President Trump’s two major achievements in foreign policy involve both deviations from outdated paradigms that have conquered dual neoliberal elites for decades: unprecedented Arab-Israeli rapprochement in the Middle East and an assertive strategy for China’s containment in Asia-Pacific Ocean.
On the earlier front, Trump boldly deviated from the wrong ‘inside-out’ conflict resolution approach, highlighting the need for Israeli capitulation to Palestinian-Arab intransigence; on the latter front, Trump became the first president since Richard Nixon in his famous 1972 trip to China who openly questioned our relationship with that emerging, hegemonic communist regime.
The main difference is that when Trump prepares to ride to the sunset, progress on the latter is likely to carry a greater risk of a quick turnaround after his inauguration of his Democratic successor.
The physical relocation of the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one of the powerful displays of the Trump administration with a firm friendship with the Jewish state, is unlikely to be undone. Nor does any prudent politician want to try to disregard the Abrahamic Accords, the series of peace treaties between Israel and Islamic countries that helped the administration negotiate.
But sad China-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 all too easy for a longtime Chinese pigeon like Joe Biden to reverse quickly.
In order to help include his successor and ensure the continuity of our long-term recalibration with our leading 21st-century geopolitical threat, there is, above all, one farewell action that will remain in the creep of the Chinese Communist Party, or the CCP, and repaid to America’s material advantage.
Trump should formally recognize Taiwan (also known as the Republic of China) as an independent state, unlike the Beijing-based regime – and he should do so, with all the diplomatic equipment that such formal recognition entails, postal haste.
There are few territorial disputes over which the CCP is more determined than its insistence that both mainland China and Taiwan be part of a single, united Chinese state – with the Beijing-based People’s Republic of China, or PRC, as the sole legal representative. of that state. It has also been de facto, if not entirely official, American policy since the Jimmy Carter administration.
As with most other Carter-era foreign policy initiatives, which are remnants of a capitulating Cold War stance, this stance is misleading and counterproductive: it is recently that the US has adopted the “one-China policy”. formally rejected and an embassy in Taipei.
The one-China policy was based on the belief that through reconciliation and economic liberalization, the People’s Republic of China could become less authoritarian and ultimately better “integrated” into the ‘liberal world order’.
Whatever the merits of such an idea as a theoretical contemplation are now certainly refuted by history. The People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping, secretary general of the CCP, is an ominous hegemony that commits genocide against unwanted minorities, operates an unsupervised system of Orwellian state guards, steals intellectual property, commits predatory trade practices and releases deadly pandemics around the world. .
Worse, the same praise after 1972’s economic liberalization made both Americans complicit in CCP crimes against humanity – remember that Disney partially filmed his recent “Mulan” movie in Xinjiang, where a genuine genocide against the Uyghur Muslims unfolded – and contributed to the erosion of our industrial base, the loss of mass work with blue collars and the concomitant spread of drug overdoses in the American heartland.
Trump had both the instinct and the courage to change course. He can help boost profits by ending the one-China policy, turning the de facto embassy, which is the US Institute in Taiwan, into an official embassy and formalizing all relevant diplomatic channels to the Taiwanese government. .
Taiwan is all that the VRC is not: it is a free-market-oriented, pro-Western bastion that, with proper Western stronghold, would work miracles to keep the People’s Liberation Army in place because of its strategic position.
This would meaningfully deter Jinping’s looming “wolf warrior diplomacy” and help anchor a comprehensive China inclusion strategy that spreads 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, a formal baptism of a US embassy in Taipei is an action that would be politically difficult to undo.
Earlier this week, John Review of National Review reported that many U.S. officials had encouraged Trump to officially recognize Taiwan. It would be an appropriate keystone for the first presidency in half a century to recognize the PRC for the arch-enemy it is.