USA TODAY International Edition
Taiwan contact stirs up a ruckus in diplomacy
Trump’s talk draws formal complaint from China official
President- elect Donald Trump’s break with diplomatic precedent by speaking with the president of Taiwan is yet another signal that the unconventional path candidate Trump took to victory in the general election will likely guide him in the White House, some analysts and government officials said Saturday.
The implications of Trump’s latest action — the first such direct communication with a Taiwanese leader since the U. S. broke diplomatic relations in 1979 — are not immediately clear. Yet some foreign policy experts said there are serious potential ramifications to pursuing such an unorthodox course.
“Unfortunately, Presidentelect Trump has waded into the thicket of U. S.- Taiwan relations without any apparent briefings by senior State Department officials intimately familiar with this long history,” Jeffrey Bader, a former principal adviser to President Obama on Asia, said Saturday in a written statement. “This phone call will likely be interpreted by Beijing as something much more than a personal chat.”
The U. S. formally severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 1979 after President Jimmy Carter formally recognized Beijing as the sole government of China.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said Saturday that State officials “supported requests from the transition team for some of their communications” with foreign leaders. Gov- ernment officials, however, had no advance knowledge of Trump’s plan to speak with Tsai Ing- wen.
As recently as Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry was lauding growing cooperation with China on climate change and development, progress re- sulting from careful negotiations with the nation.
“Imagine that, China and the United States cooperating on global development,” Kerry told the Women’s Foreign Policy Group in Washington. “That cooperation is starting already to happen now, and I believe if we grow it, it can make a major difference in the generation to come.”
By early Saturday, however, China had lodged a formal complaint over the Trump call, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang declaring that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.”
“The one China principle is the political basis of the ChinaUS relationship,” Shuang said in a statement.
Trump addressed the matter Friday night, issuing a tweet claiming that “the president of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency.” That tweet was followed by another: “Interesting how the U. S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”
Sen. Chris Coons, D- Del., a member of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Trump’s interactions so far with foreign leaders may represent an uneasy “new chapter” in such dealings involving a U. S. president. “We’ll have to see whether the president- elect, after his inauguration, conducts foreign policy that is shoot- from- hip, Twitter- storm style,” Coons said on CNN.
Kellyanne Conway, a senior Trump adviser, disputed any suggestion that the presidentelect was not aware of the potential gravity of the Taiwan communication. Trump is “fully knowledgeable about these issues,” Conway said on CNN.