US President Joe Biden was accused of inflaming tensions with China on Thursday when he insisted that US troops would go to war to defend Taiwan.

Answering a question at a CNN town hall meeting, he said Washington would come to Taiwan’s aid if China invaded. “We have a commitment to that,” he told those gathered.

His remarks were seized upon by Taipei, which welcomed Mr Biden’s support.

“The US government has demonstrated, through actual actions, their rock solid support for Taiwan,” presidential office spokesman Xavier Chang said in a statement today.

Mr Biden’s declaration would indicate a shift in US policy, formerly one of “strategic ambiguity” in which Washington helped build Taiwan’s defence capabilities but did not explicitly state it would come to the island’s aid.

But a White House spokesperson sought to clarify that there was no change in the US position on Taiwan, the second time such a statement has been issued following remarks by Mr Biden.

The president insisted that the US was able to compete with China militarily amid reports that Beijing has tested a state-of-the-art hypersonic missile with nuclear capacity which orbited the planet before landing.

“China, Russia and the rest of the world knows we have the most powerful military in the history of the world,” he said.

Mr Biden claimed that he didn’t want a cold war with China.

Taiwan appears set to become the centre of a new global flashpoint, alongside claims that a genocide of Uighur Muslims has been taking place in China’s Xinjiang region, US support for pro-democracy campaigners in Hong Kong and accusations that Covid-19 was purposefully developed by China — the widely discredited “lab leak” theory.

Beijing recently demanded the withdrawal of all US troops from Taiwan after discovering that scores of marines had been training soldiers there since at least 2020.

The recent Aukus security pact signed by Australia, Britain and the US threatens regional stability, Beijing says.

And it warned that Thursday’s non-binding resolution adopted by the European Parliament to deepen political and economic ties with Taiwan undermines its sovereignty and the one-China principle.

Lawmakers are exploring the development of an EU-Taiwan bilateral investment agreement, according to the parliament’s website.

Central to EU interests in Taiwan are the semiconductors produced by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which produces a third of the world’s total.