US should not let Tsai lead it by the nose

Two US Navy vessels passed through the Taiwan Straits on Monday, less than a week after the island’s leader Tsai Ingwen claimed the Chinese mainland posed a military threat to the island in an interview with CNN. Whatever the rationale the United States might be using to justify the move, Tsai and her followers will very likely try to portray it as the US responding to her claim that the mainland is challenging the island’s “independent existence”.

Both she and Washington know the island has no such thing. It is Tsai who is dangerously playing with fire, emboldened by the ill-considered support offered her by Washington.

Since she took office as leader of the island, Tsai has stubbornly refused to acknowledge the 1992 Consensus that there is only one China and Taiwan is part of it. In doing so, she has plunged cross-Straits relations into their worst crisis in many years.

By holding to their ambition to realize the island’s separation from the motherland, Tsai and the Democratic Progressive Party have been losing the support of Taiwan people. The defeat Tsai and her party suffered in the local elections on the island in 2018 speaks volumes about how stranded and isolated they are in their delusion.

Tsai showed how divorced from reality she is, when she announced last week that she would stand for reelection in 2020, despite the vote of no confidence she received in the local elections.

The farther Tsai and her party go in their attempts to separate the island from the motherland the more they distance themselves from the prevailing sentiment among residents on the island, and the more they test the limit of the mainland’s tolerance.

The sailing through the Taiwan Straits by the two US naval vessels serves Tsai’s purpose, as it helps to obscure the truth of the crossStraits situation, which is that in seeking to “finish her agenda”, she is the one who poses the threat to peace and stability.

Provoking the Chinese mainland and exaggerating the threat from it are Tsai’s way of trying to shift the blame to the mainland for the consequences of her actions.

In this endeavor, it is important for Tsai that she has recourse to the US, as she needs it to bolster her bravado.

Washington knows what Taiwan means to the Chinese mainland, and therefore, it should understand the high hopes that Tsai pins on it. It should not get dragged into Tsai’s schemes, as US-China relations will be the collateral damage if it blithely colludes with her artifice.