Why Trump’s Phone Conversation with Taiwan’s President Is a Good Sign
The U.S. should more actively support Taiwan’s independence-loving people.
By Ian Tuttle — December 5, 2016
When the president-elect of the U.S. took a phone call last week with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, he may not have known that he was breaking a four-decades-old precedent and potentially disrupting the delicate state of affairs that prevails between Taiwan and its neighbor across the Taiwan Strait, China. Needless to say, such an approach to international dealings is not ideal. But neither is an “expert” approach that fails to distinguish friends from foes — which has been America’s approach for the last eight years. Taiwan is the sort of country the United States should seek to support. Instead, the U.S. remains beholden to a decades-old, Cold War arrangement that favors the Communist regime in Beijing over the vibrant democracy in Taipei — an arrangement to which the Obama administration has been far friendlier than its predecessor. Donald Trump should aim to shift this balance of power.
Which country is more amenable to American ideals is not difficult to discern. As the 20th century made clear, People’s Republics tend to be extraordinarily unfriendly to the people who reside in them — for instance, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a.k.a. North Korea. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is no different, having existed for 70 years under varying degrees of Communist oppression: at one end, Mao Zedong’s, responsible for mass slaughter on a scale comparable to Joseph Stalin’s; at the other, Xi Jinping’s, which also “disappears” political dissidents, but does so quietly in order to earn the admiration of Thomas Friedman and other gullible leftwing luminaries.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442753/print
