Contradictions, Uncertainty Mark Trump Administration’s Policies on Taiwan and China

The challenge for the Trump Administration will be to adjust U.S. policies toward Taiwan and China in a way that does not lead to further negative repercussions in cross-Strait relations or to conflict between China and the United States.

Some two months have passed since the election of Donald Trump, but in foreign affairs as in many other policy areas, the incoming U.S. administration still presents us with uncertainties and contradictions. This is nowhere more apparent than in assessing what the Trump administration’s policy toward Taiwan and China will be.

Key Foreign Policy Appointees Not Focused on Asia, Taiwan, or China

President-elect Trump has now named a number of key appointments dealing with foreign policy and trade, but even assuming all those nominees requiring Senate confirmation receive it, assessing the implications of these appointments for U.S. relations with Taiwan and China remains difficult.

Consistent with the emphases of candidate Trump’s election campaign, many of the nominees for top foreign policy positions lack exposure to and experience in Asia. In most cases, their experience and knowledge are largely limited to Russia, the Middle East, the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, or the problem of terrorism. This includes: proposed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has a long history of energy deals with Russia and is reportedly close to Russian President Vladimir Putin; the proposed Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who has served extensively as a military officer in the Middle East; CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who served his last tour of duty as a military officer in the Gulf War; and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, whose obsessive preoccupation with the Middle East and in particular the threat of Islamic terrorism is well known.

Nikki Haley, nominated as Ambassador to the United Nations, apparently has no foreign policy experience at all. Elaine Chao, the proposed Secretary of Transportation and the wife of Senate leader Mitch McConnell, was born in Taiwan and therefore might be considered a possible advocate for Taiwan within the Trump Cabinet, but during a visit she made to Taipei in October 2009, it was apparent to those whom she met that she knew very little about Taiwan, which she left when she was eight years old, and she spoke no Mandarin.

This lack of familiarity with and attention to Taiwan and China, and Asia in general, in the top foreign policy positions is consistent with what we heard during the Trump campaign. The only time that Candidate Trump seems to have mentioned Taiwan was during a rally in Warren, Michigan, on Oct. 31, 2016, when, addressing the loss of American jobs to workers abroad, Trump cited 200 workers laid off by U.S. car parts manufacturer whose products were now being made in “China, South Korea, and Taiwan.”

This lack of familiarity with and attention to Taiwan and China, and Asia in general, in the top foreign policy positions is consistent with what we heard during the Trump campaign.

In fact, neither China nor Taiwan was mentioned in Candidate Trump’s foreign policy platform, which significantly was titled “Foreign Policy and Defeating ISIS,” as if the conjoined challenges of these two subjects were of equal magnitude. In that section, the only countries specifically mentioned were Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Syria. Meanwhile, the only mention of China was in the section on “Trade” where the focus was on criticism of People’s Republic of China (PRC) trade practices, (along with a critique of our Free Trade Agreement with South Korea). There was no mention of Taiwan.

Close Ties between Nominees for Treasury and Commerce and China

Ironically, however, the man nominated to serve as Secretary of Treasury — Steven Mnuchin — who likely does have experience dealing with China would appear to be, by virtue of his background as a banker and investor, at odds with President-Elect Trump’s get-tough-on-China fiscal and trade policies. After all, Goldman Sachs, where Mnuchin served as a former partner, has been one of the strongest supporters of the U.S.-China relationship while also profiting from that connection.

Henry Kissinger, the greatest booster ever of the U.S.-China relationship, provided the model. Having set the U.S.-China relationship in motion, Kissinger established Kissinger Associates, partly through a Goldman Sachs loan, and then both fostered that relationship and at the same time profited from it by easing the way for (unnamed) U.S. clients to do business with China. Similarly, John Thornton, who paved the way in China as chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia by putting together deals for major Chinese state-owned enterprises, subsequently established the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington as well as a branch office at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where Thornton was also awarded a full professorship in “global leadership.” In 2008, Thornton was also awarded the PRC’s Friendship Award, the highest honor accorded to a non-Chinese citizen, and in 2009 he became a member of the International Advisory Council of the Chinese sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation (CIC). Meanwhile, he has continued to do business in China.

According to Politico, Trump has also reportedly considered Goldman’s current No. 2 executive Gary Cohn to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Such Goldman executives and the role they have played in shaping the Sino-U.S. trade and investment relationship hardly seem to fit the bill of Candidate Trump’s fulminations against China. The nomination of Mnuchin would also appear to fly in the face of Candidate Trump’s accusation that Goldman Sachs had “total, total control” over Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz. Trump often called attention to Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs, accusing her of meeting “in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.”

