Watching his chaotic evacuation plan in Kabul, 78-year-old President Joe Biden exposed his erratic side, reacting to Chinese government reports that the U.S. would not protect Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. Instead of quietly working on the debacle in Kabul, Biden felt inclined to respond to Chinese press rbeports that the U.S. can’t be counted on to support allies, especially the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. Biden announced April 17 that the U.S. would make good a a Feb. 29, 2020 deal made by former President Donald Trump to withdraw all U.S. forces in Afghanistan by May 1. Biden pushed back the date to Sept. 1 but was equally committed to ending the nation’s longest “war” before the 20-year anniversary oF Sept. 11. Biden’s desperately holding press events to reassure the public that things are under control in Kabul, when in fact things are getting worse.
With the U.S. only controlling the Hamid Karzai airport, it’s next to impossible for U.S. citizens to get through the endless Taliban checkpoints, leaving airport access next to impossible. Add to that new concerns that remnants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] are ready to attack U.S. citizens and assets. No one knows the extent of the Taliban’s cooperation with ISIS or al-Qaeda, looking to avenge the deaths of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi and al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. But whatever the utter mess in Kabul, there’s no accountability for how Biden blew his opportunity for an orderly transition out of Afghanistan. Biden had four months to start evacuating U.S. personnel and Afghan citizens but chose instead to procrastinate to the last minute. Biden started the evacuation Aug. 17, one day after former Afghan-backed President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
Biden’s apologists in the Democrat Party and press tried to sugar-coat the train-wreck in Kabul, diverting attention to what-if scenarios about Taiwan. At a time when the nation has growing concerns about safely evacuating U.S. citizens from Kabul, Biden starts spewing nonsense about Taiwan. “See? You can’t count on the Americans,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos said to Biden in a Aug. 18 scripted interview. “Why wouldn’t China say that?” Biden responded, taking Stephanopoulos bait. Biden should have told George he’s not going to speculate about China or Taiwan. But instead Biden started rambling about how Taiwan was like our NATO allies or South Korea, countries the U.S. would defend in the event of an attack by a foreign enemy. Biden’s reference to Taiwan and NATO in he same breath was astonishing, considering U.S. relationship to China
Stephanopoulos, who’s supposed to be a Democrat ally, got Biden to go off the rails. “We have made—kept every commitment. We made a sacred commitment to Article V [NATO] that if, in fact, anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with Taiwan. It’s not even comparable to talk about that . . .It’s not comparable,” Biden told George. Biden’s tangent endangers U.S. national security where the U.S. doesn’t talk about what it would do in what-if scenarios. China forces all countries to recognize Taiwan as a territory of Beijing, despite letting Taiwan live independently of Beijing’s heavy communist hand. It was a small band of national Chinese led by Chiang Kai-shek who fled Mao Zedong’s 1949 communist revolution for the island of Formosa. Talking about defending Taiwan is reckless to U.S. national security.
Biden’s debacle in Kabul has left him scrambling to divert attention away from the slow-moving train wreck trying to evacuate U.S. citizens and foreign nationals from Kabul. U.S. policy toward Taiwan has been one of strategic ambiguity, selling arms to the Republic of China to defend itself from a possible Chinese invasion. But whatever hypothetically happens in Taiwan, under no circumstances would the Pentagon get into a war with Beijing, knowing any war could escalate into WW III. “U.S. will abandon Taiwan in a crisis given its tarnished credibility and that “Washington just left despite the worsening situation in Kabul. Is this some kind of omen of Taiwan’s future fate?” said China’s state propaganda paper Global Times. Biden should not take the bate either from Stephanopoulos but certainly not from Chinese state media.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who’s main job is to clean up Biden’s gaffes, offered even a more dangerous explanation of the U.S. relation to Taiwan. “We stand by, as is outlined in the Taiwan Relations Agreement, by our—by individuals in Taiwan. We stand by our partners around the world who are subject to this kind of propaganda that Russia and China are projecting,” Psaki. Psaki’s statements, like Biden, need someone to clean them up. Taiwan Relations Act [TRA] actually establishes a one-China policy, while, at the same time, recognizing the independence of Taiwan At no place in the TRA does it say that the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. But instead of talking such nonsense, Biden and Psaki should focus all the White House efforts on cleaning up the mess in Kabul, now threatening thousands of U.S. lives.
