Taiwan's national security chief David Lee met John Bolton

Meeting between national security advisers was first since US ended formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979.

www.aljazeera.com
The destroyer Kee Lung and navy vessels taking part in a military drill in the seas off Taiwan on May 22.

Senior national security officials from the United States and Taiwan have held their first meeting in four decades this month, with the aim of deepening cooperation, the government in Taipei has said.
Taiwan's national security chief David Lee met John Bolton, the White House NSA, during his May 13-21 visit to the US, the island's foreign affairs ministry said in a statement issued on Saturday.
"During the trip, together with US government officials, Secretary-General Lee met with representatives from our diplomatic allies, reiterating support and commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific region," the statement said.
Taiwan's foreign affairs ministry and the US's de facto embassy in Taiwan declined to comment on Monday.
Taiwan's official Central News Agency said the meeting was the first since the self-ruling island and the US ended formal diplomatic ties in 1979.
China considers democratically-ruled Taiwan a renegade province, threatening to reclaim the territory by force if necessary.
Diplomatic tension between the US and China has risen in recent weeks amid an escalating trade war and Beijing's military posturing in the South China Sea, where Washington also conducts freedom-of-navigation patrols.

The meeting is likely to be viewed by Taiwan as a sign of support from the administration of US President Donald Trump.
The US, which has no formal ties with Taiwan but is the island's main source of arms.
The US has in recent months increased the frequency of patrols through the strategic Taiwan Strait despite opposition from China.
China has been ramping up pressure on Taiwan, conducting military drills near the island and leaning on its few diplomatic allies to cut off relations.
Earlier in May, the US House of Representatives backed legislation supporting Taiwan as members of Congress pushed for a sharper approach to relations with Beijing.
The Pentagon says the US has sold weapons worth more than $15bn to Taiwan since 2010.

National security adviser John Bolton Warns China Against Limiting Free Passage in South China Sea

Remarks served as warning to Southeast Asian leaders, who are preparing for a summit in Singapore this week
By Jake Maxwell Watts

National security adviser John Bolton speaks in Miami on Nov. 1. Mr. Bolton said Tuesday that U.S. vessels would continue to sail through the South China Sea. 

SINGAPORE—National security adviser John Bolton said the U.S. would oppose any agreements between China and other claimants to the South China Sea that limit free passage to international shipping, and that American naval vessels would continue to sail through those waters.
Mr. Bolton’s remarks served as a warning to Southeast Asian leaders, who are preparing for a regional summit in Singapore this week, and particularly for the Philippines, which is now in talks with Beijing about jointly exploring natural resources in the contested area.
In meetings to develop a code of conduct this year for the South China Sea, China has tried to secure a veto over Southeast Asian nations hosting military exercises with other countries in the disputed waters.
Such a deal would have the potential to limit U.S. military engagement with countries such as Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Beijing has also urged its southern neighbors to develop the region’s resources only with other countries in the region, according to people familiar with the draft text, which has been years in the making.
Chinese officials have previously declined to comment on the talks, which are continuing. 

Security analysts say Southeast Asian countries are unlikely to accept any proposal that would preclude them from exercises with the U.S.
Mr. Bolton said the U.S. welcomes the negotiations in principle. 

In a media briefing in Singapore, he described them as a plus.
But he stressed that “the outcome has to be mutually acceptable, and also has to be acceptable to all the countries that have legitimate maritime and naval rights to transit and other associate rights that we don’t want to see infringed.”

The USS Ronald Reagan and the guided-missile destroyer USS Milius, conduct an exercise in the South China Sea.

China, which claims almost the entire South China Sea, has built up several small atolls and constructed military bases on them, providing it with a strategic advantage over the region’s smaller claimants, which include the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. 

Taiwan also has competing claims, while countries such as Japan and South Korea depend on the shipping routes to supply nearly all of their oil needs.
The U.S. military has responded by conducting regular patrols that challenge China’s claims of sovereignty by sailing near or flying over the reclaimed islands, leading to several tense brushes with Chinese military vessels. 

