Aaron Friedberg, a Princeton University professor and a China expert, was scheduled to begin serving as deputy national security adviser to US Vice President Dick Cheney starting yesterday. He will join Cheney's team as the director of policy planning under the vice president's chief-of-staff, Lewis Libby. Friedberg is the first China expert officially recruited by US President George W. Bush's administration. This shows that Washington has already made progress on the Middle East issue as the US-Iraq war is over, and that Bush's diplomatic team is switching its focus to the China issue in the face of the growing threat of North Korea.
What deserves our attention is that Friedberg is considered a hawk on the China issue. He's also a member of the rising neoconservative faction on Bush's team. The future influence of this appointment on Washington's China policy will depend, in part, on the overall thinking of the hawkish faction.
Neoconservatism first became mainstream when the Project for the New American Century was established in early 1997. The project is a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. The founders of the organization are have influence on both US domestic and international affairs, including Cheney himself, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Libby, Friedberg, John Hopkins University professor Elliott Abrams, author of The End of History Francis Fukuyama, former secretary of education William Bennett and former US vice president Dan Quayle.
They praise the theory of the late University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss that invasive human nature can only be constrained by superpowers based on nationalism and the so-called "new empires" and that the political order can only be united in the face of an external threat. Based on this theory, the neoconservatives suggest that diplomatic conflicts be solved by military means. In addition, they also advocate seeking and creating external enemies.
Their agenda is backed by many famous right-wing intellectuals. For example, Bernard Lewis, a Princeton University professor, published in December 2001 an influential book entitled What went wrong: Western impact and Middle Eastern response. He believes that the Arab world worships power. Therefore, Arab countries can only be conquered through a demonstration of power.
Some US military experts also believe that war is justified if its motive is righteous. We clearly witnessed that the Bush administration insisted on solving the Iraq issue by force. Thus, the US policy framework is now deeply affected by neoconservatism.
Although most of the neoconservatives are scholars, their capacity for collective action and overall planning is strong. These people are ambitious, aggressive and calculating. This is perhaps why their influence on US foreign policy has become greater and greater over the past few years. Friedberg's joining Cheney's diplomatic team means that these people have occupied yet another spot on the US political map.
US foreign policy, led by neoconservatism, is likely to challenge Chinese President Hu Jintao's (
Wang Dan was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
Father’s Day, as celebrated around the world, has its roots in the early 20th century US. In 1910, the state of Washington marked the world’s first official Father’s Day. Later, in 1972, then-US president Richard Nixon signed a proclamation establishing the third Sunday of June as a national holiday honoring fathers. Many countries have since followed suit, adopting the same date. In Taiwan, the celebration takes a different form — both in timing and meaning. Taiwan’s Father’s Day falls on Aug. 8, a date chosen not for historical events, but for the beauty of language. In Mandarin, “eight eight” is pronounced
In a recent essay, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” a former adviser to US President Donald Trump, Christian Whiton, accuses Taiwan of diplomatic incompetence — claiming Taipei failed to reach out to Trump, botched trade negotiations and mishandled its defense posture. Whiton’s narrative overlooks a fundamental truth: Taiwan was never in a position to “win” Trump’s favor in the first place. The playing field was asymmetrical from the outset, dominated by a transactional US president on one side and the looming threat of Chinese coercion on the other. From the outset of his second term, which began in January, Trump reaffirmed his
US President Donald Trump’s alleged request that Taiwanese President William Lai (賴清德) not stop in New York while traveling to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, after his administration also rescheduled a visit to Washington by the minister of national defense, sets an unwise precedent and risks locking the US into a trajectory of either direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or capitulation to it over Taiwan. Taiwanese authorities have said that no plans to request a stopover in the US had been submitted to Washington, but Trump shared a direct call with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)
It is difficult to think of an issue that has monopolized political commentary as intensely as the recall movement and the autopsy of the July 26 failures. These commentaries have come from diverse sources within Taiwan and abroad, from local Taiwanese members of the public and academics, foreign academics resident in Taiwan, and overseas Taiwanese working in US universities. There is a lack of consensus that Taiwan’s democracy is either dying in ashes or has become a phoenix rising from the ashes, nurtured into existence by civic groups and rational voters. There are narratives of extreme polarization and an alarming
RSS