The “senior official” in Washington who tried to undermine Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) presidential campaign last week was almost certainly from the White House and not the US Department of State, analysts in the US say.
The official called the Financial Times to claim that Tsai had left US President Barack Obama’s administration with “distinct concerns” about her ability to maintain stability in the Taiwan Strait.
The resulting story has been seen as particularly damaging to Tsai and a clear attempt to influence Taiwan’s Jan. 14 presidential election in favor of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
It is not considered to be coincidental that China strongly favors the pro-Beijing policies of Ma over Tsai’s more independence-minded views.
During a three-day visit to Washington, Tsai met with both State Department and US National Security Council (NSC) officials.
Some analysts now believe the unsolicited call to the newspaper, aimed at crippling Tsai’s campaign, may have been unprecedented as a calculated and virtually open political attack.
The newspaper described the caller, who was well known to reporters, as a “senior administration official.” The official’s message was clear: The Obama administration did not trust Tsai to keep the peace and it would be better to re-elect Ma.
Tsai’s aides and entourage were shocked because there had been no trace of such sentiments in their meetings.
At the State Department, she had met with US Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell and their response to her views and policies had appeared to be positive, Tsai’s aides said.
US Senator James Inhofe, the Republican who is co-chair of the US Senate Taiwan Caucus, immediately asked the State Department for an explanation.
“The ‘official’ mentioned in this [Financial Times] article is totally unknown to us and certainly does not speak for the Obama administration,” the State Department replied.
To reinforce this position, Campbell has since told other political figures on Capitol Hill that the State Department was not involved and that the views expressed to the Financial Times did not reflect State Department thinking.
This leaves the NSC, where Tsai met NSC Senior Director for Asia Danny Russel and China Director Evan Medeiros.
Washington experts who specialize in China are now speculating that Russel and Medeiros reported their own views on Tsai — those contained in the Financial Times article — to a more senior White House figure close to the Oval Office. And this figure, identity unknown, either authorized someone within the council to call the Financial Times or authorized another White House senior official or made the call himself.
Whichever, the call was made without the knowledge and without the support of the State Department.
According to one diplomatic source, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has since been briefed on the situation and was “not pleased” at what had happened.
Behind all of this lies a long-running disagreement — some insiders call it a feud — between the State Department and the NSC.
Chris Nelson, a well-regarded Asia analyst, has written in his privately distributed Nelson Report newsletter that there is a “highly personal, often bitter animosity between senior White House officials and senior Asia players at State.”
He now wonders if that animosity will have a “deleterious effect” on foreign policy formulation because the senior administration official’s decision to call the Financial Times has raised the dispute to a new level.
Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, has written that Tsai has “assiduously sought to project reasonableness and responsibility.”
“The White House comments [in the story] reflect an all-too-well-trained instinct for carrying China’s water on cross-Straits issues. It is the PRC [People’s Republic of China] that is dictating the terms of the ‘stability’ the US is concerned with maintaining. It is the PRC that declares any deviation from the trend in the direction of unification ‘destabilizing’ and threatens to resort to force to preclude any movement counter to this trend — as it alone perceives it,” he wrote.
“And judging by the White House response to its encounter with Tsai this [last] week, the PRC’s perception is the only one it cares about,” Lohman wrote.
Travel agencies in Taiwan are working to secure alternative flights for travelers bound for New Zealand for the Lunar New Year holiday, as Air New Zealand workers are set to strike next week. The airline said that it has confirmed that the planned industrial action by its international wide-body cabin crew would go ahead on Thursday and Friday next week. While the Auckland-based carrier pledged to take reasonable measures to mitigate the impact of the workers’ strike, an Air New Zealand flight arriving at Taipei from Auckland on Thursday and another flight departing from Taipei for Auckland on Saturday would have to
The Taipei City Government yesterday confirmed that it has negotiated a royalties of NT$12.2 billion (US$380 million) with artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia Corp, with the earliest possible signing date set for Wednesday next week. The city has been preparing for Nvidia to build its Taiwan headquarters in Beitou-Shilin Technology Park since last year, and the project has now entered its final stage before the contract is signed. Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said the city government has completed the royalty price negotiations and would now push through the remaining procedures to sign the contract before
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday said the name of the Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania was agreed by both sides, after Lithuania’s prime minister described a 2021 decision to let Taiwan set up a de facto embassy in Vilnius as a “mistake.” Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene, who entered office in September last year, told the Baltic News Service on Tuesday that Lithuania had begun taking “small first steps” aimed at restoring ties with Beijing. The ministry in a statement said that Taiwan and Lithuania are important partners that share the values of freedom and democracy. Since the establishment of the
Taipei Zoo welcomes the Lunar New Year this year through its efforts to protect an endangered species of horse native to central Asia that was once fully extinct outside of captivity. The festival ushering in the Year of the Horse would draw attention to the zoo’s four specimens of Przewalski’s horse, named for a Russian geographer who first encountered them in the late 19th century across the steppes of western Mongolia. “Visitors will look at the horses and think that since this is the Year of the Horse: ‘I want to get to know horses,’” said zookeeper Chen Yun-chieh, who has been
RSS