After nearly five years on the job, Richard Bush, the chairman and managing director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), has decided to retire to join the Washington-based think tank, the Brookings Institution.
His decision, announced after months of speculation that he was about to leave AIT, sparked a furious round of speculation about who might take over his position.
Bush, 55, plans to leave around July 1, he told the Taipei Times. His deputy, Barbara Schrage, will become acting managing director until a replacement is named. Bush is the fifth AIT director since the office was established in 1979 after Washington switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei.
"I appreciate the opportunity to have made a contribution to the US-Taiwan relationship, which I believe is better now than it has been in a long time," Bush said in a statement. "I leave my position confident about Taiwan's future and about the relations between our two peoples."
The names of several potential replacements surfaced almost immediately after Bush's announcement. One is that of Theresa Shaheen, a businesswoman who has close ties in George W. Bush administration circles, and whose husband is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's chief of staff. "She's been campaigning for it for a while," said one source.
Another is George Mu, a third-generation Chinese-American who is US ambassador to the Ivory Coast. Mu, a Democrat from San Francisco, spent time with the foreign commercial service of the Commerce Department in the Bill Clinton administration before being named ambassador. Another businessman, Roy Warner, about whom little was immediately known, was another name.
On the other hand, Larry Wortzel, the head of the Asia program at the Heritage Foundation think tank who was widely tipped for the AIT post either in Washington or Taipei last year, apparently is not a candidate.
Wortzel was thought to be a possible alternative for Douglas Paal when Paal's appointment to the Taipei AIT job seemed in trouble last year. While Paal finally has been appointed, his move to Taiwan has been delayed, and he is not expected in Taipei until after July 4, sources say.
Richard Bush took over the AIT post in September 1997. Before that, he was a member of the National Intelligence Council under then president Clinton, and from 1993 to 1995 he was the Asia staffer at the House International Relations Committee. From 1983 to 1993, he covered Taiwan issues for congressman Stephen Solarz, one of Taiwan's main advocates at the time.
Some conservatives have never trusted Bush in view of his Democratic background.
"I don't think he was sufficiently supportive of either Taiwan's democratic aspirations or its defense needs," said William Triplett, a former congressional aide and a core member of the ultra-conservative "Blue Team" group in Washington.
Other strong supporters for Taiwan in Washington, however, disagree.
"I think the conservatives ... otherwise have been very happy with Richard Bush. And I think that's one reason he's around, is because nobody was pushing to get him to leave," said John Tkacik, the Taiwan expert at the Heritage Foundation.
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