Helen Raleigh, of The Federalist, wants President Joe Biden (D) to clarify his Taiwan policy to the American people and America’s allies.
Anyone who believes that the US should remain strategically ambiguous about whether it will help defend Taiwan so as not to “provoke” China doesn’t understand the thinking of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and especially its current leader, Xi Jinping.
She went on:
Although the CCP never ruled Taiwan, its obsession with the self-governing island is rooted in the party’s insecurity—the CCP wants to be the only party that governs China and sees Taiwan as a threat to the party’s legitimacy.
Here, though, she needs her own clarity. The CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, is the only party that governs the China that’s on the mainland, the People’s Republic of China. The Republic of China, the nation that sits on the island of Taiwan, is a separate nation, never governed by the PRC (which she backhandedly acknowledged later in her piece), and will only be “governed” by the PRC through naked invasion and conquering.
Here’s some strategic clarity: Biden needs to completely repudiate the 50-yr-old betrayal of the Republic of China, support the RoC’s application to rejoin the UN, and especially (re)extend formal recognition of the nation, to include exchange of embassies. This needs to be done in conjunction with the actual delivery of the billions of dollars of weapons already sold to the RoC and already paid for by the RoC, as well as the sale and transfer of yet more weapons suites. Also in conjunction with this, Biden needs to send the Navy sailing close to the PRC-occupied islands of the South China Sea and patrolling the Taiwan Strait.
And get out of the way of our rebuilding our own defense establishment: his current proposal is a cut, in real terms, of our defense spending.