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Biden: No Change To U.S. "Strategic Ambiguity" On Taiwan Defense

Biden: No Change To U.S. "Strategic Ambiguity" On Taiwan Defense

By Trevor Hunnicutt and Sakura Murakami

TOKYO (Reuters) -- President Joe Biden on Tuesday said there was no change to a U.S. policy of "strategic ambiguity" on Taiwan, a day after he appeared to stretch the limits of the U.S. line on the island by saying he would be willing to use force to defend it.

The issue of Taiwan looms over a meeting in Tokyo of leaders of the Quad grouping of the United States, Japan, Australia and India, who have stressed their determination to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific region in the face of an increasingly assertive China.

While Washington is required by law to provide self-ruled Taiwan with the means to defend itself, it has long followed a policy of "strategic ambiguity" on whether it would intervene militarily to protect it in the event of a Chinese attack - a convention Biden had appeared to break with on Monday.

On Tuesday, Biden, asked if there had been any change to the U.S. policy on Taiwan, responded: "No."

"The policy has not changed at all. I stated that when I made my statement yesterday," he said after a round of talks with his Quad colleagues.

China considers Taiwan an inalienable part of its territory and says it is the most sensitive and important issue in its relationship with Washington.

Biden's Monday comment, when he volunteered U.S. military support for Taiwan, was the latest in a series of apparently off-the-cuff assertions that suggest his personal inclination is to defend it.

Some critics have said he has misspoken on the issue, or made a gaffe, and his muddying of the issue risked accelerating China's desire to act, without carrying the muscle of a formal security guarantee.

But other policy analysts have suggested that given Biden's extensive foreign policy experience, and the context in which he made the remarks, next to Japan's prime minister and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggested he didn't misspeak.

Taiwan was not an official item on the Quad agenda and Biden spoke more about Ukraine, condemning Russia's invasion as a global issue.

"Russia's assault of Ukraine only heightens the importance of those goals of fundamental principles of international order, territorial integrity and sovereignty. International law, human rights must always be defended regardless of where they're violated in the world," he said.

Biden said the United States would stand with its "close democratic partners" to push for a free and open Indo-Pacific.

'Ambitious Action'

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida echoed Biden's condemnation of Russia, saying its invasion "shakes the foundation of international order" and was a direct challenge to the principles of the United Nations.

"We should not allow similar things to happen in the Indo-Pacific region," he said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not mention Ukraine, Russia or China in his opening remarks.

India has frustrated the United States with what it regards as a lack of support for U.S.-led sanctions on Russia and condemnation of its invasion.

Though India has developed close U.S. ties in recent years and is a vital part of the Quad grouping aimed at pushing back against China, it also has a long-standing relationship with Russia, which remains a major supplier of its defense equipment and oil supplies.

India abstained in U.N. Security Council votes on Russia's invasion, though it did raise concerns about some killings of Ukrainian civilians.

New Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his goals were aligned with the priorities of the Quad, telling his fellow leaders he wanted them all to lead on climate change.

"The region is looking to us to work with them and to lead by example," he said.

"That's why my government will take ambitious action on climate change and increase our support to partners in the region as they work to address it, including with new finance."

China has been extending its influence in the Pacific where island nations face some of the most direct risks from rising seas.

On India's stand on Ukraine, a U.S. official said Biden, who is due to hold bilateral talks with Modi later on Tuesday, would seek out commonalities, emphasizing the importance of a face-to-face meeting.

"It's true with all the members of Quad there are some differences, the question is how they're addressed and how they're managed," the official said in a briefing to reporters before the talks.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Sakura Murakami, David Dolan, Chang-Ran Kim, Kiyoshi Takenaka and Krishna Das; writing by Trevor Hunnicutt and Elaine Lies; editing by Michael Perry, Robert Birsel)


Covid-19 vaccines

How Pharma's Greed Is Blocking Vaccination For The Whole World

Reprinted with permission from DC Report

The big drug companies are killing people.

