Tag Archives: foreign policy

One China and One China

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s the People’s Republic of China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, still on about the Republic of China’s President, Tsai Ing-wen’s congratulatory telecon with President-Elect Donald Trump:

We urge the new US leader and government to fully understand the seriousness of the Taiwan issue, and to continue to stick to the one-China policy[.]

He went on to say that US-PRC relations would be “badly affected” were such behaviors to continue.

Indeed we do fully understand the seriousness of the Taiwan issue and the seriousness of the status of the RoC, which sits on that island.  It’s about time our administration gained that understanding, too, and began moving away from the…foolishness…of the last 45 years.

And Geng had this:

The Taiwan question has a bearing on China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and is one of China’s core interests.

Indeed.  The “Taiwan” question has a very large bearing on the island nation’s sovereignty and its territorial integrity and is at the center of the RoC’s core interests.

If our relationship with the mainland Chinese government is “badly affected,” that would be to the PRC’s detriment, not ours.  Furthermore, our relationship with the mainland already is—or would be with a less timid administration—badly affected by the PRC’s naked aggression in the East and South China Seas and by its use of northern Korea’s behaviors as levers against the Republic of Korea, Japan, and us.

The PRC isn’t helping matters either, when it trots out its token, and crony, capitalist Wang Jianlin to make naked threats against American citizens:

I’ve invested $10 billion in the U.S. I have 20,000 employees there.  If things aren’t handled well, those 20,000 people won’t have food to eat[.]

(The PRC and Wang are projecting their own failings, too: Americans don’t starve from our government’s retaliation against those who disobey it.)

The beginning of Trump’s recognition:

Trump said on “Fox News Sunday” that he doesn’t feel “bound by a one-China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.”

It’s remotely possible for reasonable men to debate the degree of linkage involved in the fate of a sovereign nation, but it’s entirely appropriate for Trump—or anyone—to not feel bound by a “one-China” policy.  Throughout these last 45 years, the US has never recognized a one-China policy; we’ve only acknowledged that the PRC and an early, weak RoC had such a policy, even though too many American administrations have meekly behaved as though we accepted it.

On the other hand, one China: The Republic of China.  One China: The People’s Republic of China.

One China, and one China.

Sanctions

Posted on by
Reply

The People’s Republic of China said Saturday that it opposes unilateral sanctions against northern Korea over the latter’s nuclear weapons program.  Such things must have the auspices of the UN.  The PRC also said it opposes the Republic of Korea having the ability to defend itself against northern Korea’s nuclear weapons, insisting that the deployment of a missile defense system would be a threat to the PRC’s security.

This is risible.  The PRC wants sanctions to go through the UN where, via its Security Council veto power, the PRC can water down joint sanctions to the point of uselessness.  The PRC doesn’t want sanctions and it doesn’t want the RoK to be able to defend itself against nuclear attack because the PRC wants to damage the RoK as a means of damaging further a timid US.

Of course, we need to make the deployment—and to press upon the (likely) new RoK government the importance of missile defense—and we need to impose such unilateral sanctions as we can on northern Korea and to make them as broad as we can.

We need to do this for a couple of reasons.  One is to demonstrate to the PRC that they don’t get to dictate our foreign policy.  Another is to demonstrate to the RoK, to Japan, to the nations rimming the South China Sea, and to ourselves that we’re done being timid in the Pacific.

A Hack

Posted on by
2

The Russians are alleged to be behind the hacks into the Democrats’ IT systems, and they’re alleged to have so engaged in order to sow distrust in our election system and procedures and especially to influence our just concluded election in favor of the ultimate winner, President-Elect Donald Trump.  Indeed, the CIA and other of our intelligence agencies have said that the hacks have all the earmarks of Russian hackers.

A couple things about that.  The NLMSM’s bold, declarative statements based on those intelligence agency statements that the Russians did it notwithstanding, “have all the earmarks” does not mean the Russians did it, only that it looks like they did it.  Of course getting actual proof in the intelligence or the hacking world is more difficult even than getting “proof”—sufficient reduction of reasonable doubt—in a criminal trial.  Nor does that difficulty, or the limitation of a statement of “all the earmarks,” mean the Russians didn’t do it, especially in the face of their history.

The other thing centers on the assumption that the Russians really did do the hacks and for the reasons named.  Now the NLMSM, whose favored Democrats were losers in the last election at all levels from the Presidential level on down, is pushing at the top of its collective lungs the idea that the Russians did it, and to favor Trump, as though these were facts.

