It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.”
The State Department didn’t give details. Taipei’s newspapers reported that the American officials were sub-cabinet officers, and no doubt they were. I’m not going to guess who the two American deputy assistant secretaries were. But as an aside, the two people who know Taiwan and international organization issues inside-out are, in fact, the two top DASs in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs (EAP). They are former AIT chief of mission Kin Wah Moy (梅健華) and China/Taiwan coordination chief DAS Mark Lambert, who oversees all of State’s China initiatives in “The China House.” He works under Ambassador Moy and EAP Assistant Secretary Ambassador Daniel Kritenbrink. The Bureau of International Organization Affairs is also a key policy player in the State Department’s initiative to support Taiwan’s international engagement, so perhaps a senior IO officer was on the mission instead.
That said, the State Department press release (issued on Saturday June 22) was singularly uninformative. It made no mention of the identities of the American “representatives” dispatched to Taipei or their deputy assistant secretary rank. Nor did the release address the legal rationale for Taiwan’s “meaningful participation” in United Nations agencies; or even admit that third-country diplomats in Taipei (“official” and otherwise) had joined the American and Taiwanese diplomats in consultations.
Officially, all we know about the joint Working Group was contained in the meager State Department press release. Unofficially, it seems, the American Institute in Taiwan backgrounded the Taipei news media on a not-for-attribution basis because several news outlets (including this newspaper and its sister publication the Liberty Times) reported that the diplomats from Washington made a strong case to their third-country counterparts in Taipei that United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 2758 had nothing to do with Taiwan. The word “Taiwan,” they said, is nowhere in the document; consequently Res. 2758 cannot logically be cited by China or any other nation in support of China’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan; still less may the United Nations Secretariat cite UNGA Res. 2758 as justification to designate Taiwan as a “province of China.”
Significantly, Deputy Assistant Secretary Mark Lambert’s remarks in Washington at the German Marshall Fund on April 30th were the Blinken State Department’s first public attack on China’s “mischaracterization” of Res. 2758. If Lambert was in Taipei ten days ago, he probably made the exact same points to the unofficial-official envoys in Taipei from “like-minded” partners. At the GMF, Lambert made four crisp points:
“Number One, 2758 did not endorse, is not equivalent to, and does not reflect a consensus for China’s ‘one China Principle’,” a term he reminded his audience that solely “refers to the PRC’s own position on Taiwan” and is nowhere encompassed in the resolution itself.
“Number Two,” Lambert continued, “Resolution 2758 has no bearing on a country’s sovereign choices with respect to their relationships with Taiwan.” The resolution, he explained, does not constitute any conceivable United Nations requirement that member states participate in China’s campaign to isolate Taiwan.
“Number Three,” he continued, “2758 did not constitute a UN institutional position on the ultimate political status of Taiwan.” Here, alas, the deputy assistant secretary neglected to delve deeper. Perhaps, there has already been a policy calculation in Washington to hold in reserve leverage on this point. These days, the State Department says more and more frequently, “we take no position on [Taiwan’s] sovereignty.” True enough. But from there, it would be just a short step to declare, “historically, the United States has never recognized China’s sovereignty over Taiwan,” a declaration which has the added advantage of being true.
“Number Four,” he concluded, there is nothing, least of all Resolution 2758, that would “preclude Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the United Nations’ other multilateral fora.”
To avoid an argument with Beijing, Washington has always been elliptical in its policy statements regarding Taiwan’s sovereignty. America’s “one China policy,” the State Department insists, is based on the Taiwan Relations Act, the Six Assurances and the “three communiques.”
But the Department never publicly quotes chapter-and-verse of either the TRA or Reagan’s Six Assurances to clarify its position on “sovereignty”. If it did, we all would discover that Taiwan (like the proverbial walking-talking-quacking duck) is a “foreign country,” a “nation,” a “state”, a “government” — see 22 United States Code 48 § 3303(b)(1). Several previous “On Taiwan” columns belabor this fact, but I suspect the State Department does not appreciate how much leverage Washington has over Beijing should America find it necessary to open up the United States Code and point this out, not only to China but to the American people as well — and to the senior members of the diplomatic press corps at the State Department who seem oblivious to it.
As China’s air and naval incursions intensify in the Taiwan Strait, the State Department will be forced to unpack the issue of Taiwan’s political status, if only for the edification of Congress and the American people who soon will want to know why a war crisis looms. In a way, it is unfortunate that fifty years of vague, ambiguous, nuanced State Department “one China” pontification — pontification which avoided the issue of Taiwan’s sovereignty — was never explained to the American people. It was a triumph of Chinese diplomacy — to get the United States to avoid stating its real policy out loud for fear of discommoding Beijing. US President Richard Nixon hoped to ingratiate himself to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) in 1972 by pledging that the matter of Taiwan’s “sovereignty” would not be aired “as long as I can control the bureaucracy.” It is an inexplicable triumph for China that American diplomats continue to hold their tongues about Taiwan a half-century after Nixon’s “control of the bureaucracy” evaporated.
On May 24, a month after Mark Lambert’s German Marshall Fund denunciation of UNGA Res. 2758’s relevance to Taiwan, eight countries — all mutual treaty allies, all with “unofficial” trade offices in Taipei, all with ambassadorial-rank diplomats, all with diplomatic staff business cards bearing “.gov” email addresses — issued a rare “joint press release” calling for Taiwan’s participation in the World Health Organization that they posted on their respective countries’ official websites. No doubt those same unofficial-officials, together with several more in Taipei, conferred with the two American deputy assistant secretaries on June 20 in an environment tinged with a sense of crisis.
The American deputy assistant secretaries’ Taipei mission ten days ago is a sign that strategic ambiguity among the like-minded countries is coming to an end. I imagine that the twenty or so allied diplomats in Taipei who conferred with them have been tasked by their home country foreign offices to develop a common front against China on Taiwan’s international participation. The key components of that front would certainly include: debunking UNGA Resolution 2758’s significance beyond its plain text; shoring-up Taiwan’s international legitimacy as China foments crisis; and forming a common understanding on Taiwan’s sovereignty. Most major countries that signed the 1951 San Francisco Treaty — Australia, Canada, Britain, the United States and Japan — know that the seventy-three year-old treaty pointedly left Taiwan’s postwar status “unresolved.”
Taiwan has long since resolved its own status in its own way. “Sovereignty resides in the people,” (主權在民) former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) used to say, quoting Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙). It will take thoughtful, planned and coordinated support from Taiwan’s international partners to ensure Taiwan’s future is resolved peacefully and with the assent of the Taiwanese people. The mission to Taipei of the two deputy assistant secretaries ten days ago is a sign this is happening.
John J. Tkacik, Jr. is a retired US foreign service officer who has served in Taipei and Beijing and is now director of the Future Asia Project at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
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