NELSON INSTITUTE DIRECTOR RESPONDS TO HIGH-LEVEL BEIJING-TAIPEI MEETING, QUESTION BALANCE OF U.S. POLICY

April 14, 2008

HARRISONBURG— Today, in a “Inside Track” feature for National Interest online, the web edition of the foreign policy journal The National Interest, Dr. J. Peter Pham, Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University, reacts to Saturday’s meeting between President Hu Jintao of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Vice President-elect Vincent Siew of the Republic of China (ROC) and discusses United States policy under the Bush administration towards relations across the Taiwan Strait.

While noting that the optimism generated by the meetings is “certainly to be welcomed, not only in the region, but on this side of the Pacific as well” since “it is clearly in the interests of the United States to lower tensions between the parties on both sides of the strait,” Dr. Pham argues that “if the idea is that as economic ties between Beijing and Taipei increase…the two adversaries will be even more constrained to settle their differences peacefully, then the United States needs to do more than simply applaud progress when it happens.” According to Dr. Pham, the irony is that while the United States should “to be more directly engaged with both sides,” it only really engaged with the PRC. Citing last week’s opening of a direct “hotline” between the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense in Beijing, the essay observes:

While [U.S. Defense Secretary Robert] Gates and [PRC Defense Minister] Liang [Guanglie] can talk, there are no such established channels for the defense chief—or any member of the U.S. cabinet—to regularly interact with their counterparts in Taipei. The same goes for the legislative branch: while Congress has exchanges with the PRC’s rubberstamp National People’s Congress, there are no institutional connections with the ROC’s boisterously democratic Legislative Yuan. Washington cannot even decide if it will give President-elect Ma a visa to privately visit the United States before his inauguration, despite his longstanding ties to America (he and his wife Christine Chow, both alumni of U.S. law schools, were married in New York; the couple’s two daughters both currently live here and the elder of them, Lesley, is even a U.S. citizen)…

Besides being less than conducive to America’s official policy objective of ensuring the balance of peace and stability across the strait, the lack of routine contact makes little tactical or operational sense from the point of view of U.S. strategic interests.

The full text of Dr. Pham’s feature, “Charting a Strait Course,” can be accessed by clicking here.