High-ranking US and UK officials held secret talks in early March to discuss greater British involvement on the issue of Taiwan, according to a report by the Financial Times.
The negotiations involved Kurt Campbell, the White House’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, and Laura Rosenberger, the top US National Security Council China official, and took place amid a broader two-day meeting on Indo-Pacific strategy between the sides, sources told the paper.
Campbell and Rosenberger addressed a range of issues from the possibility of London intensifying diplomatic contacts with Taipei to boosting so-called deterrence in Asia, one unnamed official revealed. The role that the UK would play if tensions over Taiwan lead to war between the US and China was also on the agenda, he added.
A UK official who talked to the paper said this was the “highest-level” and “most significant” bilateral discussion over Taiwan to date. “Naturally, crisis planning would be a hefty chunk of any such conversation about Taiwan,” he noted.