Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo arrives in Taiwan today for a four-day visit, accompanied by his wife and Miles Yu (余茂春), his principal China policy adviser during his tenure at the US Department of State.
As the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in its news release announcing Pompeo’s visit, he is a valued, long-term friend of Taiwan.
As secretary of state, Pompeo pushed for closer relations between Washington and Taipei, approved multiple tranches of arms sales to Taiwan and declassified several important memoranda from the administration of former US president Ronald Reagan.
Of particular note was the declassification of the “six assurances” cable sent to Taiwan by Reagan in 1982, which has undoubtedly further bolstered Washington’s security guarantees to Taiwan.
In one of his final acts before leaving office, Pompeo instructed all US government executive agencies to disregard outdated restrictions governing official contact with Taiwan. While in office, he labored tirelessly to set the Taiwan-US relationship on a more normal footing.
The whole nation extends a warm welcome to Pompeo and Yu, old friends who clearly treasure Taiwan and its democratic way of life.
Perhaps Pompeo’s most significant impact on global affairs was his unequivocal opposition to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictatorship and his advocacy of an alliance of democratic nations to defeat the CCP.
Pompeo has previously said that the struggle faced today is not a question of the US versus China; rather, it is a choice between two political systems: liberty versus authoritarianism.
He recognizes that everyone must decide whether they are willing to allow the creation of a new world order in which China uses military coercion to bully smaller nations into submission.
Pompeo was a key figure behind the administration of former US president Donald Trump’s policy of unleashing an all-out trade dispute with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Although the policy was heavily criticized at the time, it continues virtually unchanged under US President Joe Biden, whose administration has stepped up efforts to build a coalition of democratic nations to tackle the PRC.
After Pompeo stepped down in January last year, Beijing announced that it had drawn up a sanctions blacklist of security officials and advisers who served in the Trump administration, including Pompeo. It was proof that Pompeo and other high-level officials within the Trump administration had touched a raw nerve in Beijing.
A descendant of Italian immigrants, Pompeo was born into an ordinary family, the son of an electromechanical technician. Despite his humble beginnings, Pompeo was first in his class at US Military Academy West Point and served in the US army, going on to earn a Juris Doctor at Harvard Law School, before moving into business.
In 2010, he won the Republican primary for Kansas’ fourth congressional district seat and served as the district’s representative until he was appointed by Trump as CIA director in 2017. A year later, Pompeo was nominated by Trump to serve as secretary of state.
Despite his apparently seamless ascent through the ranks of US politics, Pompeo is no establishment figure. He put together a foreign policy platform at the State Department that marked a radical departure from the model of statecraft employed under the administration of former US president Barack Obama. This was perhaps manifested most clearly in Pompeo’s reform of the US’ Taiwan policy.
“Taiwan has not been a part of China, and that was recognized with the work that the Reagan administration did to lay out the policies that the United States has adhered to now for three-and-a-half decades, and done so under both administrations,” Pompeo said in a radio interview in November 2020.
Pompeo was the first US secretary of state to clearly elucidate the US government’s actual position on Taiwan. Previous incumbents had always fallen back on opaque verbiage from the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiques and other nebulous “one China” formulas.
Under Pompeo’s leadership, the State Department became much less conservative about official interaction with Taipei, and moved toward an easing of restrictions and the establishment of a more formal relationship.
Bipartisan support for Taiwan in the US Congress enabled the passing of the Taiwan Travel Act, providing a legal basis for enhanced relations with Taiwan, and Pompeo capitalized on rising anti-China sentiment in the US to elevate Taiwan’s geostrategic value in Washington.
Several months after Pompeo took over as secretary of state in April 2018, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) conducted an official state visit to Paraguay and Belize, stopping over in the US. In contrast with the convention of holding a low-key event to welcome transiting Taiwanese presidents, he ensured that Tsai’s welcome was not only public, but for the first time allowed a Taiwanese head of state to set foot inside Taiwan’s US representative office and a US federal agency. It was truly a watershed moment.
Another barrier was broken by Pompeo in 2020 when then-US secretary of health and human services Alex Azar visited Taiwan to conduct the highest-level official meeting between the two nations since 1979.
A month later, then-US undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment Keith Krach arrived in Taipei for a three-day visit.
In January last year, Pompeo announced the removal of all of the State Department’s internal contact restrictions with Taiwan. His actions boosted the Taiwan-US relationship and set a trajectory for the Biden administration to follow.
Monday last week marked the 50th anniversary of former US president Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China. Nixon had taken a strategic decision to pursue rapprochement with China to defeat the former Soviet Union.
Hindsight shows that the gamble failed. China did not democratize as it embraced market reform and became more prosperous. Instead, the PRC inveigled itself into the global financial economy with false promises of reform and has become the world’s greatest authoritarian threat.
During an address at the Nixon Library on July 23, 2020, Pompeo called on the US and other countries to end the failed policy of engagement and drive a wedge between the CCP’s elites and the Chinese people to induce change from within.
Reagan famously dubbed the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and set about destroying it. Pompeo has correctly identified China as the “evil empire” of this generation. Today, a new democratic alliance of nations must be formed to systematically dismantle the evil regime in Beijing.
Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has thrown the European continent into a state of emergency. Pompeo’s visit to Taiwan is timely.
As the Biden administration uses up limited bandwidth to deal with the unfolding security and humanitarian crisis in Europe, the White House must be under no false pretenses: Beijing will be looking to exploit the crisis within the Indo-Pacific region, which could involve a premature move against Taiwan. Washington and Taipei must be on full alert.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread from China, throwing the US and governments around the world into a tailspin, Beijing seized on the opportunity to escalate its military coercion of Taiwan, sending record numbers of military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone.
Five decades ago, Nixon brought China in from the cold to isolate the Soviet Union and end the Cold War. Today, the fundamental struggle between democracy and despotism continues, only the primary actors have swapped roles: Then the main enemy was the Soviet Union, today it is the PRC.
Russia is today a much weaker country economically, but it has maintained a formidable military that the Kremlin uses to threaten neighboring countries. Russia and China have a history of colluding to disrupt, sow confusion and divide the democratic free world.
Today the world is in the midst of a major realignment: a return to strategic competition between land powers and naval powers. This has significantly increased Taiwan’s strategic value, but at the same time, the nation would be caught in the middle of the firefight if a major conflict were to break out.
Pompeo has been tipped as a future presidential candidate. It will be fascinating to see how he interprets the current situation and what his proposed strategic vision for the world is as the tectonic plates of the settled global order shift.
Translated by Edward Jones
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