With inflation rising in the U.S. to 7.1 percent for the year, the stock market in decline, interest rates rising, fears of recession growing, and 63 percent of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, the U.S. Congress passed a military spending bill that would provide Taiwan with a historic amount of funding for weapons in an effort to repel a Chinese invasion.

The NDAA provides Taiwan with as much as $10 billion in financing and grants for weapons over five years.

Mark Montgomery, a retired admiral, told The Wall Street Journal that the support, when implemented, could give Taipei the firepower to forestall potential aggression from China and allow U.S. forces to get into position to defend the island.

He told the paper that the bill goes far beyond the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

Montgomery, who works at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the paper that the U.S. is signaling to Taiwan that it is going to help the country “pay for weapons, stow weapons for you to access, give you presidential drawdown authority from U.S. stocks, and work together to plan and exercise.”

Defense Department officials told the WSJ that Beijing hopes to acquire military capabilities that would allow it to launch an attack or invasion of Taiwan by 2027. They said the fear of China’s invasion is that Beijing would gain a major foothold in the region and push out American forces.

The 4,440-page $857.9 billion National Defense Authorization Act also includes $2 billion for Ukraine from the State Department’s Foreign Military Finance grant assistance from 2023 to 2027 and another $2 billion in loans to purchase U.S. weaponry. 

The sitting U.S. president will also have the authority to develop a “regional contingency stockpile” that can include up to $100 million in ammunition.

TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal has reported extensively on how the U.S. wants to provide Taiwan with weapons that would make its capture by China costly and deadly for Beijing. (See “U.S. TO GIVE TAIWAN MORE BILLIONS TO BUY WEAPONS,” “U.S. AIMS TO FLOOD TAIWAN WITH WEAPONS TO TURN ISLAND INTO A ‘PORCUPINE’ IF CHINA INVADES,” and “BIDEN DOUBLES DOWN ON HIS PLEDGE THAT THE U.S. WILL DEFEND TAIWAN IF CHINA INVADES.”) 

President Biden told reporters four times in the past year that the U.S. would come to the defense of Taipei if China invaded only to have his comments walked back by the White House that said the U.S. position of strategic ambiguity has not changed.

Taipei and Washington have studied the Ukraine War to learn effective ways to counter an invasion by a more powerful neighbor. Taiwan spent a record $17 billion on its military in 2022 and, in January, its parliament approved $8.6 billion more that will be earmarked for precision missiles and high-efficiency naval ships

TREND FORECAST: Despite these grandstanding visits and vows of support, we forecast that just as Beijing has clamped down on Hong Kong protests and taken full control, so, too, will they take control of Taiwan when they are ready.

Despite condemnations when they do so, there will be no military forces from other nations that will challenge Communist China’s military might. Indeed, America, with the largest military in the world, has not won a war since World War II and cannot even win against third-world nations, such as Afghanistan, after invading that nation some 20 years ago.

Again, should war break out between China and Taiwan, we forecast the Taiwanese military will not aggressively fight back, since doing so would result in millions of deaths and mass destruction.

We have pointed to numerous articles that explain Taiwan is simply no match for the much larger and more deadly Chinese military. China spends 25 times the amount Taipei does on its defenses. China also has a hundred times as many ground-force troops as the island.