The likelihood of a conflict has increased as Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping asserts his intention to bring the island democracy under Beijing’s control. He sent an unprecedented number of warplanes in sorties near the island.
U.S. forces have surged toward the Indo-Pacific to fortify U.S. allies against Chinese pressure in territorial disputes across the region. Simultaneously, the U.S. and some European officials have expanded their outreach to Taipei — a diplomatic overture that could diminish Beijing’s appetite for a conflict if it doesn’t induce Chinese officials to take a desperate lunge for the island.
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“We consider the risk of miscalculation higher than it was,” Justin Hayhurst, a top official for Indo-Pacific security issues at the Australian Foreign Affairs and Trade Department, told Australian senators this week. "There's more activity, more pressure — so we are concerned.”
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A senior U.S. lawmaker made a similar point but kept an even keel about the relative danger of war.
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“There is a risk of miscalculation. There's always been a risk of miscalculation, and it isn't worse or better today, except with the incursions that the Chinese are doing with the flights that the Chinese are doing the flights that they're taking into near Taiwan,” Idaho Sen. James Risch, top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told the Washington Examiner. “Admittedly, there’s more of it now.”
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The surge in Chinese military flights near Taiwan provided the context for an unusual statement from President Joe Biden, who declared in an unscripted moment that the United States has made “a commitment” to protect Taiwan in a Chinese Communist invasion. Biden’s administration walked back that commitment — no such thing exists in the federal law that governs U.S.-Taiwanese relations — but Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has expressed confidence that such help would come.
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“This is a very, very dangerous issue and one that requires clear statements of U.S. policy,” the German Marshall Fund’s Bonnie Glaser stated following Biden's unusual statement last week. She acknowledged that establishing diplomatic ties between the United States and the Chinese Communist regime required the abrogation of a defense treaty with Taiwan.
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“A return to that kind of a commitment ... to Taiwan’s security, I think, would lead the Chinese to conclude that we no longer, perhaps, have a one-China policy [and] maybe we are even moving in the direction of establishing diplomatic relations with the Republic of China,” she said, using the official name for the Taiwanese government. “And that might set in motion a set of actions by China.”
That controversy set the stage for dueling diplomatic tours in Europe this week, where Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu held high-profile meetings in two capitals and arranged a secret trip to meet with European Union officials in Brussels.
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