is not please with the recent aggressive on Diaoyutai dispute by Taiwan
This year's Taiwan-US Defense Industry Conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, came after a series of aggressive moves carried out by Taiwan's political leadership and elements of the island's armed forces against US ally Japan over its stance on the disputed Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, it is the prevailing assessment in Taiwan that the conspicuous absence of the US officials and Washington's dissatisfaction with Taipei are connected.
Militarily, the US and Taiwan are de facto allies, with the former being the latter's sole security guarantor and meaningful supplier of weapons. In the absence of official bilateral ties, all military-related exchanges are conducted in various semi-official conferences and symposiums. Among those, there are the so-called Monterey Talks that in effect bring together the Pentagon and Taiwan's national-security officials, and there also is the US-Taiwan Business Council's Taiwan-US Defense Industry Conference.
Such meetings have been postponed in the past and schedules have undergone last-minute changes, but behind those there always appeared to have been reasons that were rather weighty, for example, Hurricane Katrina having struck the US in 2005 or Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington in 2006. Therefore, most observers in Taiwan thought, it could not possibly have been a harmless coincidence that only two days before this year's Taiwan-US Defense Industry Conference, Mark Lippert, US assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, who was reportedly scheduled to deliver a keynote speech, announced that he would not come and likewise did Kin Moy, deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
These observers could not get over the fact that it was the first time since 2002 that no senior official from the State Department had attended that particular conference, and thus they settled for one explanation.
The most plausible one seems to be a US gesture of displeasure with the escort of Taiwan's fishing boats by coast-guard vessels to the Diaoyutais and the resultant skirmish with the Japanese boats, for the US is behind Japan on this issue." Wu Yu-shan, director of the Institute of Political Science at Taiwan's Academia Sinica, the island's most renowned research institution, told Asia Times Online.
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Asia Times Online :: Taiwan shaken by US conference confusion
I wouldn't surprised the US would dump Taiwan under the bus for the benefit of her favorite client state or, should I say, her favorite colony.
