I thought this week was the right time to talk about the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). After all, it was exactly three decades yesterday since the TRA, that masterpiece of strategic legislation, was enacted.
The scene: the Oval Office, Dec. 16, 1978. One day after US president Jimmy Carter surprised most by announcing the US would dump Taiwan in favor of the Reds.
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance: “Mr. President. Now that we’re going to establish relations with the Chicoms, that sort of leaves our former friends on Taiwan in a bit of a hole, wouldn’t you say?”
Carter: “Who gives a diggety damn. We’ll let Congress take care of it.”
And so, realizing the importance of uninterrupted imports of color TVs, Congress took the State Department’s draft Taiwan Omnibus Act and completely rewrote it. So it came to pass: The cornerstone of the unofficial US-Taiwan relationship, the TRA, was born.
The TRA is quite specific in its aims and objectives, but the same can’t be said for Washington’s longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity.”
US policy on Taiwan, to borrow from Winston Churchill, is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Trying to get definitive language on Taiwan from US officials is like Cathy Pacific trying to get me to tell her: “I love you.”
Down the years, the lexicon pasta that is US cross-strait policy has befuddled even the best of them. Just ask former secretary of state Colin Powell.
Who can forget his faux pas on Oct. 25, 2004? He told Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV: “Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation” and that Taiwan and China should move toward “peaceful reunification.”
Poor old General Powell was forced to “clarify” his comments just two days later, replacing “reunification” with “resolution.”
Such is the wordsmithery one used when trapped in the pit of cross-strait nomenclature.
Readers following the TRA anniversary stories in this very publication will by now be familiar with the name of the non-voting Congressional Delegate for American Samoa. To save ink in these environmentally conscious times, let me simply refer to him as Mr. F.
I didn’t know much about Mr. F until he launched his first counterstrike in the Taipei Times’ direction. But a little research reveals he’s quite an interesting character — not at all your average US politician.
How many congressmen, for instance, can say they appeared as an extra in an Elvis Presley film?
The movie, 1966’s Paradise, Hawaiian Style, was a turkey by most accounts. But it did showcase the beautiful islands of Hawaii, where a young Mr. F was attending Brigham Young University, a Mormon institution.
A source informs me that one reason Mr. F was picked for the film — in which he is apparently one of several dancers — was that his body is heavily tattooed (“In the Samoan Islands men were traditionally tattooed from waist to knees at the age of 16-18 years, in a group puberty ceremony that served to reinforce societal authority,” according to the Penn Museum).
The question is, how did he sneak past the school administrators? Visible tattoos violate the school’s grooming standards.
Anyway, back to business. Why is Mr. F so concerned with Taiwan?
Well, as chairman of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment, we Taiwanese occasionally pop up on his radar.
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