President Trump’s two greatest achievements in foreign policy involve moving away from outdated paradigms that, for decades, have snatched bipartisan neoliberal elites: the unprecedented Arab-Israeli rapprochement in the Middle East and an affirmative strategy of restraining China in Asia-Pacific.
On the first front, Trump boldly stepped away from the misguided approach to conflict resolution “from the inside out,” which brought to the fore the need for Israeli capitulation to Arab-Palestinian intransigence; on the last front, Trump became the first president since Richard Nixon on his famous 1972 trip to China to openly question our relationship with that rising hegemonic communist regime.
The main difference is that as Trump prepares to ride towards sunset, progress in the latter is likely to be at greater risk of an immediate reversal of his Democratic successor after his inauguration.
The physical move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one of the numerous demonstrations of the Trump administration’s firm friendship with the Jewish state, is unlikely to be undone. Nor would any sensible politician seek to reject the Abraham Accords, the series of striking peace agreements between Israel and the Islamic nations that the government helped to negotiate.
But China’s combative and skeptical rhetoric, hard-line opposition to Huawei’s emerging 5G telecommunications network and harsh tariffs on Chinese imports are the kind of move that would be too easy for a longtime Chinese dove like Joe Biden to reverse quickly.
In order to help box its successor and ensure the continuity of our long-awaited recalibration with our pre-eminent 21st century geopolitical threat, there is a farewell action above all that would hinder the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, and result in benefits nouns for America.
Trump should formally recognize Taiwan (also known as the Republic of China) as an independent state, distinct from the Beijing-based regime – and he must do so, with all the diplomatic devices that such formal recognition entails, quickly.
There are few territorial disputes over which the CCP is more adamant than its insistence that 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 sole representative legitimate state. It has also been in fact, if not entirely official, US policy since the Jimmy Carter administration.
Like most other Carter-era foreign policy initiatives that are remnants of a Cold War capitulating stance, this stance is misguided and counterproductive: it is past time for the US to formally repudiate “China policy” 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” with the much-vaunted “liberal world order”.
Whatever merit such an idea could have as a theoretical reflection, it has now been decisively refuted by history. The PRC under the CCP’s secretary general, Xi Jinping, is a voracious hegemony that commits genocide against unwanted minorities, operates an unparalleled Orwellian state surveillance system, steals intellectual property, commits predatory commercial practices and unleashes deadly pandemics worldwide.
Worse, the same highly praised post-1972 economic liberalization made Americans complicit in the CCP’s crimes against humanity – think of Disney filming its recent film “Mulan” partially in Xinjiang, where a genuine genocide is unfolding against Uighur Muslims – and it has contributed to the emptying of our industrial base, the loss of mass jobs of workers and the concomitant proliferation of drug overdoses across the heart of the United States.
Trump had the instinct and the courage to change course. It can help solidify those gains by ending China’s unique policy, converting the de facto embassy that is the American Institute in Taiwan into an official embassy and formalizing all relevant diplomatic channels for the Taiwanese government.
Taiwan is everything the PRC is not: it is a pro-Western bastion, geared towards the free market, which, with the proper western fortification, would do wonders to keep the People’s Liberation Army at bay due to its strategic position.
This would significantly halt Jinping’s threatening “wolf warrior diplomacy” and help anchor a comprehensive strategy to contain China that has spread from South Korea and Japan across the Philippines and all the way to Australia. And much like Trump’s move from the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a formal baptism of an American embassy in Taipei is an action that would be politically difficult to undo.
Earlier this week, the John Fund of National Review reported that many U.S. officials have been urging Trump to officially recognize Taiwan. It would be a suitable cornerstone for the first presidency in half a century to recognize the PRC as the archenemy it is.