Biden's Invented Security Commitment

Whatever the president hoped to accomplish with these remarks, he has succeeded mainly in worsening relations with China and in putting Taiwan in greater jeopardy.

Michael Swaine explains why Biden’s remarks on Taiwan earlier this week were so dangerous:

And yet Biden has given up on strategic ambiguity. Therefore, it has now become laughable, not just to the Chinese, but probably to many U.S. allies, for U.S. spokespeople to keep trying to clean up after Biden by stating that nothing in U.S. policy has changed. Washington cannot both provide a security guarantee to Taiwan, thereby treating it as an ally tied to vital U.S. security interests, and at the same time credibly assure the Chinese that it does not treat the island as a sovereign state.

I can’t recall another instance in my lifetime when a president just invented a security commitment in the way that Biden has. The president pretends that this commitment is consistent with longstanding policy, but it plainly is not. None of his predecessors believed that such a commitment existed, and as far as U.S. legal obligations are concerned it still doesn’t. Unfortunately, Biden has repeated some version of this line in public so many times that he would be hard-pressed to disavow it, and there is no sign that he will do that. He has created an expectation of U.S. intervention in the event of an attack that may encourage reckless decisions from both the Taiwanese and Chinese governments. Whatever the president hoped to accomplish with these remarks, he has succeeded mainly in worsening relations with China and in putting Taiwan in greater jeopardy. As Stephen Wertheim observed in his analysis, “The president’s remarks are provocative to Beijing without providing security to Taiwan or the United States.”