Mr. Bolton said Tuesday that the U.S. will continue the faster pace of these missions and increase both military spending and the level of engagement with other countries in the region to reinforce its position.
Some leaders in Southeast Asia have opted to engage Beijing, hoping that cooperating with China will at least provide some economic benefit.
Among them is President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who is expected to welcome Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to Manila next week. 

It isn’t known whether the two leaders will announce the conclusion of a deal on joint resource exploration.
A broader code of conduct between China and Southeast Asian countries, meanwhile, appears some way off.
In a speech Tuesday morning in Singapore, Li Keqiang said Beijing hopes the agreement “will be finished in three years’ time,” dashing hopes of substantial progress by the conclusion of this week’s leaders’ summit.
The heads of government for Southeast Asia’s 10 countries are meeting this week in Singapore for an annual summit and will be joined by leaders from eight other countries including Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.
China in particular is trying to drum up support for a free-trade pact called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes the Southeast Asian nations plus China, India, Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. 

Negotiations for the pact picked up speed after President Trump pulled the U.S. out of a rival trans-Pacific trade agreement that excluded China. 

Li said Tuesday that talks would continue into next year.
Mr. Bolton said the U.S. is instead trying to drive more bilateral trade with key partners, such as Japan.
“I think the level of diplomatic activity has picked up,” he said. 

“I think this is a strategy that is still being shaped but it’s being received very well and we’re continuing to pursue it.”

US criticises China’s empire and aggression in Asia

US vice-president Pence takes swipe at Beijing’s regional ambitions ahead of Trump-Xi meeting at G20 
By Stefania Palma in Singapore

Mike Pence: 'Empire and aggression have no place in the Indo-Pacific' 

Mike Pence, US vice-president, has condemned “empire and aggression” in Asia in a veiled swipe at China’s growing influence across the region, fuelling tensions ahead of a meeting between the two countries’ leaders at the G20 summit later this month
 The rhetoric marks one of Washington’s strongest attacks on Beijing’s growing sway in the region, and comes amid a trade war that has seen the world’s two biggest economies slap duties on more than $350bn worth of trade, rattling global financial markets. 
 “We all agree that empire and aggression have no place in the Indo-Pacific,” Mr Pence told a gathering of Asian leaders at the Asean summit in Singapore.
“In all that we do, the United States seeks collaboration, not control. And we are proud to call Asean our strategic partner.”
 The US delegation has used the Singapore meetings to reassert its commitment to Asean — the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — from which the White House seeks support to push back against Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and to urge North Korea towards denuclearisation.
 Mr Pence’s speech highlighted the tensions dominating Sino-US relations ahead of a key meeting between President Trump and Xi in Buenos Aires later this month, the scheduling of which had signalled a potential breakthrough in the countries’ escalating trade dispute. 
 Wang Qishan, Chinese vice-president and close confidant of Xi, last week said that Beijing was ready to talk with Washington to resolve the trade dispute, while the US and China held high-level talks in Washington that included a meeting between John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, and Yang Jiechi, a Chinese state councillor with responsibility for foreign affairs. 
 The stakes of the meeting in Argentina are high.
These “significant” talks will cover a wide range of issues including trade and “will help give [the two presidents’] senior advisers guidance as to how to proceed going forward,” Mr Bolton told journalists at the Asean summit. 
 If no deal is reached, the most likely scenario is that the tariff rate on most of the $250bn of targeted Chinese exports to the US will rise from 10 per cent to 25 per cent in January.
President Trump could then proceed to what US officials describe as phase three of the trade confrontation with Beijing, imposing tariffs on all US imports from China.  
Mr Pence on Thursday said that the US’s vision of the Indo-Pacific “excludes no nation. It only requires that every nation treat their neighbours with respect, that they respect the sovereignty of our nations and the international rules of order.”
Washington has accused China of military intimidation and economic coercion of other countries in the region.
It argues that Beijing’s militarisation of the South China Sea has effectively robbed rival claimants of fair access.
Washington also says that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the foreign policy framework that builds Chinese influence through massive infrastructure projects, forces less powerful countries into dangerous dependence.
 At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Papua New Guinea this weekend, Mr Pence is due to unveil details of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy, aimed at providing an alternative to China’s BRI.
 The US plan “stands in sharp contrast to the dangerous debt diplomacy that China has been engaging in throughout the region and has led several countries . . . to have serious debt problems from accepting loans that are not transparent”, a senior US administration official told reporters in Singapore.

