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This is extremely provocative: in a congressional testimony by retired US Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, he admitted that the US has now 500 military personnel stationed on Taiwan. This is despite the US famously committing in its 1978 normalization agreement with the PRC - the agreement that established diplomatic relations with China - to not have any US military forces in Taiwan. An agreement the US apparently abided by until the Biden administration, which acknowledged they had 41 personnel stationed on the island. And it's now been increased to 500... Why is it provocative? Not only because the US formally committed not to do that, but because of course from China's standpoint Taiwan is a Chinese province so these troops are effectively a de-facto invasion of their sovereign territory by the US. This is even the case from the US's standpoint, by the way, given they officially do not recognize Taiwan as an independent state and follow a "One China" policy that acknowledges Beijing's position that Taiwan is part of China. As such even from the American government's own stated position, these 500 troops are deployed within what they acknowledge as sovereign Chinese territory. It's all part of what China calls the US's "salami slicing" strategy: a series of small moves which in and of themselves do not justify war but which taken together fundamentally change the status quo. And, as we've seen in Ukraine, if China responds to this, it will be framed as an "unprovoked" because no-one paid any attention to what led to it 🤷‍♂️ Source for the article: scmp.com/news/china/military…