US Secretary of State Antony Blinken bragged before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday that his country has facilitated $20 billion in arms sales to the rogue Chinese Province of Taiwan since 2017 and is continuing to support the island’s military-industrial complex. This amounts to a shameless admission of illegal and regionally destabilizing actions since Taiwan is an integral part of the People’s Republic of China.

America is openly meddling in China’s internal affairs in complete contradiction of its claims to support a so-called “rules-based order”. That euphemism, however, is never shared out of a sincere commitment to upholding international law but as a means for manipulating the public into supporting the imposition of selective standards in order to advance America’s own interests at others’ expense. The only real rules-based order is the one enshrined in the UN Charter, which the US is blatantly violating.

Taipei hasn’t declared independence and is unlikely to do so in any case since that would violate Beijing’s red line and thus prompt a decisive response to thwart the national security threat that this would pose. That being the case, America’s arming of Taiwan is different from Russia’s arming of Ukraine’s breakaway Donbass Republics that held independence referendums in accordance with international law and were subsequently recognized by Moscow.

While Russia’s actions in Ukraine are of questionable legality according to the West, President Vladimir Putin did indeed have a point when he told UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday that Kosovo set the contentious precedent by which he’s operating in Ukraine. Taiwan, however, doesn’t officially aspire for independence since its political leaders claim that they’re the only legitimate rulers of China. The US’ arming to them is therefore essentially prolonging the legacy of China’s civil war.

That observation once again adds credence to the claim that America’s actions are illegal. Furthermore, the US is applying a double standard with respect to its repeated commitment to ensure indivisible security in the trans-Atlantic space. The 1999 Istanbul Summit and 2010 Astana Summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) saw all participants, the US included, agreeing to this concept and that security shouldn’t be enhanced at anyone else’s expense.

It’s therefore hypocritical that the US would claim to uphold this principle in Europe, which Russia nevertheless accuses it of violating and which Moscow regards as one of the reasons for commencing its special operation in Ukraine, but completely ignore it in Asia with respect to its arming of Taiwan. That’s regionally destabilizing and contradicts its self-proclaimed “rules-based order” that was already exposed earlier in this analysis as a euphemism for selectively imposing double standards to advance its interests.

What America is doing is arming a rogue political movement that openly aspires to carry out regime change against a UN member state, the People’s Republic of China. The US itself wouldn’t tolerate it if China, Russia, Iran, or whoever else armed a similar such group inside its own internationally recognized territory, yet it inexplicably expects Beijing to be alright with Washington doing exactly that against the People’s Republic. Such double standards are the definition of regionally destabilizing behavior.

Pouring fuel on the fire of a former civil war by militarily supporting its losing side doesn’t help anyone, neither the Chinese on the mainland nor the Chinese in Taiwan. It’s a brazen attempt to divide and rule the Chinese people solely for America’s own interest in reasserting its declining hegemony over Asia. It’s doomed to fail, but it’s nevertheless still a very deadly policy, not to mention one that also counterproductively discredits everything that America claims to stand for. It must stop.