The biggest failure of US President Barack Obama administration’s policy toward China was “ignoring and underestimating Taiwan,” former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) director William Stanton told a Taipei symposium yesterday.
“The US policy toward China has been pretty consistent since 1972, but it does not mean our policies have been correct or successful,” said Stanton, who is now director of the Center for Asia Policy at National Tsing Hua University.
“In my view, US policy is often proved wrong with regard to China, and by ‘wrong’ I mean they failed to promote US interests or to achieve US goals,” he said.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
In his speech, titled “US policy toward Xi Jinping’s [習近平] China,” Stanton said that the Cold War geostrategic argument that the US should cooperate with China to counterbalance a possible Sino-Soviet alliance was “proved wrong” by the continuing strengthening of Sino-Russian partnership on both military and diplomatic fronts.
“In the absence of shared values, geostrategic partnerships are inherently unstable,” Stanton said.
“You can have a geostrategic relationship between the US and the United Kingdom, maybe, which are two democracies. But do not depend on it if [the potential partner is] a communist autocracy and [you are] a democracy,” he added.
Another argument that calls for cooperation with China in order to resolve regional and global problems “has been largely illusory when you search for concrete positive outcomes from a US perspective” due to China’s size, power and status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Stanton said.
The economic argument, which expects increased trade with China and states that continuing improvement in the Chinese economy would facilitate political change, has started to be called into question, he said.
The assumption that the US economy has benefited from trade with China has also been rebuffed by studies, he added.
“Another US policy error from the start was ignoring Taiwan’s interests and underestimating its potential,” he said.
“If Washington policymakers in 1972 had foreseen [Taiwan’s evolution into a vibrant democracy and robust economy], perhaps they would not have written off Taiwan so easily, just as no one would have ever thought of abandoning Australia,” he said.
“A lack of knowledge about and understanding of Taiwan continues. Some of our key policymakers on China under the Obama administration have never even visited Taiwan, or visited it rarely, meeting with junior officials and academics,” Stanton said.
This partly explains why “some Washington observers were taken aback by the Sunflower movement [in the spring of last year] and reacted angrily,” he said.
“In my view, the biggest failure of the Obama administration’s policy toward China has been its handling of Taiwan. An example was the omission of any references to Taiwan in describing the US policy of a reorientation to Asia,” Stanton said.
He said Washington gave a “far more hospitable and objective reception of [Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson] Tsai Ing-wen [蔡英文] this year [than in 2011], and it was an “important positive step by Washington in support of an even-handed approach to, and support for, Taiwan’s democracy.”
Other key areas where the US needs to support Taiwan are “defense cooperation and trade,” Stanton said.
“While the US must cooperate [with China] where it can, it also needs to continue to be very clear about its own values and interests,” he said.
“While the US should never assume that China is necessarily an enemy, we should also always be aware that the China with which we now deal also does not regard us a friend either,” he added.
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
‘MALIGN PURPOSE’: Governments around the world conduct espionage operations, but China’s is different, as its ultimate goal is annexation, a think tank head said Taiwan is facing a growing existential threat from its own people spying for China, experts said, as the government seeks to toughen measures to stop Beijing’s infiltration efforts and deter Taiwanese turncoats. While Beijing and Taipei have been spying on each other for years, experts said that espionage posed a bigger threat to Taiwan due to the risk of a Chinese attack. Taiwan’s intelligence agency said China used “diverse channels and tactics” to infiltrate the nation’s military, government agencies and pro-China organizations. The main targets were retired and active members of the military, persuaded by money, blackmail or pro-China ideology to steal
RSS