Two Chinas Policy

• Bolton Says Trump Moves Signal A Tougher China Line
• The Taiwan call laid the foundation for a different relationship

Reuters

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton arrives for a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York, U.S., December 2, 2016.
One of Donald Trump’s possible picks for secretary of state said on Friday that the president’s criticisms of China and phone call with Taiwan’s president could signal a different relationship with Beijing and a tougher line on issues from trade to the South China Sea.
In a speech on Thursday in Iowa, Trump said the United States needed to improve its relationship with China, which he criticized for its economic policies and failure to rein in North Korea.
“That and the call to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen that was arranged a week ago certainly lay the foundation for a different relationship (with China),” John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, told Fox Business.
Bolton, a conservative seen as being among the contenders to be Trump’s secretary of state, said Trump expected countries to live up to commitments they have made on issues such as trade.
“The Chinese have not just been doing that,” Bolton said, while also highlighting China’s political and military steps “to make the South China Sea into a Chinese province.”
Asked if he thought Trump’s remarks were a statement of intent and an opening negotiating position, Bolton said, “I think that’s at least what it is, and it may be more than that as well. You could use the Taiwan relationship to play off against their performance in the South China Sea.
“It was very important that he mentioned what I’ve seen for the past 15 years, which is that China says they’re being helpful with the North Korean nuclear weapons program, when in fact they’ve done precious little,” he said.
In an opinion article last January in The Wall Street Journal, Bolton proposed using degrees of escalation on Taiwan that could start with receiving Taiwanese diplomats officially at the State Department and lead to restoring full diplomatic recognition, to pressure China to step back from its pursuit of territory in East Asia.
Experts saw Trump’s call with Tsai on Dec. 4 -- the first by a U.S. president with a Taiwanese leader since Jimmy Carter switched diplomatic recognition to China from Taiwan in 1979 -- as an opening salvo in a strong test of wills with Beijing.

Jettisoning the ambiguous ‘one-China’ policy

China is not our friend — Trump's Taiwan call cuts belligerent rival down to size
BY CHRIS BUSKIRK

America’s foreign policy "elites" are in an uproar. 

Again. 

Or maybe it’s still. 

It’s hard to keep track of where one censorious tantrum ends and the next begins. 

This time their casus belli is the President’s phone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
They warn us that this upsets the delicate international balance and that Donald Trump is a know-nothing cowboy acting without either knowledge or understanding.
Academics like NYU’s Ian Bremmer assumes that Trump’s political acts are nothing more than involuntary spasms, postulating that he “inadvertently caused a major diplomatic incident.”
The presumption is that since Trump is breaking with the current orthodoxy that he must be doing so accidentally.
It also ignores the fact that Trump is being counseled by Ambassador John Bolton, who wrote back in January that the United States should be countering China’s aggression in East Asia “may involve modifying or even jettisoning the ambiguous ‘one-China’ policy.”
Yet the more the critics talk the more they expose their own ignorance. 

American policy regarding the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China) is really not that complicated. 

Rather, it is predicated on a conflict and a fiction. 

Both are Made in America.
The conflict is between our morality and geopolitical reality. 

Our morality urges us to support the free, democratic people of Taiwan with whom we have a friendship that dates back to World War II when the United States supported Chiang Kai Shek against the communists. 

But they lost China’s civil war and fled to Taiwan to avoid certain humiliation and death at the hands of Mao’s advancing communist hordes.
For a quarter of a century after that the United States enjoyed diplomatic relations with the government of Taiwan including the “Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty” which was signed in 1954 and unilaterally renounced by Jimmy Carter without the consent of Congress in 1979.

But the reality on the ground undermined our commitment to Taiwan. 

To put it simply, the PRC is bigger: More people, more land, more money. 

It’s a major strategic player in Asia, on the Pacific Rim, and increasingly in the world. 

