The Morning Dispatch: China Provokes Taiwan With Airspace Incursion

Plus: Protests in the Twin Cities over the shooting death of Daunte Wright.

(Photograph by Xinhua/Li Shaopeng/Getty Images.)

Happy Tuesday! Let’s dive right in.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon said Monday that the police officer who fatally shot Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old black man, meant to fire her taser, citing police camera footage and calling it “an accidental discharge that resulted in the tragic death of Mr. Wright.”
  • A police officer was injured at a high school shooting in Knoxville, Tennessee, on Monday. The high school student who shot the officer died at the scene.
  • President Joe Biden will nominate Christine Wormuth to be the secretary of the army and Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus to head U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
  • Senior national security officials from the U.S. and Israel will hold virtual strategic talks on Iran on Tuesday, Axios reported on Monday. The talks come one day before the U.S. will resume indirect negotiations with Iran on the 2015 nuclear deal and two days after an explosion at a top Iranian nuclear facility.
  • Following a series of explosions beginning on April 9, La Soufrière volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent had its largest eruption this week on Monday, sending “deadly clouds of hot gas, ash and stones down the mountainsides.”
Twitter avatar for @C_C_KrebsChris Krebs @C_C_Krebs

How about that. Jen Easterly as the next @CISAgov Director, Rob Silvers as Under for Policy, and Chris Inglis as NCD are brilliant picks. Don’t forget Anne Neuberger as Dep NatSecAdvisor already in place. My goodness. This is a team. Proud Of You Yes GIF

Ellen Nakashima @nakashimae

SCOOP: Former senior NSA officials named to White House cyber position and head of DHS cyber agency https://t.co/i7F1967Ke1

  • The United States confirmed 72,545 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 6.6 percent of the 1,101,031 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 472 deaths were attributed to the virus on Monday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 562,533. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 27,952 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. Meanwhile, 2,644,914 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, with 120,848,490 Americans having now received at least one dose.

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China Provokes Taiwan in South China Sea

One day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken took to Meet the Press to express concerns over Beijing’s recent “aggressive actions” in the South China Sea, the Chinese Air Force deployed 25 fighter jets and nuclear-capable bombers to Taiwanese airspace in its largest recorded incursion to date. Monday’s saber-rattling—combined with increasingly hostile rhetoric from Chinese officials—raises alarm bells of an impending invasion by Beijing to retake the island nation.

Astute observers and regional experts attribute the military exercises, at least in part, to American movement toward China’s “insurmountable red line”: support for Taipei’s sovereignty. The State Department released new guidelines Friday to “encourage the U.S. government engagement with Taiwan that reflects our deepening unofficial relationship.” Symbolically, “the guidance underscores Taiwan is a vibrant democracy and an important security and economic partner that is also a force for good in the international community.” In practice, it permits U.S. officials greater access to their diplomatic counterparts.

The shifting State Department protocol builds on that of its predecessor, which in its final days dismantled the “complex internal restrictions” inhibiting “our diplomats, servicemembers, and other officials’ interactions with their Taiwanese counterparts.” The Trump administration also authorized more than $15 billion in defense sales in a strategic effort to deter a Chinese invasion.

While it’s uncertain what support theAmerican military will provide in such an event, arming Taiwan has been a critical component of the U.S.’s Indo-Pacific policy since the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. The legislation “doesn’t require us to defend Taiwan, but does mandate that we sell them equipment and make sure that they can defend themselves,” Gary Schmitt, a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, told The Dispatch. “To the Trump team’s credit they made a very big effort to try to close that gap and the Taiwanese have been willing to buy a lot of equipment that they need.”

“We stand behind those commitments,” Blinken said of the legislation on Meet the Press. “And all I can tell you is it would be a serious mistake for anyone to try to change the existing status quo by force.”

Daunte Wright’s Death Sparks Protests in the Twin Cities

Last year, Minnesota’s Twin Cities were rocked by protests and riots following the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died face-down in the street with a police officer’s knee on his neck. This week, with that officer’s trial ongoing, another incident took place just miles away in Brooklyn Center, when another young black man, 20-year-old Daunte Wright, was shot and killed during a traffic stop.

According to police, the altercation began as a routine stop on Sunday afternoon: Officers pulled Wright over because his vehicle had expired tags. When they ran his name, however, they discovered he had an outstanding warrant—police said only that it was a gross misdemeanor—and moved to arrest him.

What happened next was caught on the body camera of the officer who fired the weapon, footage of which was released by the department on Monday. Wright exits the car without incident and turns to be cuffed by the officer at his window, a black man. Another white officer was standing at the passenger window; the third, a white woman—who was wearing the body camera—approached to assist with the restraining.

Worth Your Time

  • After years spent bullying his political adversaries and publicly displaying his ego,, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is one of the most unpopular Democratic lawmakers of the 21st century. He faces ongoing investigations into his nursing home death cover-up, as well as multiple, detailed allegations of sexual harassment levied against him. “At the same time,” writes National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty, “this absolutely power-mad, arrogant, sleaze bucket of a governor is the only thing preventing New York from becoming the next California.” Per Dougherty: “Cuomo began his reign in New York by immediately closing the state’s massive budget deficit, taming an unruly legislature, and then going on the offensive against big public-sector unions,” and later took under his wing a group of Democrats in the state legislature who split from the more prog
    ressive flanks of his party. “I guess it’s a tribute to this bizarre state to think, That son of a bitch was intolerable and deserved to be at Rikers; I’ll miss him when he’s gone.”

Presented Without Comment

Twitter avatar for @mckaycoppinsMcKay Coppins @mckaycoppins

Just saw a tweet calling someone a “RINO” because he wants “lower taxes for corporations.”

Toeing the Company Line

  • Is Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer likely to retire anytime soon? David Lat joined Monday’s episode of Advisory Opinions to give us his thoughts. Stick around to hear Lat and our hosts chat about Biden’s 36-person Supreme Court commission, a new opinion involving California pandemic law, Google v. Oracle, and lawful orders from police officers.
  • President Biden unveiled his commission to look into possible reforms to the Supreme Court. Ilya Shapiro warns that there are no quick fixes.
  • Thomas Koenig reviews Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders, a book that details how the Founding Fathers lost faith in the American experiment.
  • Peter Hedger compares recent comments by J.D. Vance about reining in Big Tech companies who benefit from infrastructure and government privileges to Barack Obama’s infamous “You didn’t build that” comment.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).