I get to say this about the drug companies, now that President Joe Biden has said that Facebook is killing people by allowing people to use its system to spread lies about the vaccines. There is actually a better case against the drug companies.

After all, they are using their government-granted patent monopolies and their control over technical information about the production of vaccines to limit the supply of vaccines available to the world. As a result, most of the population in the developing world is not yet vaccinated. And, unlike the followers of Donald Trump, people in developing countries are not vaccinated because they can't get vaccines.

The TRIPS Waiver Charade

The central item in the story about speeding vaccine distribution in the developing world is the proposal put forward at the World Trade Organization last October (yes, that would be nine months ago), by India and South Africa, to suspend patents and other intellectual property rules related to vaccines, tests, and treatments for the duration of the pandemic. Since that time, the rich countries have been engaged in a massive filibuster, continually delaying any WTO action on the measure presumably with the hope that it will become largely irrelevant at some point.

The Biden administration breathed new life into the proposal when it endorsed suspending patent rights, albeit just for vaccines. This is the easiest sell for people in the United States and other rich countries since it is not just about humanitarian concerns for the developing world. If the pandemic is allowed to spread unchecked in the developing world it is likely only a matter of time before a vaccine-resistant strain develops. This could mean a whole new round of disease, death, and shutdowns in the rich countries until a new vaccine can be developed and widely distributed.

After the Biden administration indicated its support for this limited waiver, many other rich countries signed on as well. Germany, under longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel, has been largely left alone to aid the pharmaceutical industry in opposing the vaccine waiver.

I had the chance to confront the industry arguments directly last week in a web panel sponsored by the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (link included when it becomes available). It's always educational to see these arguments up close and real people actually making them.

The first line of defense is that the waiver of patent rights by itself does not lead to any increase in vaccine production. This is of course true. Vaccines have to be manufactured; eliminating patent rights is not the same thing as manufacturing vaccines.

But once we get serious, the point is that many potential manufacturers of vaccines are being prevented from getting into the business by the threat of patent infringement lawsuits. In some cases, this might mean reverse-engineering the process, something that might be more feasible with the adenovirus vaccines produced by Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca, than with the mRNA vaccines. The manufacturing process for these vaccines is similar to ones already used by manufacturers in several countries in the developing world, as well as several in the rich countries that are not currently producing vaccines against the pandemic.

Another possible outcome from eliminating patent rights is that the drug companies may opt to do more voluntary licensing agreements under the logic that it is better to get something than nothing.

If manufacturers use reverse engineering to produce vaccines, the patent holders get nothing. They would be much better off with a limited royalty on a licensing agreement, even if it is less than they could have expected if they had been able to maintain an unchecked patent monopoly.

[Editor: Reverse engineering is how startup computer companies built clones of the early PCs or personal computers. They bought IBM personal computers and paid one set of engineers to take it apart and describe what they found. Then a second set of engineers used the descriptions to build a personal computer. Voila, no royalties to IBM.]

The other route that suspending patent monopolies may open is one where former employees of the pharmaceutical companies may choose to share their expertise with vaccine manufacturers around the world. In almost all cases these employees would be bound by non-disclosure agreements. This means that sharing their knowledge would subject them to substantial legal liability. But some of them may be willing to take this risk. From the standpoint of potential manufacturers, the patent waiver would mean that they would not face direct liability if they were to go this route, and the countries in which they are based would not face trade sanctions.

Open-Sourcing Technology

While suspending patent rights by itself could lead to a substantial increase in vaccine production, if we took the pandemic seriously, we would want to go much further. We would want to see the technology for producing vaccines fully open-sourced. This would mean posting the details of the manufacturing process on the web, so that engineers all over the world could benefit from them. Ideally, the engineers from the pharmaceutical companies would also be available to do webinars and even in-person visits to factories around the world, with the goal of assisting them in getting their facilities up-to-speed as quickly as possible.

The industry person on my panel didn't seem to understand how governments could even arrange to have this technology open-sourced. He asked rhetorically whether governments can force a company to disclose information.