And American businesses covet its huge population of potential customers. 

So Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 led to Carter’s renunciation of Taiwan in 1979.
That’s when the U.S.-PRC-Taiwan relationship grew even more, as we say today, complicated. 

That’s where the fiction comes into play. 

We want to maintain our friendship with the free people of Taiwan but we also want access to the PRC’s markets and money.
Remember, the PRC is among the largest buyers of U.S. sovereign debt — our largest export to China. 

Meanwhile, the PRC wants to swallow Taiwan whole and settle old scores with the descendants of the Nationalists who defied Mao and his communist armies.
And Taiwan? 

They have mostly given up any dreams of imminent rapprochement with the mainland and want to be left alone to pursue life as a free and independent country without fear of Beijing.
American policy since 1979 has been official recognition of Beijing along with deepening commercial and diplomatic ties. 

At the same time we have maintained close ties with Taiwan that defy the usual categories.
The U.S. government does not officially recognize the Taiwanese government but we maintain an unofficial diplomatic outpost in Taipei known as the American Institute in Taiwan.
We also have an obligation to defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression under the Taiwan Relations Act. 

And we have sold Taiwan $46 billion of military equipment since 1990 — $1.6 billion in the last year alone.
Since breaking official ties with Taipei no American president has officially spoken with a Taiwanese president. 

Against the backdrop of this benign neglect of an erstwhile American ally, Beijing has grown increasingly bold.
Witness the 2001 Chinese provocation of President Bush just months after his inauguration. 

The Red Chinese forced an unarmed American EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft to land on Hainan Island and held the crews captive for 11 days. 

During the diplomatic stand-off the Chinese stripped the airplane of its sophisticated electronics. 

The incident is largely forgotten because the 9/11 attacks occurred just a few months later.
More recently, the Chinese have been rattling their increasingly numerous sabers in the South China Sea and across Asia intending to force local powers to accept their regional hegemony.

Philippines’ President Duterte has already made friendly overtures towards Beijing, unsettling an old alliance with the United States. 

Other countries in the region are looking to see if the United States will remain committed to peace and freedom on the Pacific Rim.
As a result, there has been an expectation that the Chinese would poke our new president early in his administration — much like they did with Bush — and take his measure.
More important, they would send a signal that the United States must accept Chinese dominance in the region. 

In talking to Taiwan’s president before taking office Donald Trump seized the initiative and now forces China to respond to American action and respect American power.
This is not foreign policy in the mold of Obama’s famously feckless “resets.” 

It is a first step in a new, interests-based foreign policy in which China is not given a veto on American diplomacy.
Trump seems to understand that China is a strategic competitor for power and influence — not a friend. 

And he is treating them as such. 

America’s China policy since Reagan has oscillated between intellectualized inconsistency (Bush) and impotent obeisance couched in the somber tones of ineffectual, nuance. (Clinton & Obama)
As libertarian economist Tyler Cowen wrote: “China was going to test Trump soon anyway, (it is) not obviously bad to troll them in advance and disrupt their strategy with tactics.”

Trump’s phone call with Taiwan’s president before taking office looks increasingly shrewd. 

What’s more, it sets up a China policy reminiscent of Ronald Reagan and the Six Assurances he made to Taiwan.
The phone call was, like so much of the diplomacy between the United States and Taiwan, unofficial. But it sets the table for a more self-confident American policy in Asia once Trump takes office — one where the interests of America and her friends are put ahead of those of her competitors and adversaries.

Two Chinas Policy

Trump’s Taiwan call was brilliant.
By Marc A. Thiessen

President Donald Trump

Relax.
Breathe.
Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy.
It was a deliberate move — and a brilliant one at that.
The phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was reportedly carefully planned, and Trump was fully briefed before the call, according to The Post. 

It’s not that Trump was unfamiliar with the “Three Communiques” or unaware of the fiction that there is “One China.” 

Trump knew precisely what he was doing in taking the call. 

He was serving notice on Beijing that it is dealing with a different kind of president — an outsider who will not be encumbered by the same Lilliputian diplomatic threads that tied down previous administrations. 

