Taiwan should worry more about improving relations with China than with the US because ties with Washington are already excellent while ties with China are "broken and need to be fixed," said former high-ranking US state department official Stanley Roth yesterday.
In a speech sponsored by the Institute for National Policy Research, Roth, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under former US president Bill Clinton, said ties between Taipei and Beijing are more important for the prosperity and security of Taiwan than Taipei-Washington ties.
"I don't believe that US-Taiwan relations are broken. I think they're great," said Roth, who leaves Taipei today after a five-day visit, adding that Taiwan should "concentrate on cross-strait relations which are broken and which need to be fixed."
Roth, who in a speech in Washington in March 1999 urged both sides of the Taiwan Strait to map out an "interim agreement" when a full-scale deal could not be reached, declined to suggest ways for Taipei and Beijing to settle their differences.
"I can envision many different formulations that could be used as the basis to restarting the talks. But frankly speaking, I don't think either China or Taiwan needs America to come up with the formulation. It seems to me that this is something that has to be done and must be done between the two sides themselves," Roth said.
The key element, Roth added, was for both sides to have "the political will" to resolve the longstanding dispute.
Roth also said that his 1999 initial proposal on the idea of the "interim agreement" was not the US government's plan.
"What I have been talking about is a conceptual proposal," Roth said.
"I do not offer a Roth plan, and I do not offer what an interim agreement should look like."
Roth said it was quite common in diplomatic circles when dealing with very difficult disputes to recognize that when the parties involved realized that the dispute could not be resolved with one "decisive" agreement, then there were various precedents for "interim agreements."
Despite praising President Chen Shui-bian (
He also criticized China for avoiding dealing directly with Chen's regime while embarking on what he described as "a very clumsy United Front strategy" to entice opposition parties and key business leaders on the island since Chen's victory in last year's presidential election.
Meanwhile, Roth said a common view in Taiwan -- which held that the Clinton administration was "hostile" to Taiwan while the Bush administration was "friendly" to the island -- was to him "complete nonsense."
He said he believed the Bush administration would adhere to the same three pillars of Clinton's policy on cross-strait ties: adherence to a "one-China" policy, insistence on peaceful resolution of the cross-strait dispute, as well as an emphasis on the resumption of cross-strait dialogue between the two sides.
RSS