As a legal matter, governments probably cannot force a company to disclose information that it chooses to keep secret. However, governments can offer to pay companies to share this information. This could mean, for example, that the U.S. government (or some set of rich country governments) offers Pfizer $1-$2 billion to fully open-source its manufacturing technology.

Suppose Pfizer and the other manufacturers refuse reasonable offers. There is another recourse. The governments can make their offers directly to the company's engineers who have developed the technology. They can offer the engineers say $1-$2 million a month for making their knowledge available to the world.

This sharing would almost certainly violate the non-disclosure agreements these engineers have signed with their employers. The companies would almost certainly sue engineers for making public disclosures of protected information. Governments can offer to cover all legal expenses and any settlements or penalties that they face as a result of the disclosure.

The key point is that we want the information available as soon as possible. We can worry about the proper level of compensation later. This again gets back to whether we see the pandemic as a real emergency.

Suppose that during World War II Lockheed, General Electric, or some other military contractor developed a new sonar system that made it easier to detect the presence of German submarines. What would we do if this company refused to share the technology with the U.S. government so that it was better able to defend its military and merchant vessels against German attacks?

While that scenario would have been almost unimaginable – no U.S. corporation would have withheld valuable military technology from the government during the war – it is also almost inconceivable that the government would have just shrugged and said, "Oh well, I guess there is nothing we can do." (That's especially hard to imagine since so much public money went into developing the technology.) The point is that the war was seen as a national emergency and the belief that we had to do everything possible to win as quickly as possible was widely shared. If we see the pandemic as a similar emergency, it would be reasonable to treat it in the same way as World War II.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is what the industry representative saw as the downside of making their technology widely available. The argument was that the mRNA technology was not actually developed to be used against Covid. Its value against the pandemic was just a fortunate coincidence. The technology was actually intended to be used for vaccines against cancer and other diseases.

From the industry perspective, the downside is that if they made their technology more widely available, then other companies may be able to step in and use it to develop their own vaccines against cancer and other diseases. In other words, the big fear is that we will see more advances in health care if the technology is widely available, pretty much the exact opposite of the story about how this would impede further innovation.

I gather most of us do not share the industry's concerns that open-sourcing technology could lead to a proliferation of new vaccines against deadly diseases, but it is worth taking a moment to think about the innovation process. The industry has long pushed the line that the way to promote more innovation is to make patent and related monopolies longer and stronger. The idea is that by increasing potential profits, we will see more investment in developing new vaccines, cures, and treatments.

But these monopolies are only one way to provide incentives, and even now they are not the only mechanism we use. We also spend over $40 billion a year in the United States alone on supporting biomedical research, primarily through the National Institutes of Health. Most of this money goes to more basic research, but many drugs and vaccines have been developed largely on the government dime, most notably the Moderna vaccine, which was paid for entirely through Operation Warp Speed.

If we put up more public money, then we need less private money. I have argued that we would be best off relying pretty much entirely on public money. This would take away the perverse incentives created by patent monopoly pricing, like the pushing of opioids that was a major factor in the country's opioid crisis. It would also allow for the open-sourcing of research, which should be a condition of public funding. This could create the world the industry fears, as many companies could jump ahead and take advantage of developments in mRNA technology to develop vaccines against a variety of diseases.

But even if we don't go the full public funding route, it is pretty much definitional that more public funding reduces the need for strong patent monopolies to provide incentives. If we put up more dollars for research, clinical testing, or other aspects of the development process, then we can provide the same incentive to the pharmaceutical industry with shorter and/or weaker monopoly protections.

In the vaccine context, open-source means not only sharing existing technology, but creating the opportunity for improving it by allowing engineers all of the world to inspect production techniques. While the industry would like to pretend that it has perfected the production process and possibilities for improvement do not exist, this is hardly plausible based on what is publicly known.

To take a few examples, Pfizer announced back in February that it found that changing its production techniques could cut production time in half. It also discovered that its vaccine did not require super-cold storage. Rather, it could be kept in a normal freezer for up to two weeks. In fact, Pfizer did not even realize that its standard vial contained six doses of the vaccine rather than five. This meant that one sixth of its vaccines were being thrown into the toilet at a time when they were in very short supply.

Given this history, it is hard to believe that Pfizer and the other pharmaceutical companies now have an optimal production system that will allow for no further improvements. As the saying goes, when did the drug companies stop making mistakes about their production technology?

Has Anyone Heard Of China?

It is remarkable how discussions of vaccinating the world so often leave out the Chinese vaccines. They are clearly not as effective as the mRNA vaccines, but they are nonetheless hugely more effective in preventing death and serious illness than no vaccines. And, in a context where our drug companies insist that they couldn't possibly produce enough vaccines to cover the developing world this year, and possibly not even next year, we should be looking to the Chinese vaccines to fill the gap.

China was able to distribute more than 560 million vaccines internally in the month of June, in addition to the doses it supplied to other countries. Unless the country had a truly massive stockpile at the start of the month, this presumably reflects capacity in the range of 500 million vaccines a month. The Chinese vaccines account for close to 50 percent of the doses given around the world to date.

It would be bizarre not to try to take advantage of China's capacity. There obviously are political issues in dealing with China, but America and other Western countries should try to put these aside, if we are going to be serious about vaccinating the world as quickly as possible.

'Mistakes Were Made' — NOT Our National Motto

If a vaccine-resistant strain of the coronavirus develops, and we have to go through a whole new round of disease, deaths, and shutdowns, it will be an enormous disaster from any perspective. The worst part of the story is that it is a fully avoidable disaster.

We could have had the whole world vaccinated by now, if the United States and other major powers had made it a priority. Unfortunately, we were too concerned about pharmaceutical industry profits and scoring points against China to go this route.

Nonetheless, we may get lucky. Current infection rates worldwide are down sharply from the peaks hit in April, but they are rising again due to the Delta variant. It is essential to do everything possible to accelerate the distribution of vaccines. It is long past time that we started taking the pandemic seriously.

Danziger Draws

Danziger Draws

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.

Exclusive Excerpt 2: ‘Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton’

Exclusive Excerpt 2: ‘Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton’

In Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, published on September 13 by Simon & Schuster, National Memo editor Joe Conason tells the remarkable story of the 42nd president’s life and times since his presidency ended. Having departed the White House under the cloud of controversial last-minute pardons, Clinton saw his popularity in the United States plummet almost instantly. But he soon discovered that overseas he still could do useful work — and find friendly audiences. That discovery began when he decided to bring relief to Gujarat, India — the site of a ruinous earthquake on January 25, 2001, less than a week after he left office. The Indian prime minister asked for Clinton’s help, and he swiftly organized friends in the Indian diaspora in the United States into a new organization, the American India Foundation.

..

In Gujarat, Clinton had found a compelling cause—with donors so enthusiastic and generous that the American India Foundation increased its fundraising goal to $50 million and scheduled a weeklong visit to the subcontinent, led by Clinton, primarily to assess conditions in the desolated western region. His experience as governor and president had afforded him considerable expertise in dealing with disasters, both natural and man-made.

Returning to India little more than a year after his historic March 2000 state visit, Clinton’s itinerary included a couple of days touring the damage in Gujarat state, a morning at the late Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Calcutta, and a banquet hosted by the prime minister in New Delhi. No paid speeches were on the schedule. With a far smaller entourage (including a dozen AIF leaders) and a humanitarian rather than geopolitical agenda, the trip established a post-presidential style that would serve as the template for many of his foreign tours. Usually he would enjoy all the perquisites and comforts due a visiting head of state: traveling via sleek private aircraft, staying in the very finest hotel suites, eating at the best tables in the best restaurants, riding in black Chevy Suburban SUVs with his Secret Service detail, flanked by local police vehicles and motorcycles. His staff made a valiant effort to uphold that standard, as did his hosts. It wasn’t always possible.

