Trump Speaks With Taiwan’s Leader

Donald Trump is the first U.S. president who has spoken to a Taiwanese leader since 1979

By MARK LANDLER and DAVID E. SANGER

President Donald J. Trump at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis on Thursday.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump spoke by telephone with Taiwan’s president on Friday, a striking break with nearly four decades of diplomatic practice that could precipitate a major rift with China even before Mr. Trump takes office.
Mr. Trump’s office said he had spoken with the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, “who offered her congratulations.” 

He is the first president who has spoken to a Taiwanese leader since 1979, when the United States severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan as part of its recognition of the People’s Republic of China.
In the statement, Mr. Trump’s office said the two leaders had noted “the close economic, political, and security ties” between Taiwan and the United States. 

Mr. Trump, it said, “also congratulated President Tsai on becoming President of Taiwan earlier this year.”
Mr. Trump’s motives in taking the call, which lasted more than 10 minutes, were not clear. 

In a Twitter message late Friday, he said Ms. Tsai “CALLED ME.”
But diplomats with ties to Taiwan said it was highly unlikely that the Taiwanese leader would have made the call without arranging it in advance. 

Ms. Tsai’s office confirmed that it had taken place, saying the two had discussed promoting economic development and “strengthening defense.” 

Taiwan’s Central News Agency hailed the call as “historic.”
The president has shown little heed for the nuances of international diplomacy, holding a series of unscripted phone calls to foreign leaders that have roiled sensitive relationships with Britain, India and Pakistan. 

On Thursday, the White House urged Mr. Trump to use experts from the State Department to prepare him for these exchanges.
The White House was not told about Mr. Trump’s call until after it happened, according to a senior administration official. 

But afterward, the Chinese government contacted the White House to discuss the matter.

President Tsai Ing-wen 

The longer-term fallout from the Trump-Tsai conversation could be significant, the administration official said, noting that the Chinese government issued a bitter protest after the United States sold weapons to Taiwan as part of a well-established arms agreement grudgingly accepted by Beijing.
Mr. Trump’s call with President Tsai is a bigger provocation. 

Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway province and has adamantly opposed the attempts of any country to carry on official relations with it.
On Nov. 14, Mr. Trump spoke with Xi Jinping and a statement from the transition team said the two men had a “clear sense of mutual respect.”
Initial reaction from China about Friday’s telephone call was surprise verging on disbelief. 

“This is a big event, the first challenge the president has made to China,” said Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. 

“This must be bad news for the Chinese leadership.”
Official state-run media have portrayed Mr. Trump in a positive light, casting him as a businessman China could get along with. 

He was favored among Chinese commentators during the election over Hillary Clinton, who was perceived as being too hard on China.
Mr. Trump’s exchange touched “the most sensitive spot” for China’s foreign policy, Mr. Shi said. 

The government, he said, would most likely interpret it as encouraging Ms. Tsai, the leader of the party that favors independence from the mainland, to continue to resist pressure from Beijing.
Among diplomats in the United States, there was similar shock. 

“This is a change of historic proportions,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a former senior director of Asian affairs in the Obama administration. 

In a second Twitter message about the call Friday night, Mr. Trump said, “Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”
Ties between the United States and Taiwan are currently managed through quasi-official institutions. The American Institute in Taiwan issues visas and provides other basic consular services, and Taiwan has an equivalent institution with offices in several cities in the United States.
These arrangements are the outgrowth of the One China policy that has governed relations between the United States and China since President Richard M. Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972. 

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter formally recognized Beijing as the sole government of China, abrogating its ties with Taipei a year later.
The call also raised questions of conflicts of interest.
Newspapers in Taiwan reported last month that a Trump Organization representative had visited the country, expressing interest in perhaps developing a hotel project adjacent to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, which is undergoing a major expansion. 

The mayor of Taoyuan, Cheng Wen-tsan, was quoted as confirming that visit.
A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, Amanda Miller, said that the company had “no plans for expansion into Taiwan,” and that there had been no “authorized visits” to the country to push a Trump development project. 

