Stanley Roth visited Taiwan immediately before and after taking office as US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. Both times he was received by top officials. He is considered a top US expert on Asian affairs. So why is he so often wrong?
In 1997, Roth was worried that the Asian financial crisis might bring regressions to the political democracy and social stability of the region. He was wrong. In the same year, before Chinese President Jiang Zemin's
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), however, agrees with two points made by Roth. In a speech he made on Jan. 1, Roth said Taipei and Beijing did not understand each other. Beijing has deliberately circumvented Chen to deal directly with Taiwan's opposition parties and business community. This was a serious mistake, Roth said. Roth believed that Taipei had failed to fully understand the importance of cross-strait relations to Beijing and that Taipei also erroneously thought that the benefits to Beijing from economic interaction across the Strait outweighed the political divisions. Roth used the "small three links" (小三通) as an example, explaining that before Taipei complies with the "one China" principle, Beijing is unlikely to cooperate to any greater extent. Taipei does not entirely agree with Roth on this point .
Now that Roth is out of office, the two US policies toward Taiwan that he had helped to formulate continue to take their toll. Last March, Roth suggested that the two sides of the Strait should adopt some innovative thinking, enter into an interim agreement and adopt some measures showing mutual trust on issues over which the two sides are divided. The issue of Theater Missile Defense, for example, could be included as a topic of discussion in cross-strait dialogue, he said. Roth's suggestion was unlike the "interim agreement" proposed by Kenneth Lieberthal, former senior director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council and assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs. As Lieberthal's proposal did not pre-suppose "Chinese unification" as a necessary outcome, Taipei was naturally much happier with it.
Chen has agreed that the "interim agreement" is a short-term goal in the long process of cross-strait reconciliation, rather than the agreement defining the ultimate status of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Former US president Bill Clinton had said that the agreement reached by Taipei and Beijing over the future of Taiwan must be made peacefully and with the consent of the Taiwanese people. An "interim agreement" would seem certainly to fall within such a scope.
A blind spot in the US policy however, is that Taiwan's future must be jointly decided by the two sides of the Strait without the use of force or the imposition of the will of one side over the other side. US Secretary of State Colin Powell said during his congressional approval hearings that the two sides must reach a peaceful resolution through a manner found acceptable by the people of both sides. This language was slightly different from that in Clinton's comments after China issued a white paper concerning Taiwan last February.
Chen obviously intended to clarify this discrepancy when he met with Roth. If the future of Taiwan is to be decided by the people of both sides of the Strait, then the verdict is out already. The futures of East Timor and Quebec were both decided by their respective residents, rather than by all the citizens of Indonesia and Canada. So Chen told Roth that Taiwan's future could not be decided by the people on the two sides of the Strait, but rather that the free will of the Taiwanese people must be respected.
US policy toward Taiwan is very confused. The US has sold Taiwan medium-range air-to-air missiles, yet it has also requested the missiles be left in the US for safe-keeping. It has even opposed a visit to the Marshall Islands, a country which has formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, by a naval flotilla from Taiwan. While these two decisions were made by low-ranking officials, if the mid- and high-ranking officials do not intercede in time, the basis of mutual trust between the US and Taiwan will be severely damaged. Taiwan remains most concerned, however, about the US' attitude toward cross-strait relations. The US' decision on arms sales to Taiwan in April will be an important indicator of that attitude.
Lin Cheng-yi is a research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies of the Academica Sinica.
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