The two biggest achievements of President Trump’s foreign policy are to move away from obsolete paradigms that had been captured by bipartisan neoliberal elites for decades: an unprecedented Arab-Israeli approach to the Middle East and a strategy to contain China in the Asia-Pacific.
On the previous front, Trump bravely stepped aside from the wasted conflict resolution approach, which raised to the forefront the need for Israeli capitulation in the face of Arab-Palestinian intransigence; on the latter front, Trump became the first president since Richard Nixon on his famous 1972 trip to China that openly questioned our relationship with that ascendant and hegemonic communist regime.
The key difference is that as Trump prepares to enter the sunset, progress on the latter is likely to have a greater risk of reversing quickly after his Democratic successor takes office.
The physical relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one of the Trump administration’s endless displays of firm friendship with the Jewish state, is unlikely to unravel. Nor would any healthy politician try to suppress the Abraham Accords, the series of iconic peace agreements between Israel and the Islamic nations that the administration helped negotiate.
But China’s disputed skeptical rhetoric, harsh opposition to Huawei’s emerging 5G telecommunications network and harsh tariffs on Chinese imports are the kind of moves that would be too easy for a longtime Chinese pigeon like Joe Biden to reverse quickly.
In order to help his successor and ensure the continuation of our long-standing recalibration with our preeminent geopolitical threat of the 21st century, there is a farewell action above all else that would leave the Chinese Communist Party hungry. or the CCP, and results in substantial benefit to the United States.
Trump should formally recognize Taiwan (also known as the Republic of China) as an independent state, different from the Beijing-based regime, and he should do so, with all the diplomatic resources that this formal recognition entails, posthas.
There are few territorial disputes on which the CCP is stronger than its insistence that both mainland China and Taiwan are part of a single, unified Chinese state, with the People’s Republic of China based in Beijing or the PRC, as the sole legitimate representative of that state. It has also been de facto, if not entirely official, U.S. policy since the Jimmy Carter administration.
As with most other foreign policy initiatives of the Carter era that are remnants of a Cold War capitulating stance, this stance is wrong and counterproductive: it has taken time for the U.S. to formally repudiate “politics of a single China ”and open an embassy in Taipei.
The one-China policy was based on the belief that, through appeasement and economic liberalization, the PRC could become less authoritarian and ultimately better “integrated” into the so bewildered “world order.” liberal “.
Any merit that this idea might have as theoretical reflection has now been decisively refuted by history. The PRC under CCP Secretary-General Xi Jinping is a rapacious hegemony that commits genocide against unwanted minorities, operates a non-theft Orwellian state surveillance system, steals intellectual property, commits predatory business practices and triggers deadly pandemics in the world.
Even worse, the much-lauded post-1972 economic liberalization has made Americans complicit in the CCP’s crimes against humanity – think about filming Disney’s recent film “Mulan” in part in Xinjiang, where developing a genuine genocide against Uighur Muslims – and has contributed to the emptying of our industrial base, the loss of massive blue-collar jobs and the concomitant proliferation of drug overdoses across the American core.
Trump had the instinct and courage to change course. It can help consolidate these gains by ending the policy of a single China, turning the de facto embassy that is the American Institute in Taiwan into an official embassy and formalizing all relevant diplomatic channels to the Taiwanese government.
Taiwan is all that the PR is not: it is a pro-Western stronghold oriented to the free market that, with a proper Western fortification, would do wonders to keep the People’s Liberation Army at bay because of its strategic position.
It would significantly deter Jinping’s threatening “wolf diplomacy” and help anchor a global containment strategy of China that extends from South Korea and Japan through the Philippines to Australia. And, like Trump’s move from the U.S. embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the formal christening of a U.S. embassy in Taipei is an action that would be politically difficult to undo.
Earlier this week, John Fund of National Review reported that many U.S. officials have been urging Trump to officially recognize Taiwan. It would be a cornerstone suitable for the first presidency in half a century to recognize the PRC by the enemy bow it is.