So: assume the Russians really did do the hacks for the reasons named.  The NLMSM, in its temper tantrums over their loss and their having been ignored by American voters, is playing along with that Russian goal and with that serving, wittingly or not, to discredit Trump and the elections, and to sow doubt about the legitimacy of both.

Congress is pressing for bipartisan investigations into the matter, and it’s pushing for President Barack Obama to release all of the report that will result from the investigation he’s ordered into the matter.  He should, and so should President Trump if the Obama investigation isn’t complete before Trump takes office.

The question is valid, and it should be investigated and answered, but press hysteria contributes nothing to an objective resolution while sowing the doubts the press alleges the Russians want sown.

Republic of China and President-Elect Donald Trump

Posted on by
Reply

It’s time to start correcting some errors of long standing, and it may be (it is too soon to be confident of this) that President-Elect Donald Trump is beginning to do that with his telecon with the President of the RoC.

“The one-China policy is the cornerstone of the healthy development of China-US relations and we hope this political foundation will not be interfered with or damaged,” [Chinese Foreign Minister Yi] Wang was quoted as saying.

This illustrates one of those errors.  The Republic of China is separate from the People’s Republic of China—that’s why Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang followers and lots of others left the mainland for the island of Taiwan.  They wanted no part of Mao Tse-tung’s butcherous communist state, including declining to be a part of that.

[RoC President Ing-wen] Tsai also told Trump that she hoped the US would support Taiwan in its participation in international affairs, the office said, in an apparent reference to China’s efforts to isolate Taiwan from global institutions such as the United Nations.

It said the two also discussed “promoting domestic economic development and strengthening national defense[.]”

Indeed.  We need to be plusing up the RoC’s ability to defend itself and loudly repeating our commitment to the nation’s defense, especially against the backdrop of the PRC’s naked aggression in the East and South China Seas and its occupation of the latter.

Of course, the Obama administration objects to this apparent show of non-timidity.  A carefully anonymous “senior Obama administration official,” who’s not supposed to be talking at all “because of the sensitive diplomatic relations involved” complained

The White House learned of the conversation after it had taken place

No hypocrisy here at all.  Its not at all like Congress learning of the White House’s immigration moves with “refugees” that Australia had rejected only after the fact.  Nossir.  Never mind that the President-Elect, nor does any American, have any obligation to seek the President’s permission to make or take a telephone call.

The administration isn’t the only gang with trouble with this call, though.  The whole of the Left is up in arms; their dismay is exemplified by this from Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

I think privately, they [the PRC] will definitely seek to educate this incoming president and ensure that he understands the sensitivity of Taiwan[.]

Because an American President should be taking guidance—education, even—from America’s enemies.  Glaser (and the PRC) are right, though, that matters relating to the RoC are sensitive–just not for her reasons.  The island nation’s freedom is hanging on a thread.

Along these same lines, I look forward to the new President Trump hosting the Dalai Lama at a State Dinner sometime this winter.

A couple of small nits from the article at the link, too: it’s the Republic of China; the island on which the nation sits is Taiwan.  Also, the citizens of the RoC have been increasing their push for independence from the People’s Republic of China over the last several years; Tsai Ing-wen was just elected President of the RoC in no small part because of her and her party’s long-standing push for independence.

In sum, we absolutely need to tighten and strengthen our relationship with the RoC, and that includes working closely with them politically, economically, and militarily.

I Disagree, Mildly

Posted on by
Reply

…with Walter Russell Mead, who wrote of Fidel Castro’s death in American Interest.

In some ways, Fidel has to be accounted a success.  …  He wanted to assert Cuban independence of the United States; Cuba not only sided with the USSR in the Cold War, but it intervened against US interests in wars in Angola, Ethiopia and the Middle East.

That’s not independence, though.  Castro tied Cuba irrevocably to the US by basing his actions on their relation to the US’ activities, as those examples illustrate.  Indeed, by being a “symbol of resistance to US power and to capitalist order,” he cemented Cuba’s dependency: he did not create Cuba as a symbol of anything related to Cuban independent behavior—a Cuban model of socialism, for instance, or a Cuban font of socialist revolution support, as Che Guevara made himself (not his own movement) into.

On the contrary, Castro demonstrated his long-term failure, as Mead showed in the rest of his article.  Castro’s only success was in his ability to impose and then maintain his rank and rancorous dictatorship for as long as he did.  And even in this he had American aid at critical moments, from Jack Kennedy’s waffling over invading Cuba during a nascent Castro…administration…to Barack Obama’s open support for the Castro regime in the latter stages of both administrations.