US true saboteur, backpedaling on commitments to Beijing: China Daily editorial

Neither the "faith" Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen expressed in an interview on Wednesday that the United States would defend the island if it is attacked nor the US "commitment" to protect the island, which US President Joe Biden stressed last week, mean that is a certainty.

Before US lives are truly sacrificed for the island, what Tsai hankers for is simply US politicians' verbal support, something the Biden administration has been willing to do, and done a good job of so far. But for the US, there is only one commitment that matters and that is to its hegemony. Taiwan is simply a means to that end, as it is a convenient and relatively cheap way of putting pressure on Beijing. It can even profit from it monetarily if it can sell out-of-date weapons to the island.

But the duet, in colluding with each other to continuously keep the kindling of cross-Straits tensions smoldering — Tsai confirmed US military personnel training the island forces for the first time on Wednesday, while Biden called China's actions in the Straits "coercive" that day — blithely ignore the well-being of residents on the island.

For the secessionists on the island their vainglorious pursuit comes before all else. While for the strategists in Washington the island is simply an unsinkable aircraft carrier with which to defend the US hegemony.

Claiming to uphold a rules-based order, the two sides have never ceased trying to provoke Beijing to resort to extreme measures to resolve the Taiwan question, in a bid to bring the full weight of the international community against it.

The logic of their trick is clear: to occupy the moral high ground by portraying the island as a model of democracy and to isolate the Chinese mainland from the rest of the international community by provoking it to attack "democracy".

Such tricks failed in Hong Kong with the introduction of the National Security Law for the special administrative region. And they will not work now.

The 1992 Consensus, the one-China policy and the three joint communiques lay the foundation for peace and stability across the Straits, and have been the guarantee for the island's economic boom over the past decades.

Beijing has been doing all it can to consolidate this foundation, while the secessionists on the island and the Washington ideologues have been doing the opposite. It is clear to any impartial observer which party is the promoter of regional peace and stability, and which are the saboteurs.

After US Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement on Tuesday in support of the island joining the UN system, a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry cautioned that by playing games with the secessionists on the island the US is walking on a road that has a dead end, since it will necessarily cause "seismic" risks to Sino-US relations, and seriously undermine stability in the Taiwan Straits and damage US interests.

Those cautionary words are offered in good faith.