GOP Rep. Gallagher: Ukraine Shows We Need ‘Hard Power’ Before a Crisis, We Need to Boost Military Partnership with Taiwan

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) said that the Biden administration’s policy of relying on the threat of sanctions alone failed with Russia and that one way of applying the lesson from that would be to increase our military partnership with Taiwan and “pressure on them to invest in asymmetric capabilities, missiles, mines, things that will make it very, very difficult” for China to invade.

Gallagher stated, “We should have been doing this on the front end. Shame on us for being so slow to help our friends in Ukraine, who are demonstrating the will to fight. We could have armed them to the teeth. It would have required us to put our own boots on the ground and made this even more difficult for Vladimir Putin. But, of course, the Biden administration was wedded to this threat of sanctions-only strategy that ultimately failed to deter Putin. We need to really understand how and why that failed, not to assign blame. But so that we can learn the right lessons, and make sure that we aren’t in such a weak position going forward.”

He also said, “[T]he lessons from Ukraine, are obvious, right? You need hard power in place, on the ground, prior to the crisis to deter dictators and authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.” And “[A]s much as the Chinese might protest the move, we should be increasing our partnership, particularly our military partnership with Taiwan and really put some pressure on them to invest in asymmetric capabilities, missiles, mines, things that will make it very, very difficult to do this. But I fear that the weakness we’ve projected has just expedited Xi Jinping’s timeline for Taiwan and he might feel like he should make the move in the next two years. Because he can get away with it. So, we need to do a better job, those of us in public office, of communicating why this is so important. It’s time for America to wake up.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett