US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, a pro-China diplomat with little sympathy for Taiwan, has resigned and will return to academia.
He is to be replaced by William Burns, a Middle East expert who is currently undersecretary for political affairs and the department’s third-ranking official.
The move is unlikely to have an immediate impact on US-Taiwan relations at a time when Washington is preoccupied with developments in the Arab world.
Announcing Steinberg’s departure on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said: “Jim has been particularly instrumental in shaping our renewed engagement in the Asia-Pacific.”
“From managing our expanding relationship with China, to reaffirming our historic alliance with Japan, to addressing challenges on the Korean Peninsula, Jim has been at the center of shaping our efforts,” she said.
Clinton said Steinberg had been a “fixture” at meetings with the National Security Council (NSC) and frequently represented the US State Department at the White House.
Insiders said Steinberg has been at least partly responsible for US President Barack Obama’s decision to put Taiwan’s request to buy advanced F-16 aircraft on the backburner. He is said to have argued in private that F-16 sales to Taiwan would not result in enough benefits to justify upsetting Beijing.
US-Taiwan Business Council president Rupert Hammond-Chambers said US decisions regarding Taiwan were made collectively through an interagency process, coordinated by the NSC.
“That said, Steinberg did have the power to say no. It was a power he exercised reflexively when it came to Taiwan,” he said.
“I believe his actions spoke volumes for his view of Taiwan and the issues he believed it created for the US-China relationship. We can only hope that his successor takes a more balanced view of American interests on Taiwan and injects some badly needed ambition into our goals for US-Taiwan relations,” he said.
“I’m hopeful that a reassessment of our Taiwan policy will accompany the change,” said Walter Lohman, director of Asian studies at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
“US-Taiwan relations right now are going nowhere. Steinberg was a well-known advocate for closer relations with China and I think that tendency was undermining movement in US-Taiwan relations,” Lohman said.
Steinberg is leaving the State Department to become dean of Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in New York State. Prior to serving as deputy secretary of state, he was dean of the University of Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
An article on the New York Times Web site said Steinberg’s departure had been rumored for some time and that he “never became close to Mrs Clinton, despite having served as deputy national security adviser to her husband.”
Burns, the highest-ranking career diplomat in the department, has been deeply involved in policies concerning Iran and its nuclear program and the upheaval in the Arab world.
“He will bring incomparable depth and experience to the job, as well as important continuity,” Clinton said.
Steinberg will be remembered for his “strategic reassurance” policies toward Beijing.
Analyzing these policies in the Wall Street Journal, Kelley Currie, a nonresident fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, wrote: “There is a chance that the US is starting a quiet but important strategic shift away from a policy that incorporates an understood, if often inchoate, desire to see China become a more liberal and democratic society, toward an acceptance of China as a permanent authoritarian state.”
Gerrit van der Wees, editor of the Washington-based Taiwan Communique, said Steinberg was “too soft on China.”
“On Taiwan, Steinberg regrettably clung too much to old ‘one China’ policy mantras and was not able to engage the US in more creative thinking and action in support of Taiwan’s democracy and international space. He also was overly cautious on US arms sales to Taiwan,” he said.
What happens next, Van der Wees told the Taipei Times, depends on how responsibilities are shifted within the State Department.
Van der Wees expects US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell to take a more prominent role, “which is a good thing, because he has an excellent grasp of the policies needed to balance out China’s rise and retain US influence in East Asia.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater