Ex-US diplomat rankles Taiwan with defense remarks | Nation & World | The Seattle Times: The former top American diplomat in Taiwan has said that the island's declining military budgets have left it vulnerable to Chinese attack and made it easier for mainland spies to penetrate its armed forces, remarks that the defense ministry on Monday called "not entirely objective."
The comments from William Stanton constituted an unusually hard-hitting critique of Taiwan's national security posture, and stood in sharp contrast to repeated assertions of American support for President Ma Ying-jeou's five-year program of seeking to lower tensions with the mainland, from which Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949.
