The US alliance structure would serve to constrain US President Donald Trump’s ability to negotiate directly with China, US academic Francis Fukuyama said yesterday in Taipei.
“There’s frequently talk about the need for some kind of G2, where the US and China negotiate directly to manage their relationship and I just think that that’s not a realistic outcome,” he said, speaking at a forum on US-China relations organized by former premier Jiang Yi-huah’s (江宜樺) Fair Winds Foundation.
“[This view is] sort of like what the European great powers did in the 19th century, when everyone else was just a colony of a European power and colonies were traded back and forth, but the world isn’t structured like this anymore — the United States has many alliances,” he said. “We don’t have an alliance exactly with Taiwan, but we certainly have a long-standing moral commitment, and you’re not living in a world where the United States is going to go to China and say that because we want X out of you, we’ll give you Taiwan or the East China Sea.”
While Trump is unlikely to abandon the US alliance structure, an attempt to force a renegotiation of cost-sharing might have more credibility than previous US administrations, he said.
“It’s actually very hard to undermine an existing big international institution — I think what’s going to happen is the United States is not going to invest any effort into expanding that set of institutions, and it’s going to continue to keep putting pressure on its allies to pay more,” he said.
While there is still potential for a “grand bargain” with China over allowing South Korea to reunite the Korean Peninsula while withdrawing US troops, Chinese negotiators have so far been unwilling to countenance the potential collapse of North Korea, he said.
Fukuyama also criticized the opposition of former US president Barack Obama’s administration to China’s establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
The inspection equipment and data transmission system for new robotic dogs that Taipei is planning to use for sidewalk patrols were developed by a Taiwanese company, the city’s New Construction Office said today, dismissing concerns that the China-made robots could pose a security risk. The city is bringing in smart robotic dogs to help with sidewalk inspections, Taipei Deputy Mayor Lee Ssu-chuan (李四川) said on Facebook. Equipped with a panoramic surveillance system, the robots would be able to automatically flag problems and easily navigate narrow sidewalks, making inspections faster and more accurate, Lee said. By collecting more accurate data, they would help Taipei
STATS: Taiwan’s average life expectancy of 80.77 years was lower than that of Japan, Singapore and South Korea, but higher than in China, Malaysia and Indonesia Taiwan’s average life expectancy last year increased to 80.77 years, but was still not back to its pre-COVID-19 pandemic peak of 81.32 years in 2020, the Ministry of the Interior said yesterday. The average life expectancy last year increased the 0.54 years from 2023, the ministry said in a statement. For men and women, the average life expectancy last year was 77.42 years and 84.30 years respectively, up 0.48 years and 0.56 years from the previous year. Taiwan’s average life expectancy peaked at 81.32 years in 2020, as the nation was relatively unaffected by the pandemic that year. The metric
TAKING STOCK: The USMC is rebuilding a once-abandoned airfield in Palau to support large-scale ground operations as China’s missile range grows, Naval News reported The US Marine Corps (USMC) is considering new sites for stockpiling equipment in the West Pacific to harden military supply chains and enhance mobility across the Indo-Pacific region, US-based Naval News reported on Saturday. The proposed sites in Palau — one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — and Australia would enable a “rapid standup of stored equipment within a year” of the program’s approval, the report said, citing documents published by the USMC last month. In Palau, the service is rebuilding a formerly abandoned World War II-era airfield and establishing ancillary structures to support large-scale ground operations “as China’s missile range and magazine
A 72-year-old man in Kaohsiung was sentenced to 40 days in jail after he was found having sex with a 67-year-old woman under a slide in a public park on Sunday afternoon. At 3pm on Sunday, a mother surnamed Liang (梁) was with her child at a neighborhood park when they found the man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and woman, surnamed Huang (黃), underneath the slide. Liang took her child away from the scene, took photographs of the two and called the police, who arrived and arrested the couple. During questioning, Tsai told police that he had met Huang that day and offered to
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