American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Director Douglas Paal is scheduled to leave his post on July 1, and his likely replacement will be veteran diplomat Stephen Young, sources in Washington and Taipei told the Taipei Times yesterday.
When asked to comment on the issue, AIT deputy spokeswoman Nadine Siak confirmed that Paal is planning to leave, but said she had no further information on the date of his departure or who his replacement would be.
A US government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that it was an "open secret" in Washington that Young was Paal's most likely successor.
PHOTO: US STATE DEPARTMENT
Young is currently the US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, a post he has held since July 25, 2003. He has been in the US Department of State for 25 years, and is a former AIT deputy director as well as a former director of the State Department's Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs.
AIT is the de facto US embassy in Taiwan established under the US' Taiwan Relations Act, and appointments to the post of AIT director -- in effect the US ambassador to Taiwan -- do not require Senate confirmation.
The appointment of a career foreign-service officer as the head of AIT would probably be greeted with enthusiasm by State Department officials and their Taiwanese counterparts, the source said.
"With Steve [Young], you know what you are getting," a separate source in Taiwan said.
"At least he's diplomatic -- a real professional," the source said.
Many observers of Taiwan-US relations have said that the Bush and Chen administrations have had a difficult relationship in recent years, and some have specifically said that part of the problem was the personal animosity between President Chen Shui-bian (
One senior US official said that Chen and Paal "dislike each other so intensely that they hardly ever meet."
The official cited a series of missteps and miscommunications as the source of the friction, saying that "Paal had the deck stacked against him before he even came to Taiwan."
"Some Taiwanese officials were very open about their dislike of Paal before he came to Taipei," the official said.
"As a result, Paal understandably had a chip on his shoulder when he got here," the official said.
However, the US government source said this was idle rumor-mongering.
"Even if there were personal issues, Doug [Paal] and Chen are too professional to let it affect US-Taiwan relations," the US source said.
It was not immediately clear if Paal plans to continue in government service. But the US source said it was widely thought that Paal would be "promoted" within the Bush administration.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS