Joe Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” seemed a perfect backdrop for a diplomatic demarche that summed up the cowardice and slavish kowtowing by the Biden administration toward China. The summit, the brainchild of Biden’s State Department, brought together more than 100 world leaders from “democratic” nations — many of whom can’t even spell “democracy,” let alone live it.
Joe Biden’s little democracy clique left out Russia and China — two nations with arguably better human rights than a couple of countries whom Biden embraced during the meeting.
No matter. China proved that they didn’t need to be present at a meeting to force America to its knees.
Taiwanese Digital Minister Audrey Tang gave a presentation that included a color-coded map ranking the world by openness on human rights. The map displayed China and Taiwan in different colors, clearly showing the island as a separate nation from China.
Most of Asia was shown, with Taiwan colored green, making it the only regional entity portrayed as “open,” while all the others, including several U.S. allies and partners, were labeled as being “closed,” “repressed,” “obstructed” or “narrowed.”
China, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea were colored red and labeled “closed.”
When the moderator returned to Tang a few minutes later, there was no video of her, just audio, and a screenshot captioned: “Minister Audrey Tang Taiwan.” An onscreen disclaimer later declared: “Any opinions expressed by individuals on this panel are those of the individual, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States government.”
The White House claimed it was just an “honest mistake” and apologized. But Reuters reports, “the map generated an instant email flurry among U.S. officials and the White House National Security Council (NSC) angrily contacted the State Department, concerned it appeared to show Taiwan as a distinct country.”
The source called the U.S. move an over-reaction as the map was not inherently about national boundaries, but the NSC was also angry as the slide had not appeared in “dry-run” versions of the presentation before the summit, raising questions as to whether there was intentional messaging by Tang and Taiwan.
“They choked,” the source said of the White House reaction.
A second source directly involved in the summit said the video booth operator acted on White House instructions. “It was clearly policy concerns,” the source said, adding: “This was completely an internal overreaction.”
China says “Boo!” and Biden’s aides wet their pants.
Related: God Bless the Republic of China on Taiwan
The Taiwanese government was actually a good sport about the whole thing. With gracious Oriental inscrutability, Minister Tang said of the cut video feed, “No, I do not believe that this has anything to do with the CIVICUS map in my slides, or U.S. allies in Asia for that matter.”
But the Taiwanese foreign ministry called out the White House aides who claimed that Tang had blindsided them by adding slides to the presentation they didn’t see.
It later said Tang’s presentation had been provided in advance and not shown at the last minute.
“Taiwan and the United States have fully communicated on this technical issue, and the two sides have a solid mutual trust and a solid and friendly relationship,” it said.
That’s how Taiwan called Joe Biden’s White House a bunch of liars.
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