Trump’s Taiwan call wasn’t a blunder. It was brilliant.
Relax.
Breathe.
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. The message, as John Bolton correctly put it, was that “the president of the United States [will] talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it’s in the interest of the United States, and nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...94a21c44abc_story.html?utm_term=.03ecb8e41ce5
Is poking China on Taiwan a good idea?
I have no idea. It depends on what happens.
As Ross Douthat put it on Twitter, “it’s all fine until there’s an actual crisis and then it won’t be fine.”
China might suck it up and move on. China also might be a gigantic pain in the azz about it.
Nobody knows. The Chinese probably don’t even know. They’ll have to hold emergency meetings and yell at each other in private first.
They might get over it. The United States trades with Taiwan. The United States sells
weapons to Taiwan. In 1996,
President Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait when China tested missiles in nearby waters.
Trump’s Taiwan Call Wasn’t a Blunder | World Affairs Journal
Answering a phone call is a lot lower profile than moving a couple of Carrier Battle Groups.