President Trump’s two major foreign policy accomplishments involve both departures from outdated paradigms that have captured bipartisan neoliberal elites for decades: an unprecedented Arab-Israeli rapprochement in the Middle East and an assertive strategy to limit China to Asia. Pacific.
On the former front, Trump has boldly moved away from the wrong approach to “conflict resolution,” which has highlighted the need for Israeli capitulation to Palestinian-Arab intransigence; on the last front, Trump became the first president of Richard Nixon on his famous 1972 trip to China, which openly questioned our relationship with that ascending, hegemonic communist regime.
The key difference is that as Trump prepares to leave at sunset, progress on the latter is likely to have a higher risk of prompt reversal after the inauguration of his democratic successor.
The physical move of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one of the many manifestations of firm friendship with the Jewish state of the Trump administration, is unlikely to be canceled. No healthy politician would seek to annul the Abraham Accords, the series of reference peace agreements between Israel and the Islamic nations that the administration helped negotiate.
But skeptical Chinese rhetoric, harsh opposition to Huawei’s emerging 5G telecommunications network, and harsh tariffs on Chinese imports are a kind of move that would be too easy for a long-term Chinese pigeon like Joe Biden to reverse quickly. .
To help his successor and ensure the continuity of our long-standing recalibration with the pre-eminent geopolitical threat of the 21st century, there is a farewell action above all, which would remain during the Chinese Communist Party or the CCP, and redundant to the substantial benefit of America.
Trump should formally recognize Taiwan (also known as the Republic of China) as an independent state, distinct from the Beijing regime – and he must do so, with all the diplomatic tools that such formal, post-recognition requires. .
There are few territorial disputes that the CCP is stronger than its insistence that both mainland China and Taiwan are part of a single unified Chinese state – with the Beijing-based People’s Republic of China or the PRC as the only legitimate representative of that state. It was also the de facto, if not the official, US policy of the Jimmy Carter administration.
As with most other Carter-era foreign policy initiatives, which are remnants of a Cold War capitulation, this position is wrong and counterproductive: the time has passed for the US to officially repudiate “one-China politics” and to open an embassy in Taipei.
The one-China policy was based on the belief that through economic calm and liberalization, the PRC could become less authoritarian and eventually better “integrated” into the much more dangerous “liberal world order”.
Any merit that could have had such an idea as theoretical meditation has now been decisively rejected by history. The PRC, under CCP Secretary-General Xi Jinping, is a rapacious hegemony that commits genocide against unwanted minorities, operates a non-peer surveillance system of the Orwellian state, steals intellectual property, commits predatory trade practices and unleashes deadly pandemics on the world.
Worse, the same much-lauded post-1972 economic liberalization has made Americans complicit in the CCP’s crimes against humanity – think of Disney recently shooting its film “Mulan” in Xinjiang, where a genuine genocide against Muslims is taking place. Uighurs – and contributed to the removal from our industrial base, the loss of mass jobs with blue collars and the simultaneous proliferation of drug overdoses in the Central American area.
Trump had both the instinct and the courage to change course. He can help consolidate these gains by ending the one-China policy, turning the de facto embassy of the American Taiwan Institute into an official embassy, and formalizing all relevant diplomatic channels to the Taiwanese government.
Taiwan is all that the PRC is not: it is a pro-free market-oriented bastion, which, with an adequate Western fortification, would work wonders to keep the People’s Liberation Army at bay due to its strategic position.
It would significantly discourage Jinping’s threatening “fighter diplomacy” and help anchor a comprehensive strategy of isolating China that extends from South Korea and Japan through the Philippines to Australia. And just like Trump’s move of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the formal baptism of an American embassy in Taipei is an action that would be difficult to undo politically.
Earlier this week, John Fund of the National Review reported that many US officials had urged Trump to officially recognize Taiwan. It would be a good cornerstone for the first presidency in half a century to recognize the PRC for the art-enemy it is.