Washington making wrong choice in its games of truth or dare: China Daily editorial

In telling a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday that Beijing's air and maritime operations around Taiwan were "intentionally provocative", US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner deliberately distorted the truth.

As many countries do, China conducts routine patrols around its territory. The island being an inalienable part of China, it is natural that it should come under this remit.

But, of course, the island is a convenient way for the Pentagon to inflate its budget and a key part of the jigsaw that the strategists in the US are trying to piece together to contain China, as Ratner again made clear when he said that for the United States, "bolstering Taiwan's self-defenses is an urgent task and an essential feature of deterrence".

In saying so, he also made it clear that for the Joe Biden administration, the commitments to the three communiques it keeps saying it abides by are eminently malleable.

His remarks also made it glaringly obvious to even the most myopic that it is not Beijing that puts the "prosperity and security of the region at risk", but the US.

For more than 70 years, the US has regarded the island as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the Far East, a key link in its first island chain strategy aimed at preserving its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region.

But times change. Clinging to what is outdated strategic inertia is no longer practical or in its best interests. Worse, it puts what is a fundamentally self-serving strategy at risk of being hijacked by secessionists on the island.

The more "deterrence" work the US does to prevent China from choosing to "invade" the island, by either supporting the secessionists or persuading its allies to close ranks with it, as US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday, the more likely it is that it will embolden the secessionists on the island to cross Beijing's redline, which will leave Beijing no choice but to use force to realize the country's reunification.

Beijing has made it as plain as can be that it will never allow the island to be cleaved from the motherland. In playing its game of double dare with the island's secession-inclined authorities, the US administration should not allow itself to get so carried away that it throws all caution to the wind.

The Biden administration should bear in mind that the US has made unshirkable commitments to uphold the one-China principle in the three communiques. It can hardly lay claim to the moral high ground it is so desperately trying to stake out if it reneges on those. And one only has to review its recent history to see that being pulled into any kind of military clash with China will only cause the US more problems than it thinks such a clash might solve.

Instead of opting for dare in its games with the secessionists, the US administration should choose to uphold the truth of one-China.