A congratulatory telephone call that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) made to then-US president-elect Donald Trump in 2016 was not an impromptu act and had been planned for six months, former representative to the US Stanley Kao (高碩泰) said on Saturday.
Kao made the remarks during a launch event for his memoir. He served as representative to the US from May 2016 to July 2020 and facilitated the telephone call.
The call took place on Dec. 2, 2016, and marked the first time that a US president or president-elect had directly spoken with a Taiwanese president since the countries severed official diplomatic relations in 1979.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Kao on Saturday said Washington Post foreign policy columnist Josh Rogin in his 2021 book Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century says that the phone call was an “accident” or “improvisation.”
However, he said Rogin’s account is just “one version of the many speculations made about the phone call,” which is incomplete, because Rogin “could not see the forest for the trees.”
Rogin’s version of events fails to give credit to the low-profile, but intensive communications between officials in Taiwan and the US in preparation for the call, whose planning started as far back as the summer of 2016, after Tsai was inaugurated in May that year, Kao said.
Only a handful of people in Washington, himself included, knew of the call before it happened, he said.
In his book, Kao says that Taiwan’s representative office in Washington contacted Trump’s team immediately after learning about his election victory on Nov. 8 in 2016.
Kao said he was so nervous the night before the phone call that he could hardly sleep.
At the time, he was carrying a small piece of paper with the numbers of Trump’s office at all times for fear of a sudden change of mind or schedule on Trump’s part, he said.
Finally, the call went through and Tsai and Trump spoke on the phone for about 10 minutes, double the originally planned time, he said.
Kao said the call was the result of collective efforts from both sides.
Kao entered the foreign service in 1980. He was responsible for North American affairs for most of his 40-year diplomatic career and has served as the nation’s deputy representative to Washington; as well as top representative to Hungary and Italy. He retired in July 2020.
Starlux Airlines, Taiwan’s newest international carrier, has announced it would apply to join the Oneworld global airline alliance before the end of next year. In an investor conference on Monday, Starlux Airlines chief executive officer Glenn Chai (翟健華) said joining the alliance would help it access Taiwan. Chai said that if accepted, Starlux would work with other airlines in the alliance on flight schedules, passenger transits and frequent flyer programs. The Oneworld alliance has 13 members, including American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Qantas, and serves more than 900 destinations in 170 territories. Joining Oneworld would also help boost
A new tropical storm formed late yesterday near Guam and is to approach closest to Taiwan on Thursday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. Tropical Storm Pulasan became the 14th named storm of the year at 9:25pm yesterday, the agency said. As of 8am today, it was near Guam traveling northwest at 21kph, it said. The storm’s structure is relatively loose and conditions for strengthening are limited, WeatherRisk analyst Wu Sheng-yu (吳聖宇) said on Facebook. Its path is likely to be similar to Typhoon Bebinca, which passed north of Taiwan over Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and made landfall in Shanghai this morning, he said. However, it
Taiwan's Gold Apollo Co (金阿波羅通信) said today that the pagers used in detonations in Lebanon the day before were not made by it, but by a company called BAC which has a license to use its brand. At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded when pagers used by Hezbollah members detonated simultaneously across Lebanon yesterday. Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo. A senior Lebanese security source told Reuters that Hezbollah had ordered 5,000 pagers from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo. "The product was not
COLD FACTS: ‘Snow skin’ mooncakes, made with a glutinous rice skin and kept at a low temperature, have relatively few calories compared with other mooncakes Traditional mooncakes are a typical treat for many Taiwanese in the lead-up to the Mid-Autumn Festival, but a Taipei-based dietitian has urged people not to eat more than one per day and not to have them every day due to their high fat and calorie content. As mooncakes contain a lot of oil and sugar, they can have negative health effects on older people and those with diabetes, said Lai Yu-han (賴俞含), a dietitian at Taipei Hospital of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. “The maximum you can have is one mooncake a day, and do not eat them every day,” Lai
RSS