I don’t think it’s productive to be glib about “long-established ‘rules’ of doing things” when it comes to China and Taiwan. Whatever you want to call “the Deep State,” the development of the One-China Policy was a diplomatic dance that worked precisely because all sides agreed to abide by something that didn’t make perfect sense. I think it has been vastly more successful than the way we treated communist takeovers in Korea and Vietnam. And, yes, it’s a way of controlling our own lunatics just as much as it is a way of controlling theirs.
If Trump is being advised by lunatics now, that’s a problem. And if he’s just so ignorant and pig-headed that he doesn’t know or care what he just did by having his staff arrange a call with Taiwan, that’s not a bold way of violating pointless norms. It’s extraordinarily dangerous and portends all kinds of problems for our country, the world, and the prospects for peace between nations.
I cannot understand how Trump was allowed to offer a state visit to Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines. It’s beyond belief. That absolutely cannot happen. Figuring out how to handle Duterte and our longstanding relationship with the Philippines is a real conundrum, and a ton of work would have to be done before we could even think of rewarding Duterte with a state visit. Honestly, I don’t think it would ever be justifiable.
And Trump cannot go plodding into Pakistan-India relations without getting a briefing from the State Department. They are nuclear-armed powers on constant alert against sneak attacks from each other, and it’s unimaginably irresponsible to speak with either government without carefully considering the implications of every word you’re going to say.
You can talk all you want about how Trump has some kind of mandate to challenge the status quo and that our elites are just using stale norms to “control the executive.” We’ve had normal presidents deal with that straightjacket, on Cuba, Israel, China, anti-Soviet policy. That’s not what we’re dealing with here. At all.
If you want to challenge norms and blow up longstanding ways of doing things, it’s all the more important that you understand exactly why we have done things the way he have and what the implications are of changing them.
Right now, we’re relying on something quite appalling.
“If he were president of the United States now, this could lead to a breaking-off of diplomatic relations between China and the U.S.”
“Having this mishap occur before he is president is better than having it occur after he is president,” said [Bonnie] Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Privately, I expect Beijing to find a way to give him an education on Taiwan.”
Right now, we’re relying on foreign powers forgiving our president-elect because he’s an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing. We’re going to tell them not to take him seriously or personally, and that we’ll give them an opportunity to “educate” him.
But if we can’t educate him and his staff can’t educate him, what hope is there for our adversaries and allies to educate him?
