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When Joe Biden was asked Tuesday on the White House South Lawn about China’s recent aggressive moves against Taiwan, the U.S. President played down the potential for conflict, saying that he and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, agreed on a recent call to “abide by the Taiwan agreement.”
Of course, that “agreement”—better known as the One China Policy—is nothing of the sort: Beijing interprets it as meaning the U.S. accepts Taiwan is an indivisible part of China; for Washington, however, it only means “acknowledging” Beijing’s claim over the self-ruling island rather than supporting it.
That festering intransigence is becoming ever more acute on and above the island of 23 million—the only place in the Chinese-speaking world with free and fair democratic elections—which politically split from the mainland in 1949 following China’s civil war. Beijing has sent nearly 150 PLA Air Force sorties into Taiwan’s Air Defense Zone over the past week, and the Wall Street Journal revealed Thursday that around two dozen U.S. special operations troops and Marines have been training Taiwanese forces for over a year, having first been dispatched by the Trump Administration.
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While declining to comment on the deployment report, a Pentagon spokesman noted that “our support for and defense relationship with Taiwan remains aligned against the current threat” from China. In response, China’s Foreign Ministry warned that it “will take all necessary steps to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
U.S. troops have not been based permanently on Taiwan since 1979, when Washington established diplomatic relations with Beijing. However, that same year Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which allows for the sale of weapons to the island for its self-defense.
Nick Bisley, a professor of international relations at Australia’s La Trobe University, says the most telling aspect of the troop deployment revelation is that U.S. officials are…
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Source : time
