President Joe Biden’s pronouncements on foreign policy issues “may or may not” carry authoritative weight, a senior House Democrat concluded after a testy exchange with a State Department official.
“So, the president makes statements [and] the State Department may or may not decide that that's our policy,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) said Thursday during a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing.
That sardonic conclusion flowed from a pair of frustrated attempts to elicit a clear answer about whether the United States government intends to follow through on Biden’s pledge to defendTaiwan in the event of a Chinese Communistinvasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s deputy assistant at the hearing, which focused generally on China’s belligerence in the South China Sea, refused on multiple occasions to affirm Biden’s repeated pledges to defend Taiwan.
“Are you saying that the president's words are not the words of administration policy?” Sherman asked Dr. Jung Pak, a leading official in the State Department’s multilateral affairs bureau. “Is our policy an unambiguous commitment of American forces to fight against an invasion of Taiwan? Is our policy the policy we had under prior administrations where we were intentionally ambiguous? Or you simply don’t know the policy?”
