Biden’s bullish rhetoric on Taiwan risks provoking China with no gain in security | Stephen Wertheim

The president's latest pledge to defend the island contradicts the US's longstanding One China policy

In May 2001, the new US president told an interviewer that the United States was obligated to go to war with China if it attacked Taiwan. The United States would do whatever it took" to defend the island, George W Bush vowed.

Then-Senator Joe Biden was not impressed. Taking to the Washington Post to pen Not So Deft On Taiwan," Biden scolded the president. Words matter, in diplomacy and in law," he wrote. The fact was that the United States possessed no formal obligation to defend Taiwan. As Biden explained, the United States had purposefully abrogated such a commitment and adopted the Taiwan Relations Act, for which Biden had personally voted in 1979. True, the law required the United States to help Taiwan to defend itself and declared a threat to the peace and security of the region to be of grave concern to the United States." But it did not obligate American forces to fight on the island's behalf.

Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy