Republicans back Trump after Taiwan phone call angers China
REPUBLICANS rallied around Donald Trump, the president-elect, yesterday after he reversed four decades of American policy on China following a phone call with Tsai Ing-wen, the Taiwanese president.
The US does not officially recognise Taiwan’s sovereignty, and Beijing lodged a formal complaint over the call, the first such communication with a Taiwanese leader since 1979. But Mr Trump won the praise of prominent figures within his party for declining to bow to diplomatic norms.
Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who was Mr Trump’s fiercest rival during the Republican primaries, called the decision an “improvement” over President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.
“I would much rather have Donald Trump talking to President Tsai than to Cuba’s Raul Castro or Iran’s Hassan Rouhani,” he said.
Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator who serves on the armed services committee, was more forthright in his praise: “I commend president-elect Trump for his conversation with President Tsai Ing-wen, which reaffirms our commitment to the only democracy on Chinese soil,” he said in a statement.
“It’s not policy, it’s a phone call,” Mark Meadows, another Republican congressman, told the newspaper. That was certainly the hope in China, with the country’s foreign minister referring to the call as a Taiwanese “trick”.
Mr Trump did not signal whether he planned to further upend US-China relations, but he did contradict reports from Taiwan that he had initiated the call. “The president of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the presidency. Thank you!” he tweeted, adding, “Interesting how the US sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”
Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to George W Bush, expressed alarm after the incident, saying “So long as Trump called knowing it would change the status quo, I’m fine with it,” he said. “I hope it was by design.”
The consensus among many Democrats was that Mr Trump did not understand the ramifications of his conversation with the president of Taiwan, as well as the leaders of Pakistan and the Philippines. Chris Murphy, the Connecticut senator, said Mr Trump’s “radical temporary deviations” from established US policies would weaken America’s alliances and could lead to war.
“What has happened in the last 48 hours is not a shift,” he said. “These are major pivots in foreign policy without any plan. That’s how wars start.”
Before the call with Ms Tsai, Mr Trump spoke with Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan.
He praised Mr Sharif profusely and appeared to accept an invitation to visit Pakistan, ruffling feathers in India.
The president-elect also spoke with President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who has called Mr Obama a “son of a whore”.
According to a spokesman for Mr Duterte, Mr Trump invited him to the White House next year and praised his violent anti-drug campaign, which has claimed more than 1,000 lives.