My Take | An ‘independent’ Taiwan will be a sitting duck
- There is one essential lesson Taipei must learn from the war in Ukraine: facing a nuclear-armed China, the US cannot be relied on to come to the island’s rescue
Thanks to Vladimir Putin, nuclear war is back on the global agenda. For people of my generation who grew up under the threat of nuclear annihilation only to live to see its end, its return is most unwelcome, and frankly more than a little disturbing.
If you wonder why US President Joe Biden and his White House lieutenants have been busy in the past two days backtracking – while denying he is doing so – over his apparently unscripted comments about removing Putin from power, Plan A is the ultimate reason.
“I was expressing the moral outrage I felt toward this man,” Biden told a group of reporters while rejecting criticism that he misspoke. But he said no one should interpret his “personal” remarks as calling for Putin’s ouster as that is not official US policy, which has remained unchanged, whatever it is.
That’s a lot of verbal contortion from the 79-year-old.
If Russia didn’t have a nuclear arsenal, you can be sure Washington would now be busy engineering Putin’s ouster, just as it did with Saddam Hussein (successfully) and Bashar al-Assad (unsuccessfully). But then, if he didn’t have nukes, it’s doubtful Putin would have dared to launch his invasion of Ukraine. For then, Nato and American forces would have been much less reticent about intervening directly.