Top House Republican Warns: U.S. Needs To Arm Taiwan Fast, Beef Up U.S. Military Presence To Avoid War

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) warned during an interview over the weekend that China is using all means of warfare available to try to take over Taiwan.

Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on China, told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that the Chinese Communist Party was trying to intimidate the U.S. with their recent military exercises near Taiwan.

Chinese dictator “Xi Jinping would love to achieve that reunification without force if possible,” Gallagher said. “And the way to do that is through psychological warfare. It’s through economic coercion. It’s through political warfare. And that’s really what President Tsai of Taiwan has been warning us about.”

“It’s what she calls cognitive warfare. So it’s important for the American people not to be intimidated,” he continued. “And the fact that the Chinese were throwing a temper tantrum about the speaker of the House meeting with the democratically elected leader of Taiwan on American soil just shows you how sensitive they are.”

Gallagher, who is a U.S. military veteran, said that the U.S. needs to provide Taiwan with weapons and the U.S. needs to “be moving heaven and earth to surge power out to the Indo-Pacific before it’s too late, before we have another war on our hands.”

Gallagher said that the “most important” weapon that the U.S. needed to send to Taiwan are “Harpoon anti-ship missiles.”

“I remain convinced that there’s more we can do to move Taiwan to the front of the line, ahead of Saudi Arabia, for example, when it comes to Harpoon deliveries, as well as take the Harpoon missiles that we’re putting into deep storage, that we’re de-milling, and change around a few aspects of them so that we can deliver them to Taiwan,” he said. “We could also explore licensing certain weapons systems so the Taiwanese could produce them domestically. But, at the end of the day, it just comes down to energy and focus and prioritization from the executive branch. We need the secretary of defense himself to get involved, to make this a daily priority for the backlog to get cleared.”