Former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) chairman Richard Bush said on Monday that he was speaking only for himself when he said last week that the US felt a need to express its views on how its interests would be affected by Taiwan’s elections.
He told reporters in Washington that his remarks — the subject of major news stories in Taiwan — had been over-interpreted.
Later, Bush wrote in a blog published by the Brookings Institution, where he is director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, that he had received a lot of coverage in the Taiwanese media for his remarks concerning how the US government would approach the 2016 presidential election.
“I suppose I should be flattered by all the attention my remarks evoked,” Bush wrote.
He said that he appreciated the mature and measured response from Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) and had “absolutely no objection” to the comment of the AIT spokesman that he was no longer a government official and was speaking for himself.
“I was not surprised that some reporters didn’t get their facts exactly right; that’s not unheard of in either the Taiwan [sic] or the American media, but what I’ve seen from the Taipei Times is truly puzzling,” he wrote.
The Taipei Times said that Bush had indicated that Washington would declare a preference for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate because there were lingering doubts about the DPP’s cross-strait policies.
“As can be seen from the text of my remarks, the US government clearly understands the tension between not stating support for a particular candidate and expressing itself on the US interests at stake, when there are interests at stake (I have felt that tension myself),” he wrote. “I provided the examples where we have expressed views in the past on the implications of the election for US interests, by way of predicting that it would happen again. It was up to Taiwan voters in the past to decide what those statements meant and how to weight them in their voting decisions. It will be up to Taiwan voters to do so in the future, which is as it should be, but I don’t see any basis for extrapolating from my actual remarks to conclude that I was predicting that the US government would side with one party over another.”
Separately, US Department of State deputy spokesperson Marie Harf was asked directly on Monday about Bush’s statement last week, about US policy on Taiwan’s presidential election and if the US would prefer a party or candidate based on its China policy.
She said that she had not seen Bush’s comments, but that the US did not take a position on “who we would like to see anywhere as the leader of another place.”
“Obviously, that’s not something that we here take positions on. When it comes to Taiwan, as you’re probably aware, we remain fully committed to the one China policy, to the three communiques and our responsibilities under the Taiwan Relations Act,” Harf said. “Beyond that, I don’t have much more analysis of the election.”
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