Iraq War architect and former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton has offered praise for President Biden over the White House’s purported plans to send hundreds of troops to Taiwan, saying he was confident that “this is the right thing to do.”
“I would homeport a couple of American naval vessels at Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s big harbor, and show the Chinese we’re gonna be there training and assisting the Taiwanese against any possible Chinese attack,” Bolton said in a television interview on Thursday.
The hawkish former official, whom his former boss Donald Trump once famously characterized as someone who “has never seen a war he didn’t like,” assured that “the aim” of ramping up tensions with China in Taiwan via the troop deployment was “is not to win a war that China starts,” but “to deter China from doing it.”
“And believe me, we can do a lot more to do that,” Bolton said.
23 February 2023, 17:35 GMT
The US already has a token force of 30 Marines stationed on Taiwan, and has rotated small numbers of troops onto and off the island since at least 2005, both to guard the US’s de facto embassy in Taipei, and to engage in training with Taiwanese troops.
China has repeatedly criticized such deployments as a “severe violation” of the agreements underpinning China-US diplomatic relations, and other treaties, pointing out that they run counter not only to international law but to US laws as well.
Washington withdrew its troops from Taiwan and closed down the United States Taiwan Defense Command in 1979 as it moved to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Under agreements on relations, the US is compelled to adhere to the One China principle – which states that there is only one sovereign state under the name China, that the PRC is the sole legitimate government of China, and that Taiwan is part of China. A separate 1982 joint communique obliged Washington to gradually whittle its arms sales to Taiwan down to zero (although the US has refused to do so in the decades since).
The Taiwan question became a major sticking point in China-US relations after President Biden stated that Washington would come to Taipei’s aid in the event of “Chinese aggression,” and as a stream of US officials and lawmakers, starting with now former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, traveled to the island to shore up diplomatic contacts – in violation of agreements with Beijing. At the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party last October, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized that the PRC remains committed to peaceful reunification with Taipei under the One Country, Two Systems model applied to Hong Kong and Macau. Xi warned however that “Taiwan is China’s Taiwan,” and that Beijing will “never compromise to renounce the use of force” to resolve the island’s status in the event of “interference by outside forces and the few separatists seeking ‘Taiwan independence’.”
John Bolton has been a well-known fixture of Washington politics for decades. Before being picked as Trump’s national security advisor from 2018-2019, he served as the US ambassador to the United Nations, and as an undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, during the George W. Bush administration. He’s widely seen as one of the architects of the Iraq War, and worked as the director of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative Washington think tank which proposed one year before 9/11 that the US would need “some catastrophic and catalyzing event –like a new Pearl Harbor” to cement its post-Cold War global hegemony through a series of military interventions abroad.
Bolton has had a humorous and well-publicized falling out with Trump after getting fired from the job of national security advisor, calling the former president a “danger for the republic” and intimating that he was a fool who “very rarely read much” during intelligence briefings. Trump countered, calling Bolton “one of the dumbest people in Washington,” and suggesting that if he’d ever “listened to him” on foreign policy matters, “we’d be in World War Six.”