Similarly, it is difficult to see Wilbur Ross, the billionaire investor, as the ideal candidate to be President-Elect Trump’s Secretary of Commerce if a principal focus of trade policy will be the U.S. trade deficit with China. In a Sept. 10, 2015, Forbes interview, Wilbur Ross, who was identified as “an avid Chinese contemporary art collector with years of investment experience in China,” criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but unlike Trump not because it was unfavorable to the U.S but because it represented the “the biggest risk” he saw to the Chinese economy. Ross observed that if Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia could get U.S. tariff reductions on textiles, apparel and footwear, and China was left “outside” the TPP, that would be a “huge disadvantage.” Ross concluded: “That’s the one big worry I have about China because it could really slow their exports a lot.” Hardly the argument one would expect from someone who will be expected to reduce the huge U.S. trade deficit with China.

Ross’s appointment is even odder given the New York Post’s revelation on Nov. 30, 2016, that Ross also faces a potential conflict of interest over China, as if Trump did not have enough of his own potential conflicts of interest, including in China, to worry about. The Post learned that the Chinese government is a large investor in Wilbur Ross’s private equity funds: “WL Ross & Co. in 2010 raised roughly US$500 million from a state enterprise, China Investment Corporation (CIC) [the same CIC on whose Advisory Council John Thornton sits], to invest alongside his fund, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation said. Ross collects fees from CIC’s investments, which tap part of China’s foreign exchange reserves.” Ross told the Post that, “if Trump believes there is a conflict of interest from any of his investments, he would divest them.” He declined to comment on whether CIC is an investor in his firm.

Besides a potential conflict of interest, there is the larger question of whether Ross or anyone else who has profited so greatly from the current U.S. trade and investment relationship with China is really the ideal candidate to reform that relationship.

Some Taiwan-Friendly Appointments

To be sure, many supporters of Taiwan and critics of the unbalanced status quo in U.S.-China relations have taken heart from recent announcements and rumors of Taiwan-friendly appointments to handle Asia policy. Reince Priebus, Trump’s pick for White House Chief of Staff, met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen prior to her election during a visit by Republican National Committee delegation to the Democratic Progressive Party’s Taipei headquarters in October 2015.

Matt Pottinger, a former Marine who served a tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, is rumored to be the likely Senior Director for Asia in the National Security Council. Before enlisting in the Marines, Pottinger spent seven years as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in China, where his experiences as described in a WSJ commentary on Dec. 15, 2005, would clearly inform his views on China:

[L]iving in China also shows you what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens. I’ve seen protesters tackled and beaten by plainclothes police in Tiananmen Square, and I’ve been videotaped by government agents while I was talking to a source. I’ve been arrested and forced to flush my notes down a toilet to keep the police from getting them, and I’ve been punched in the face in a Beijing Starbucks by a government goon who was trying to keep me from investigating a Chinese company’s sale of nuclear fuel to other countries.

Other candidates reportedly under consideration for positions in the Trump Administration and apparently already serving as advisers on Asia for the Trump team on Asia include Stephen Yates, Dan Blumenthal, and Randy Schriver, all of whom have been frequent visitors to Taiwan, held policy positions in previous U.S. administrations, and could be counted on to advocate polices toward Asia, Taiwan, and China more in accord with U.S. interests. For example, in a Dec. 5, 2016, essay in The National Interest titled “Reality Check: Trump’s Taiwan Call Was a Step Toward Balanced Relations,” Blumenthal and Schriver argued that President-elect Trump’s controversial telephone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai on Dec. 2 was “a good first step toward rebalancing a trilateral China-Taiwan-U.S. relationship that has been increasingly defined by the People’s Republic of China” and that “higher-level U.S. engagement with Taiwan serves U.S. national interests and values.”

In addition, Trump has already chosen Peter Navarro, one of the fiercest critics of trade with China, to head his newly created National Trade Council — a move many critics consider could lead to a trade war. The alarming titles of Navarro’s three books on China are telling: Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World (2015); Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action (2011) (which Navarro also made into a documentary); and The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won (2006, Rev. 2008). As reported by Bloomberg on Aug. 1, 2016, Navarro “has played a leading role in turning the Republican Party away from what’s left of its historical optimism about U.S.-China relations.”

Nonetheless, even Navarro struck a rather more cautious and even traditional approach toward balancing U.S. interests in China and Taiwan in his July 19, 2016, essay in The National Interest titled “America Can’t Dump Taiwan”: “It is critical there be no missteps in American policy towards Taiwan that might, on the one hand, inflame China or, on the other hand, throw Taiwan—once again—under Beijing’s bus.”

Trump’s Own Contradictions

Aside from the difficulty of aligning the disparate backgrounds, experiences, and views of President-Elect Trump’s key nominees for foreign policy posts with his projected policies toward China and Taiwan, there is the question of to whom Trump will listen, assuming he seeks advice, and whether or not he will change his mind given his tendency to “dig in” once he has publicly taken a position. We have already seen apparent contradictions in what President-Elect Trump himself has said about his policies toward Taiwan and China.