The message, as John Bolton correctly put it, was that “the president of the United States [will] talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it’s in the interest of the United States, and nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.”
Amen to that.
And if that message was lost on Beijing, Trump underscored it on Sunday, tweeting: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” 

He does not need Beijing’s permission to speak to anyone. 

No more kowtowing in a Trump administration.
Trump promised during the campaign that he would take a tougher stand with China, and supporting Taiwan has always been part of his get-tough approach to Beijing. 

As far back as 2011, Trump tweeted: “Why is @BarackObama delaying the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan? Wrong message to send to China. #TimeToGetTough.” 

Indeed, the very idea that Trump could not speak to Taiwan’s president because it would anger Beijing is precisely the kind of weak-kneed subservience that Trump promised to eliminate as president.
Trump’s call with the Taiwanese president sent a message not only to Beijing, but also to the striped-pants foreign-policy establishment in Washington. 

It is telling how so many in that establishment immediately assumed Trump had committed an unintended gaffe. 

“Bottomless pig-ignorance” is how one liberal foreign-policy commentator described Trump’s decision to speak with Tsai. 

Trump just shocked the world by winning the presidential election, yet they still underestimate him. 

The irony is that the hyperventilation in Washington has far outpaced the measured response from Beijing. 

When American foreign-policy "elites" are more upset than China, perhaps it’s time for some introspection.
The hypocrisy is rank. 

When Obama broke with decades of U.S. policy and extended diplomatic recognition to a murderous dictatorship in Cuba, the foreign-policy establishment swooned. 

Democrats on Capitol Hill praised Obama for taking action that was “long overdue.” 

Jimmy Carter raved about how Obama had “shown such wisdom,” while the New York Times gushed that Obama was acting “courageously” and “ushering in a transformational era for millions of Cubans who have suffered as a result of more than 50 years of hostility between the two nations.”
But when Trump broke with decades of U.S. diplomatic practice and had a phone call with the democratically elected leader of Taiwan, he was declared a buffoon. 

Well, if they didn’t like that phone call, his critics may hate what could come next even more. 

Trump now has an opportunity to do with Taiwan what Obama did with Cuba — normalize relations.
There are a number of steps the Trump administration can take to strengthen our military, economic and diplomatic ties with Taiwan. 

My American Enterprise Institute colleague Derek Scissors has suggested that Trump could negotiate a new free-trade agreement with Taiwan. 

“Taiwan’s tiny population means there is no jobs threat,” Scissors says, but Taiwan is also the United States’ ninth-largest trading partner. 

A free-trade agreement would be economically beneficial to both sides and would send a message to friend and foe alike in Asia that, despite Trump’s planned withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the United States is not withdrawing from the region.
On the military front, Trump could begin sending general officers to Taipei once again to coordinate with their Taiwanese counterparts and hold joint military exercises. 

On the diplomatic front, Bolton says the new administration could start “receiving Taiwanese diplomats officially at the State Department; upgrading the status of U.S. representation in Taipei from a private ‘institute’ to an official diplomatic mission; inviting Taiwan’s president to travel officially to America; allowing the most senior U.S. officials to visit Taiwan to transact government business; and ultimately restoring full diplomatic recognition.”
Beijing would be wise not to overreact to any overtures Trump makes to Taiwan. 

When China tested President George W. Bush in his first months in office by scrambling fighters and forcing a U.S. EP-3 aircraft to land on the Chinese island of Hainan, its actions backfired. 

After the incident, Bush approved a $30 billion arms package for Taiwan, announced that Taiwan would be treated as a major non-NATO ally and declared that the United States would do “whatever it took” to defend Taiwan. 

His actions not only strengthened U.S. ties with Taiwan but also set the stage for good relations with Beijing throughout his presidency.
China does not want to make the same mistake and overplay its hand with Trump. 

Trump’s call with Taiwan’s president was a smart, calculated move designed to send a clear message: The days of pushing the United States around are over.
That may horrify official Washington, but it’s the right message to send.

