Former US President Donald Trump offered an ambiguous personal prediction on the situation with Taiwan during his interview on Wednesday with the former UK MEP, Nigel Farage, on GB News, saying that “something will happen” between China and the island.
According to Trump’s insinuations, China could make a military move on the island after the Beijing Winter Olympics, sometime in 2022.
Talking about the United States of America and where it stands in the world at the moment, under the Biden administration, Trump responded harshly saying that it’s at the lowest point it’s ever been at and that the US is not respected anymore.
Elaborating on that claim, the 45th US commander-in-chief pointed towards the change in Beijing’s behavior towards the US since he left office and the heightening of aggression from Beijing towards Taipei.
Trump stressed that when he was president of the US, there were no Chinese planes flying over Taiwan and that even the name of the island wasn’t mentioned. He was obviously referring to the 159 incursions the Chinese warplanes made into Taiwan’s air defense zone in November.
Just for comparison, Chinese Army planes only into Taiwan’s airspace flew on two occasions during Trump’s presidency, both in September 2020.
Beijing, which considers Taiwan as its own territory and claims sovereignty over the island nation despite it has been governed separately for more than seven decades, vowed on more than one occasion to seize it one day, by force if necessary.
Chinese aggression skyrocketed in 2016 after Tsai Ing-wen, who rejects the ‘One-China policy’, came to power, prompting Taipei to increase strategic ties with Western democracies including the US and Japan.
Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe stressed on Wednesday that Beijing must understand that Japan and the US would not stand by if China attacks Taiwan, pointing that a Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency, and therefore an emergency for the Japan-US alliance.
Abe’s remarks angered China, which summoned Japan’s ambassador in Beijing, Shui Hideo, for an “emergency meeting” to express strong protest, with Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Hua Chunying calling Abe’s remarks a violation of basic norms of relations between the two countries.
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