Strategic clarity for Taiwan
On April 11, when US President Barack Obama met with Cuban President Raul Castro at the Summit of the Americas, Obama said: “The Cold War has been over for a long time,” adding that the days of Washington meddling in Latin America are over.
“Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born,” Obama said, adding that at times it felt as if “we’re caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy, and yanquis and the Cold War, and this and that and the other. The United States will not be imprisoned by the past… We’re looking to the future. I’m not interested in having battles that frankly started before I was born.”
Obama is quite right to point out that those controversies date back to before he was born, so now is the time to be done with it. As a Taiwanese American, I completely agree with his leadership looking at the right direction for the future.
However, he seems to have forgotten that on June 27, 1950, way before he was born, then-US president Harry Truman issued a statement on Formosa: “Accordingly, I have ordered the 7th Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa. As a corollary of this action, I am calling upon the Chinese government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland. The 7th Fleet will see that this is done. The determination of the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations.”
The resolution to those actions is still unsettled.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) led by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) was firmly associated with the US as anti-communists, which was why Truman dispatched the 7th Fleet to defend Formosa.
Now, the KMT and the Republic of China are no longer hostile to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Instead, they are friendly to each other, just like brothers. Former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) of the KMT even said it was time to unite with communist China to rule over Taiwan.
Today, more than 80 percent of residents in Taiwan identify themselves as Taiwanese not Chinese, but in US Court of Appeals Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown’s court opinion on April 7, 2009, she said: “America and China’s tumultuous relationship over the past 60 years has trapped the inhabitants of Taiwan in political purgatory.”
In her court opinion on March 18, 2008, US Court of Appeals District Judge Rosemary Collyer said Taiwanese have been “persons without a state for almost 60 years,” and that “one can understand and sympathize” with their “desire to regularize their position in the world.”
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 15 (1) reads: Everyone has the right to a nationality.
On Oct. 25, 2004, former US secretary of state Colin Powell said: “Taiwan is not independent; it does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation.”
Does Taiwan have its own sovereignty? Who owns it?
“Identifying Taiwan’s sovereign is an antecedent question to appellants’ claims. This leaves the court with few options,” Brown’s opinion reads. “We could jettison the United States’ long-standing foreign policy regarding Taiwan — that of strategic ambiguity — in favor of declaring a sovereign. But that seems imprudent.”
Earlier in the opinion, Brown said: “Once the executive determines Taiwan’s sovereign, we can decide appellants’ resulting status and concomitant rights expeditiously.”
So, there is only one person in the world can tell us who is sovereign over Taiwan — Obama. I encourage Taiwanese around the world to raise their voices to remind him and call his attention to this overdue piece of unfinished US business in Taiwan. The US, named in the Treaty of San Francisco as the principal occupying power after World War II, has ultimate responsibility for the people of Taiwan. However, the US’ strategic ambiguity in playing the “one China” policy game with the PRC has not only trapped Taiwanese in political purgatory, but also turned the US into a nation with double standards.
The US’ strategic ambiguity is an outdated policy that has been overdue for change for a long time.
“So often, when we insert ourselves in ways that go beyond persuasion, it’s counterproductive, it backfires,” Obama said, adding that was “why countries keep on trying to use us as an excuse for their own governance failures. Let’s take away the excuse.”
Yes, mister president, the 50-year-old Cuban policy was outdated, but the 70-year-old policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan is even older, so it is time to set a clear strategy for Taiwan.
John Hsieh
Hayward, California
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