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| Home Front: Politix |
| Trump's Taiwan call wasn't a blunder. It was brilliant. |
| 2016-12-06 |
| h/t Instapundit Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president-elect unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy. It was a deliberate move -- and a brilliant one at that. The phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was reportedly carefully planned, and Trump was fully briefed before the call, according to The Post. It’s not that Trump was unfamiliar with the "Three Communiques" or unaware of the fiction that there is "One China." Trump knew precisely what he was doing in taking the call. He was serving notice on Beijing that it is dealing with a different kind of president -- an outsider who will not be encumbered by the same Lilliputian diplomatic threads that tied down previous administrations. ...And if that message was lost on Beijing, Trump underscored it on Sunday, tweeting: "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!" He does not need Beijing’s permission to speak to anyone. No more kowtowing in a Trump administration. ...Trump’s call with the Taiwanese president sent a message not only to Beijing, but also to the striped-pants foreign-policy establishment in Washington. ... The irony is that the hyperventilation in Washington has far outpaced the measured response from Beijing. When American foreign-policy elites are more upset than China, perhaps it’s time for some introspection. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 "Gee, you hold a LOT of our debt. Be a damn shame if we repudiated it" |
| Posted by: Frank G 2016-12-06 18:40 |