OAN’s James Meyers
6:28 PM – Thursday, September 14, 2023
President Joe Biden reportedly told Congress he is taking military foreign aid from Egypt and giving it to Taiwan, due to the fact that the Middle East country was not improving in areas that it required to receive the money.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration will withhold $85 million in aid but some lawmakers pushed for the administration to withhold a whopping additional $235 million.
The deadline for the authorization of withholding the aid is September 30th.
According to the report, United States officials said the transition of money to Taiwan comes in response to Egypt failing to “make progress on human rights and other issues.”
However, the conditional aid is only a small percentage of the $1.3 billion that the U.S. gives Egypt per year, according to the report.
Additionally, the report claimed the White House is planning to redirect $55 million to Taiwan and $30 million to Lebanon.
This comes after Taiwan is facing threats from China and Lebanon is considered to be rebuilding after a 2020 massive explosion in the city of Beirut.
Taiwan is also expected to purchase 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles from the U.S., which can help stop an invasion by China.
Representative Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), Chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said earlier this year that the U.S. needed to provide Taiwan with weapons and the U.S. needed 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.”
“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.”
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By: OAN
