Much fuss has been made this week over this year’s Republican National Committee (RNC) policy platform’s failure to include any mention of Taiwan, for the first time in four decades.
While Taiwanese diplomats are having their “Who lost the GOP [Grand Old Party]?” moment, such fears are overblown, representing a fundamental misreading of the significance of US political party platforms, and more broadly, partisan dynamics vis-a-vis Taiwan.
In the US, party platforms are largely irrelevant from a practical policy perspective, existing to placate activist groups in each party’s coalition, and to articulate the campaign case against the other party.
Platform positions rarely translate into actual policy, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. For example, for more than 50 years the Republican Party and Democratic Party platforms have called for recognizing undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, yet no action was taken until the then-US president Donald Trump’s administration.
Both party platforms for decades have prominently featured calls for a renewed commitment to settling the Cyprus dispute, yet Cyprus never became a major priority for any US administration. These planks exist not as a serious articulation of policy, but rather to placate particular interest groups.
Notably, the 2016 Republican platform called for a free-trade agreement (FTA) with Taiwan, yet the Trump administration never entertained the idea, and negotiations over an FTA only began last year under US President Joe Biden’s administration.
While Republican platforms have traditionally outlined basic contours of a Taiwan policy, Democratic platforms have often omitted Taiwan entirely, or made only cursory reference. Despite this, steadfast support for Taiwan has been fundamental to both Democratic and Republican administrations, with little daylight between them.
The omission of Taiwan from this year’s Republican Party platform reflects the brevity of the document. While it traditionally runs to about 60 pages, the party has not adopted a traditional platform document since 2016. In 2020 it merely adopted a one-page resolution to re-adopt the 2016 platform, and this year’s platform is more of a campaign statement than a policy document.
Some have said it was dictated over the phone by Trump.
On China, it makes unserious claims that the Republicans would revoke China’s most favored nation status and “stop China from buying American real estate,” which is impossible without opening up corporate secrecy records in Delaware and the Cayman Islands.
The only foreign countries mentioned in the platform are Israel and Mexico, outlining extremely controversial positions that divide the country. Taiwan would do well to stay out of the polarization of US foreign policy, and should count itself lucky it is not yet subject to the same divisive debates over Ukraine and Israel.
That being said, Taiwanese certainly have cause for concern over the potential direction of US policy during a Trump presidency. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Trump, who is likely to win in November, waffled on the question of whether he would defend Taiwan. He called for Taiwan to “pay for [its] defense,” despite the US$19.7 billion backlog of munitions Taiwan has already paid for, while US-taxpayer-funded orders have jumped the queue to ship arms to Ukraine and Israel.
These comments have not allayed concerns that arose previously when Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton revealed that Trump had compared Taiwan to a sharpie and suggested he might abandon it. Others have raised concerns Trump might prioritize a rebalancing of the US-China trade relationship, or even personal business interests in exchange for abandoning Taiwan.
The panic of the past few weeks reflects the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ misguided priorities, as it has struggled to adapt to a more fluid US politics driven more by activist wings than traditional bipartisan consensus.
The ministry’s maladroitness has been characterized by poor decisions, such as directing hundreds of thousands of dollars to marginal fringe politicians with no political future, such as former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former British prime minister Liz Truss. Pompeo is unlikely to feature in a second Trump administration, and spends his days calling for the US to recognize Taiwan as an independent republic, something Taiwan itself is not calling for. Nonetheless, he was feted as a keynote speaker this week in Wisconsin at a reception hastily organized by the Taiwanese representative office on the margins of the Republican convention.
Meanwhile, after stepping down in disgrace as the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister, Truss was paid more than US$100,000 for a four-hour visit to Taiwan, and on her return to the UK immediately lobbied on behalf of Chinese corporations to grant export licenses for British anti-landmine technology, which obviously would be used against Taiwan in an invasion. Truss lost her seat in the UK general election earlier this month and has no future in British Conservative Party politics.
Taiwan has been very fortunate to benefit from decades of relative stability and bipartisan consensus in US foreign policy driven by moderate centrists. If Taiwan is not prepared to adequately engage the new populist currents driving US foreign policy for at least the next four years, it risks sliding into irrelevancy, or worse — polarization.
Sasha B. Chhabra is an analyst, commentator and media consultant on China’s foreign policy, Taiwanese politics and cross-strait affairs.
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