President Tsai’s 10-minute congratulatory phone call on Dec. 2 to President-Elect Trump initially caused euphoria among those of us who favor strengthened ties between the United States and Taiwan, but led to considerable wailing among those who view our policy toward China and Taiwan since 1972 as sacrosanct. The two disparate reactions only intensified when it became apparent that the call had been planned and the President-Elect had been briefed. It was an intentional and therefore significant signal to both Taipei and Beijing. The president-elect himself was pleased with the call, as reflected in his tweet: The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency. Thank you!”

In response to subsequent criticism of the call from Beijing, Washington, and much of the media, the President-Elect defensively and somewhat inaccurately tweeted on Dec. 5: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!”

Nonetheless, President-Elect Trump seemingly undermined the significance of the first such high-level phone call in nearly four decades when in an interview with Fox News on Dec. 11, he indicated that Taiwan’s status might be negotiable: “I don’t know why we have to be bound by a one-China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade,” he said. He went to on to list his familiar litany of complaints about China, all of which in the context of a deal presumably might be considered part of a negotiated package: “We’re being hurt very badly by China with devaluation, with taxing us heavy at the borders when we don’t tax them, with building a massive fortress in the middle of the South China Sea, which they shouldn’t be doing, and frankly with not helping us at all with North Korea,” he told Fox News. “You have North Korea. You have nuclear weapons and China could solve that problem and they’re not helping us at all.”

These comments made hardly anyone happy, either in Taipei, Beijing, or Washington. It appeared to many Taiwanese in particular that their country might simply be a sacrificial pawn in the match Trump was playing with China. Moreover, in the subsequent course of Washington complaints, it became sadly clearer that most of Washington — including the current and future U.S. Presidents as well as most of the U.S. media — did not really understand that the so-called “one-China” policy of the United States never meant the sovereignty of China over Taiwan.

Interestingly, Peter Navarro himself had earlier warned in his essay “America Can’t Dump Taiwan” that Taiwan should never be used as leverage against China: “Taiwan has periodically been used by the White House merely as a ‘bargaining chip’ in a game of amoral realpolitik and ‘realeconomik’ to woo and placate mainland China. The key offending presidents here include Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama; and some of the key ‘bargaining chip’ documents include both the ‘three communiqués’ and some ill-timed and poorly worded proclamations by Clinton—arguably the biggest sell-out to the People’s Republic of China of any American president in history.”

Why More Interest in Russia than China?

Another looming contradiction that the future Trump Administration will imminently have to face is the radical contrast in approaches it takes to Russia and China. Both countries have autocratic governments with a single leader at the top and neither country respects the rule of law, democracy, human rights, or political freedom in any form. Both have nuclear weapons and have struck aggressive postures toward their neighbors over territorial and maritime claims. China has created artificial islands in the South China Sea and militarized them, and Russia has illegally occupied Crimea and eastern portions of Ukraine.

Both Russia and China share a close military relationship, share similar or identical views on international and regional issues that are almost always at variance with U.S. policies, and both have undertaken cyberattacks against the United States. Except for Russia’s greater number of nuclear weapons and advanced military technology — and of course its oil, China is nonetheless the far more important and dynamic country. Clearly, moreover, China is vastly more significant to the United States from an economic and trade perspective. Nonetheless, it is with Russia that Trump seeks to improve relations.

Rough Sailing Ahead for Sino-U.S. Relations, Possibly Improved U.S. Ties with Taiwan

Unfortunately, it is still too early to know how so many contradictions and uncertainties will play out in U.S. relations with Taiwan and China. On balance, however, my view is that U.S. relations with China under a Trump Administration are headed for rough waters, but there will be opportunities for long-needed incremental improvements in U.S. relations with Taiwan.

The U.S. relationships with China and Taiwan, beginning with the 1^st Communiqué in 1972, have always been built on a fragile framework of ambiguity and half-truths. That framework has been increasingly tattered as Taiwan evolved into a prosperous modern society and a model of democratic transformation. Not easily dismissed, forgotten, or abandoned, Taiwan is rather to be respected, supported, and given at least a place at the tables of international organizations.

Meanwhile, under Xi Jinping, China has regressed politically, become more belligerent regionally, even as it has also grown richer, seemingly at the expense of the United States despite what economists might say. There is growing U.S. popular and political sentiment, both Democrat and Republican, that the ratio of costs to gains in our relationship with China has been out of whack for some time and needs to be corrected.

The challenge for the Trump Administration will be to adjust U.S. policies toward Taiwan and China in a way that does not lead to further negative repercussions in cross-Strait relations or to conflict between China and the United States.

Post Views: 2,074

#china #taiwan #Trump