(MON 5/23/22)

Biden says U.S. would be willing to intervene militarily … if China were to invade Taiwan, NPR reports. Answering a reporter’s question at a Tokyo news conference with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at Akasaka Palace, President Biden said the U.S. burden in protecting Taiwan is “even stronger” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to NPR’s Morning Edition.

Strategic ambiguity: White House aides scrambled to say Biden’s statement does not reflect a “policy shift” from the U.S. “one China” rule, in which it recognizes Beijing as China’s government and has no diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

But Biden said that any Chinese force against Taiwan “would not be appropriate,” and would dislocate “the entire region, and be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine.”

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Polish leader visits Zelenskyy … Polish President Andrej Duda met in Kyiv with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Sunday to express support for Ukraine’s aspiration to join the European Union. Duda, whose country has accepted the majority of refugees from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since late February, told the Ukrainian parliament that it does not need to submit to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conditions, AP reports. 

“I want to say clearly: Only Ukraine has the right to decide for itself,” Duda said.

Upshot: In part due to Poland’s enthusiastic support of Ukraine as its immediate neighbor to the west (and to the implicit threat of Putin expanding his offensive to other former Soviet satellites) Duda has been softening his country’s hardline nationalism recently.

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Speaking of authoritarian leanings … Not many headlines from last week’s Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Budapest, Hungary, where perhaps in the worst authoritarian tradition, mainstream free press were kept out of much of it. Coverage in The Guardian centered on the speakers, which included (via video) ex-President Trump, Fox News “personality” Tucker Carlson and Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

The MAGA wing of the GOP are in awe of Hungary and its nationalist-authoritarian President Viktor Orbån, who earlier this year won his fourth term. 

TV talk show commentator Zsolt Bayer, described by The Guardian as a “notorious racist” who has called Jews “stinking excrement,” has referred to Roma as “animals” and has used racial epithets to describe Black people, appeared on the CPAC stage live Friday with a prominent right wing Hungarian screenwriter talking about gender issues, and derided a 2019 Calvin Klein advertisement featuring a white supermodel with Black rapper Chika for “political correctness.”

The closing speech was by right-wing blogger Jack Posobiec, a purveyor of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that accused Democrats of pedophilia. 

In his video address before Bayer’s speech, Trump heaped praise on Orbån, according to The Guardian, which apparently did get access to key speeches, as “a great leader, a great gentleman, and he just had a very big election result. I was very honored to endorse him.”

--Todd Lassa