TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government released a new version of its document reviewing defense and foreign policy on Monday (March 13) and included Taiwan for the first time, emphasizing the importance of the stability of the situation in the Taiwan Strait.

In 2021, the U.K. government under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson released the "Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy," often referred to as Integrated Review (IR). At that time, the entire document failed to mention Taiwan or the Taiwan Strait, but this year, it mentioned Taiwan twice and the Taiwan Strait three times.

In the Prime Minister's forward of 2023 edition of the IR (IR23), Sunak argued that Russia's "illegal invasion of Ukraine," the use of energy and food supplies as weapons, and rhetoric about nuclear weapons, coupled with China's rising aggressiveness in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait "are threatening to create a world defined by danger, disorder and division – and an international order more favourable to authoritarianism."

In the section covering U.K. policy on China, the paper points out that Beijing has rapidly militarized the South China Sea and has refused to renounce the use of force to annex Taiwan. It then reiterated that the U.K.'s long-standing position is that "the Taiwan issue should be settled peacefully by people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait through dialogue, and not through any unilateral attempts to change the status quo."

Under strategies on implementing an integrated approach to deterrence and defense, the document states that the U.K. should support stability in the Taiwan Strait, "where we oppose any unilateral change in the status quo, and in the East and South China Seas." It added that it backs all parties that collaborate on ensuring that "heightened tensions do not lead to escalation."