When Clinton stepped off the Indian Airlines plane that had taken him from New Delhi to Bhuj, one of the largest and most heavily damaged cities in the state of Gujarat, the temperature under the glaring sun was 41 degrees Celsius—or just under 106 Fahrenheit. Wearing only a dark green T-shirt and khaki slacks, he jumped into a blue Jeep with [his chief aide] Doug Band, joining a slow crawl of two dozen vehicles—somehow without air-conditioning or bottled water—that were packed with members of the AIF contingent and local dignitaries. The perspiring convoy headed out from Bhuj’s airport for the towns of Ratnal and Anjar, a trip of less than thirty miles that would take nearly two hours to complete. Along the roads, thousands of men, women, and children had lined up to greet the motorcade, applauding loudly and crying “Clinton! Clinton!” as it arrived an hour late.

What they found in the flattened villages left Clinton and his companions stunned, stricken, overwhelmed. There simply wasn’t much left of those places, their small stone houses and concrete storefronts all tumbled into a jagged rubble of rocks, broken red roof tiles, and smashed wood beams, all strewn amid streets that nobody had cleared, two months after the quake. Yet the people of the towns, furious that the government had so far failed to restore their villages or homes, were nevertheless thrilled to see the tall white-haired man from America, an important man whose presence would, they hoped, draw fresh attention to their dismal living conditions. Dozens of young women and children greeted him with tossed rice and flower petals, as an elderly woman anointed his forehead with a reddish dot of blessing. Their energy lifted Clinton as he spoke.

“Today I have come to look, listen, learn, ask questions, see what we can do to help,” he said. “The people of this place have lived through an unimaginable tragedy. The most important thing is to see whether this can be rebuilt.” He said the world had not forgotten them, and prom- ised that soon much more help would be forthcoming, a message he repeated at every stop. “He’s a big personality in the world,’’ a dazzled truck driver told the New York Times. ‘’Something good will come of his visit, though we don’t know what it will be.’’ (The Times headline on the trip, featured on page one, treated him like a down-market showbiz personality: “Whatever Happened to Bill Clinton? He’s Playing India.”)

———

Gujarat state officials handed out a glossy brochure in every town Clinton visited, which claimed that following the earthquake, “the state government immediately swung into action and mobilized all available resources. . . . The entire machinery of the state responded to the ca- lamity with fortitude and determination.” That blatantly aggrandizing message contrasted distinctly with what the survivors told Clinton and his friends. Government at all levels had failed them so far, providing little more than a $40 stipend along with some sheet-metal shelters and plastic tents. After two months, many thousands remained destitute and homeless.

“Nothing has been done, and nothing is going to be done. This is all for show,” complained a teacher, as he waited to see the former president. “If Clinton stayed here a month, maybe then we would get some proper help.”

Reaching Anjar, their main destination, the visitors from America went straight to a street where one of the most horrific incidents had occurred. More than two hundred elementary school students were parading on the morning of January 26 to celebrate Republic Day, a national holiday, when the temblor suddenly toppled buildings from both sides of the narrow lane and killed all of them. He was supposed to unveil a memorial plaque there, but that plan—like the relief efforts in general—had gone wrong. The memorial assemblage had been placed mistakenly on private property whose owner, irritated because the authorities had not first asked whether his land could be used, had re- moved the plaque, leaving only the modest stone pedestal.

Rotting garbage and ponds of sewage surrounded the area, a situation that local workers had tried to remedy by hastily covering the ponds with dirt and broken stones. The smell combined with the heat was almost overpowering. In remembrance of the dead children, Clinton set a bouquet of roses down on the stone pedestal and bowed his head for a moment of silence.

There were no words adequate to this tragedy, but he had to try. “We will raise funds to help the people of Anjar to confront their loss,” he promised. “We have a plan to see if money can be given to people to rebuild their lives. We are interested in seeing results.”