Two Chinas Policy

"The U.S. should jettison the ambiguous one China mantra, ramp up its official engagement with Taiwan, ultimately restoring full diplomatic recognition." -- John Bolton

By ANDREW BROWNE

Trump’s phone conversation on Friday with Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen broke decades of diplomatic shenanigan

TAIPEI—Donald Trump took the call. 

The voice on the other end of the line was Taiwan’s president congratulating him. 

They chatted for a few minutes about economic matters and security—the normal business of politics. 

Why all the fuss?
After all, China didn’t object too strenuously, directing its displeasure primarily toward Taiwan for what it called a “petty trick.” 

That’s far from the explosion Beijing’s past behavior may have indicated for such a breach of protocol: No president has spoken to a Taiwan leader since Washington cut formal diplomatic ties with Taipei and recognized the People’s Republic in 1979.
Yet the future of U.S.-China relations, and the stability of East Asia, depends in large part on what Mr. Trump meant by the exchange.
Some pro-China hands in Washington think it was devoid of meaning—a sign of incompetence. 

"He blundered into the call, oblivious to the potential risks of challenging a delicate status quo that has largely kept the peace across the Taiwan Strait since Chiang Kai-shek and his defeated Kuomintang fled to the island in 1949 after years of Chinese civil war."
This precarious balance relies on the U.S. and other countries accepting an elaborate fallacy, one that Beijing insists upon: that Taiwan is part of “one China,” not the independent country it so clearly has become. 

U.S. presidents have traditionally played along with this; declining calls from Taiwan leaders is part of the charade.
Mr. Trump’s call with President Tsai Ing-wen, however, seems to have been anything but an accident. It was planned in advance after several of his senior aides and proxies visited Taipei.
His advisers are clear about their goals: an end to all the tip-toeing around Beijing’s sensitivities, and unambiguous U.S. support for Taiwan, backed up by enhanced military cooperation. 

They want America to deal with Taiwan on its own terms, not Beijing’s.
The island would revert to its Cold War role as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to contain China.
Writing earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal, John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador who is in the frame for a senior job in the Trump White House, suggested that the U.S. should play the “Taiwan card” in response to aggressive Chinese moves in the South China Sea and East China Sea, “jettisoning the ambiguous ‘one China’ mantra.” 

If China doesn’t back down, the U.S. should ramp up its official engagement with Taiwan, “ultimately restoring full diplomatic recognition.”
For China, Taiwan is a “core interest”; nothing is more important. 

Beijing’s restrained response to the call could reflect its concern not to provoke Mr. Trump into going along this path, which would likely precipitate a meltdown in U.S.-China relations.
With his politically "incorrect" phone call, though, Mr. Trump seems to be threatening a move in precisely that direction. 

In doing so, he would be reversing a long history of U.S. administrations sacrificing Taiwan’s interests in exchange for fancy benefits with Beijing.
That trade-off has looked increasingly questionable as Beijing challenges the U.S. for dominance in East Asia, and closes its markets to U.S. tech companies. 

On the trade side, Mr. Trump has already pledged punitive tariffs on Chinese exports to the U.S.
Yet a sudden shift in Washington’s approach to cross-Straits relations could leave Taiwan even more vulnerable. 

Beijing has never dropped its threat to grab Taiwan by force. 

It is now trying to strong-arm Ms. Tsai into stating her support for “one China.”
She refuses, but nevertheless tolerates the muddled status quo in the interests of friendly ties with Beijing.
Having barged into the most sensitive area of U.S.-China relations, Mr. Trump must now expect Beijing to test his resolve. 

How would he respond as president to a provocation, perhaps a military one, aimed at Taiwan? 

If he backs down, he will have damaged his credibility with both sides, along with friends and allies in the region.
Nonetheless, “one China” is increasingly anachronistic. 

After nearly seven decades, it is realistic for Taiwan to demand a more secure basis for its existence than a make-believe political arrangement that won’t permit presidential telephone calls, high-level visits or other normal exchanges between friendly countries.
A policy reset is long overdue, both in Beijing, which needs to come up with an approach to Taiwan that accommodates the reality that it is a flourishing democracy—with no desire to come under Beijing’s authoritarian sway—and in Washington.