But Ms. Miller did not dispute that Anne-Marie Donoghue, a sales manager overseeing Asia for Trump Hotels, had visited Taiwan in October, a trip that Ms. Donoghue recorded on her Facebook page.
Ms. Donoghue did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Trump’s call with the Taiwanese president came just as Obama delivered a more subtle, but also aggressive, rebuff of China: He blocked, by executive order, an effort by Chinese investors to buy a semiconductor production firm called Aixtron.
Mr. Obama took the action on national security grounds, after an intelligence review concluded that the technology could be used for “military applications” and help provide an “overall technical body of knowledge and experience” to the Chinese.
The decision is likely to accelerate tension with Beijing, as Chinese authorities make it extraordinarily difficult for American technology companies, including Google and Facebook, to gain access to the Chinese market, and Washington seeks to slow China’s acquisition of critical technology.
Mr. Trump has made little effort to avoid antagonizing China. 

He has characterized climate change as a “Chinese hoax,” designed to undermine the American economy. 

He has said China’s manipulation of its currency deepened a trade deficit with the United States. And he has threatened to impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, a proposal that critics said would set off a trade war.
By happenstance, just hours before Mr. Trump’s conversation with Ms. Tsai, Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state who designed the “One China” policy, was in Beijing meeting with Xi Jinping. 

It was unclear if Kissinger, 93, was carrying any message from Mr. Trump, with whom he met again recently in his role as the Republican Party’s foreign policy sage.
“The presidential election has taken place in the United States and we are now in the key moment. We, on the Chinese side, are watching the situation very closely. Now it is in the transition period,” Xi told Mr. Kissinger in front of reporters.

A faction of Republicans has periodically urged a more confrontational approach to Beijing, and many of President George W. Bush’s advisers were pressing such an approach in the first months of his presidency in 2001. 

But the attacks of Sept. 11 defused that move, and Iraq became the No. 1 enemy. 

After that, Bush needed China — for North Korea diplomacy, counterterrorism and as an economic partner — and any movement toward confrontation was quashed.
For his part, Mr. Trump has shown little concern about ruffling feathers in his exchanges with leaders. He also spoke on Friday with the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, who has called Obama a “son of a whore” and been accused of ordering the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers. 

On Saturday, Duterte said that Mr. Trump had wished him well in his antidrug campaign, though his account could not immediately be verified.

This week, Mr. Trump appeared to accept an invitation from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to visit Pakistan, a country that Mr. Obama has steered clear of, largely over tensions between Washington and Islamabad over counterterrorism policy and nuclear proliferation.

Checking Manila’s Pivot to China

Duterte is attacking a pillar of America’s military posture in the Western Pacific.
By DAVID FEITH

Another week, another foreign trip, another Rodrigo Duterte crisis: Fresh from visiting Beijing and announcing an ominous but vague “separation” from the United States, the Philippine president this week visited Tokyo and got specific: U.S. troops should be out of the Philippines within two years. 

A U.S. ally is now attacking a pillar of America’s military posture in the Western Pacific.
Before almost any Americans had heard of Mr. Duterte, in 2014, his predecessor signed a deal to cement cooperation with the U.S. against China’s drive to dominate the South China Sea, Asia’s central waterway. 

The agreement invited the U.S. to rotate troops and materiel through Philippine bases while boosting train-and-equip programs for Philippine troops.
“Well, forget it,” Mr. Duterte says of the deal now. 

“I don’t want to see any military man of any other nation except the Filipino,” he declared Tuesday, characteristically overlooking the Chinese forces illegally occupying Philippine territory at Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands.
Here’s an Asian pivot worthy of the name: Rarely has any country reoriented its foreign policy so dramatically and so quickly. 

Manila’s friends in the U.S. are confused and questioning: Is the alliance lost? 

Is Mr. Duterte’s gambit an indictment of Washington’s own underwhelming pivot to Asia? 

