The Taiwan blank check
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The Taiwan blank check is John Kiriakou's account of what lay behind the Republican revolt against Ukraine funding in 2023: not a general aversion to foreign commitments, but a preference for a different one.

Where the money would go instead

Kiriakou agreed with the framing that the congressional Republicans refusing to write another blank check to Ukraine were largely the members who wanted to write it for Taiwan, and who would rather be in a direct conflict with China than bogged down in Eastern Europe for a decade.

He treated the sentiment as a symptom of a wider media-fed confusion about China. Recalling an elderly family friend during the 2020 election who told him she would not vote for Joe Biden because "Biden's with China" and then could not explain what she meant, Kiriakou's reply was that she watched "way too much Fox News. Way too much. Not wanting to bomb China does not mean you're with China."

His own objection to the policy

Having dismissed the partisan framing, Kiriakou registered a substantive worry of his own, and directed it at the administration in office: "I actually fear the Biden foreign policy on China because I think it's just as provocative as the Trump foreign policy was toward China."

The specifics he named were the confrontations in the South China Sea and the Strait of Taiwan, and the transfer of F-35s and guided missile systems to Taiwan. His prescription was the opposite of the congressional impulse: "if anything, we should be at the negotiating table with the Chinese, not poking the hornet's nest. And that's really what we've been doing."

See also

- China as economic threat
- China as mediator
- The Richard Haass back channel