Sweat running down their faces and soaking their clothes, Clinton and his companions piled into their cars for the long, hot drive back to Bhuj, where the International Red Cross was operating a makeshift medical clinic to replace the city’s badly damaged Jubilee Hospital. A CNN reporter at the clinic described Clinton as “visibly shaken” by what he had seen already. At the Red Cross site, located on the ruined hospital premises, he held a news conference with a crowd of mostly Indian reporters.

Saying that much of the money raised for disaster relief had not been deployed “very well” in years past, Clinton explained that the AIF planned to collaborate with other nongovernmental organizations and the Indian government on focused action to restore jobs, education, and housing to Gujarat. They would develop a program based largely on what he and his colleagues had witnessed. In the years ahead, Clinton would try repeatedly to improve the world’s response to the desola- tion and trauma of such vast disasters.

Now, his voice quavering slightly with emotion, he mentioned the March 2000 state visit. “I will never forget it. I have always wanted to come back, but this sad event has brought me back earlier than expected.” Before climbing into his Jeep, Clinton made another vow that he repeated at every stop: “I intend to come back to India for the rest of my life.”

He met with relief officials from the Red Cross and other agencies the next morning in Ahmedabad, to discuss what they needed in Gujarat and how the AIF could be most helpful. By then, the scale of the destruction and suffering that they had witnessed was spurring him and his AIF companions toward more and more ambitious plans. Later that day, they announced that AIF had raised its fundraising goal for Gujarat to $100 million, with tentative plans to adopt one hundred villages for reconstruction.

In his meeting with the relief agencies, Clinton seemed to be grasping at larger aspirations for himself as well. According to Vimala Ramalingam, the secretary general of the Indian Red Cross, he expressed a desire in that meeting to support other humanitarian work across India—particularly to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. He also talked about discovering new ways to solve problems in Gujarat that could improve the lives of people in poor villages around the world.

“One of the things I am interested in,” he later told reporters, “is coming up with a model which will be helpful in developing other villages in India or Africa or Latin America, that may not have had natural disasters, but would like to build a different future.”

During the afternoon he toured Akshardham, a ten-story, hand- built, pink sandstone edifice in Gandhinagar that is one of Gujarat’s largest Hindu temples. He was received with a big garland of crimson and white flowers hung around his neck, as women devotees chanted a peace prayer. Standing before the great temple he looked up, marveling that such an enormous building still stood perfectly intact, without any support from steel or concrete. “The earthquake has not damaged Akshardham?” he asked Pramukh Swami Maharaj, the guru of the modern Swaminarayan sect, which emphasizes service and tolerance. It had not. The swami walked him through the complex, trailed by monks swathed in orange robes, and Secret Service agents, perspiring heavily in polo shirts.

Despite the torrid air, again over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Clinton noticed that he felt surprisingly calm and comfortable. Scheduled for fifteen minutes, the tour stretched into an hour as the swami and the former president ventured beyond the temple into a garden, filled with statues and carved stones, including a life-sized likeness of Gandhi. Then Clinton’s glance fell upon an extraordinary artwork—the figure of a man, sculpting himself with a hammer and chisel from a giant block of yellow stone. “What an amazing, incredible idea,” he blurted. “So powerful!” The swami smiled.

The sculptor’s metaphor of self-realization intrigued Clinton, who stood and gazed at it for minutes. At last, someone reminded him that they had fallen behind schedule—and that some of his companions were almost fainting in the heat. Before he left, Pramukh Swami introduced him to temple volunteers working in the earthquake relief effort—and to a Muslim man who told Clinton that although there was not a single Hindu family in his village, Akshardham had sent workers, construction materials, and food to aid the people there every day since the quake.

In the visitor’s book, he wrote:

April 5, 2001

Thank you—


for welcoming me

.
for making me feel at home.

for reaching out to all God’s children


for helping the people hurt by the earthquake

for working for peace and reconciliation.

—Bill Clinton

Excerpted from Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, by Joe Conason. Copyright © 2016 by Joe Conason. Used by permission of Simon & Schuster.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.