The answers carry lessons for the next U.S. president.
It’s true that the celebrated U.S. pivot, intended to deter China and reassure friends like the Philippines, has mostly amounted to better U.S. attendance at confabs like the East Asia Summit; important but limited openings to new partners Vietnam and India; and modest new U.S. military deployments to Singapore, Australia and (yes) the Philippines. 

The U.S. has undercut these gains by slashing defense budgets, embracing strategic retrenchment, letting Iraq and Syria burn, and so far failing to complete the trans-Pacific trade deal marketed as the pivot’s key element.
It’s also true that the U.S. failed to stop Beijing’s seizure of Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines in 2012, its most aggressive maritime move. 

When Chinese fishermen and armed coast-guard ships evicted Philippine boats from the area, U.S. diplomats brokered a deal for both sides to withdraw—then stood by as Manila honored the deal and Beijing didn’t. 

This hurt trust in the U.S. and whetted Beijing’s appetite. 

As Ely Ratner, now a White House official, wrote in 2013: “Chinese officials and pundits began speaking of a ‘Scarborough Model’ for exerting regional influence.”
China soon built militarized artificial islands off the Philippine coast, with no effective pushback from Washington. 

“America would never die for us,” Duterte charged last year, two months before announcing his presidential bid. 

“If America cared, it would have sent its aircraft carriers and missile frigates the moment China started reclaiming land in contested territory, but no such thing happened.”
Yet would a stronger U.S. pivot have kept Duterte onside? 

Unlikely.
The 71-year-old was fiercely anti-American long before the fall of Scarborough Shoal. 

Until this year he was mayor of Davao, in the restive southern province of Mindanao, where he opposed U.S. forces invited by national leaders to fight al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf terrorists. 

He barred U.S. drones from Davao, boasted of his “hatred” for the U.S. after a local hotel bombing he blames on the FBI, and refused the job of Philippine defense secretary in 2006 rather than work with Uncle Sam.
A former student and admirer of Jose Maria Sison, exiled founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Duterte considers the U.S. a former colonial overlord trying to keep his country under foot. 

He resents U.S. criticism of the extrajudicial killings involved in his signature crackdown on drugs—it’s why he called Barack Obama a “son of a whore”—and at their first meeting he reportedly confronted Obama with a photograph of Filipinos slain by U.S. forces a century ago.
So the U.S. is dealing with a proud ideological foe. 

Whether he’ll cause irreparable harm to a 65-year-old alliance, though, remains uncertain.
Voters elected Duterte mostly to fight crime and raise incomes, not to spurn the U.S. for China. 

The Philippines is the world’s most pro-American country, according to Pew: 92% of Filipinos last year viewed the U.S. favorably; only 82% of Americans view their own country favorably.
This is thanks to cultural and linguistic ties dating to the colonial era, the large and successful Filipino community in the U.S., and America’s standing as the Philippines’ second-largest trade partner behind Japan—all in addition to its liberation of the islands in World War II and its more recent contributions of military and humanitarian aid. 

China by contrast is viewed with suspicion, identified as it is with unpopular business elites and bullying in the South China Sea.
Hence the mounting pushback against Duterte—not only from political rivals but from the likes of former President Fidel Ramos, a respected elder statesman and former Duterte ally with close ties to the military, and Antonio Carpio, a Supreme Court justice who warned that undermining Philippine sovereignty at Scarborough Shoal would be an impeachable offense.
The U.S. can help as its Philippine friends try to check Duterte. 

For one, it can show that China isn’t the only country with strategic dollars to spend. 

As much as the Philippine military values U.S. training and equipment, U.S. aid fell from 2010 to 2015. 

The U.S. started to fix that last year with its Maritime Security Initiative, but Congress can do far more.
Mr. Obama and his successor meanwhile must show that the presidential transition won’t distract from U.S. commitments in Asia. 

The impression of U.S. strategic drift might not have created Duterte, but it gives him room to run. 

He’ll have less if the next U.S. president enters office pledging significant increases in defense spending. 

Adversaries in Beijing and Moscow know to read U.S. budget tables, and so do leaders in Manila weighing how hard to fight for a U.S. alliance on the ropes.