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President Joe Biden clarified today that U.S. policy toward Taiwan has not changed at all, after saying the day before that Washington would intervene militarily if China tried to take the island by force.
Biden avoided giving further details on U.S. policy toward the island during the meeting of leaders of the quartet that includes Japan, Australia, India, and the United States.
The day before, the head of the White House warned of a U.S. military intervention in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, in his most emphatic comments on the matter and which seemed to depart from the line of ambiguity wielded so far by the U.S. Administration.
“The United States is committed to supporting the ‘one China’ position, but that does not mean that China has the jurisdiction to use force to take Taiwan,” he said during his appearance before the media in Tokyo alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Biden also claimed that China is already flirting with the danger of flying too low and other maneuvers around Taiwan, although he also noted at the time that the U.S. position had not changed and that he did not see a conflict on the island, which Beijing considers an inherent part of its territory, as likely.
A few hours after those comments, Beijing reacted sharply, stating that it will take “firm measures to safeguard its sovereignty and security interests” and that the Taiwan issue “is purely China’s internal affair” before which “no outside force can interfere.”
China “has no room for compromise on this issue, and no one should underestimate the determination of the Chinese people to safeguard their sovereignty and territorial integrity,” foreign spokesman Wang Wenbin told a press conference.
The island is one of the major sources of tension between China and the United States, mainly because Washington is the main arms supplier to Taipei and would be its major military ally in the event of a war with China, according to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act.
