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 Coast Guard Administration (CGA) yesterday said it had deployed patrol vessels to expel a China Coast Guard ship and a Chinese fishing boat near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. The China Coast Guard vessel was 28 nautical miles (52km) northeast of Pratas at 6:15am on Thursday, approaching the island’s restricted waters, which extend 24 nautical miles from its shoreline, the CGA’s Dongsha-Nansha Branch said in a statement. The Tainan, a 2,000-tonne cutter, was deployed by the CGA to shadow the Chinese ship, which left the area at 2:39pm on Friday, the statement said. At 6:31pm on Friday,
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, would pose a steep challenge to Taiwan’s ability to defend itself against a full-scale invasion, a defense expert said yesterday. Institute of National Defense and Security Research analyst Chieh Chung (揭仲) made the comment hours after the PLAN confirmed the carrier recently passed through the Taiwan Strait to conduct “scientific research tests and training missions” in the South China Sea. China has two carriers in operation — the Liaoning and the Shandong — with the Fujian undergoing sea trials. Although the PLAN needs time to train the Fujian’s air wing and
Taiwanese celebrities Hank Chen (陳漢典) and Lulu Huang (黃路梓茵) announced yesterday that they are planning to marry. Huang announced and posted photos of their engagement to her social media pages yesterday morning, joking that the pair were not just doing marketing for a new show, but “really getting married.” “We’ve decided to spend all of our future happy and hilarious moments together,” she wrote. The announcement, which was later confirmed by the talent agency they share, appeared to come as a surprise even to those around them, with veteran TV host Jacky Wu (吳宗憲) saying he was “totally taken aback” by the news. Huang,
The American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) put Taiwan in danger, Ma Ying-jeou Foundation director Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑) said yesterday, hours after the de facto US embassy said that Beijing had misinterpreted World War II-era documents to isolate Taiwan. The AIT’s comments harmed the Republic of China’s (ROC) national interests and contradicted a part of the “six assurances” stipulating that the US would not change its official position on Taiwan’s sovereignty, Hsiao said. The “six assurances,” which were given by then-US president Ronald Reagan to Taiwan in 1982, say that Washington would not set a date for ending arm sales to Taiwan, consult
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