On the heels of the just-concluded Republic of China election, in which the DPP Presidential candidate won a plurality and so won the Presidency (giving the DPP, which opposes “reunification” with the People’s Republic of China, a third consecutive term in that office), but lost its legislative majority, our own Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden…messed up again.

We do not support independence [for the RoC]

That’s a clear signal of meekness to the PRC, and it magnifies the danger to the RoC.

As I noted in a comment in another venue*,

We betrayed the RoC 50 years ago, and that policy remains shamefully wrong today. It’s never a reasonable thing to support a wrong policy; its age confers no legitimacy.

It’s long past time we extended formal diplomatic recognition, again, to the RoC, and long past time we got off the dime on selling them/lend-leasing them the arms they need to mount an effective defense—and offense: there’s no defense like having the offensive initiative, which would allow the RoC to control the pace and depth of the fight. Waiting defensively to block or slip the enemy’s blows only allows too many of the enemy’s blows to land.

We also need to be far more active in air and naval patrolling of the Taiwan Strait and the waters close by the PRC-occupied islands of the South China Sea, along with low altitude overflights of those islands, and we should do so, but not exclusively so, in joint exercises with Australia, Japan, and the nations rimming that Sea.

*Claire Berlinski’s The Cosmopolitan Globalist is well worth the subscription.