The move is also a slap in the face to China hawks in Washington.
The highlights this week: The Trump administration blocks Taiwan’s president from transiting through the United States, sex scandals abound on the Chinese internet, and Beijing makes a big push on nuclear fusion.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has reportedly blocked Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te from transiting through the United States on his way to and from Latin America—the first such known refusal of a Taiwanese president in more than three decades.
The move comes as Trump, who is said to have personally opposed Lai’s visit, is attempting to curry favor with Beijing before a potential visit to China.
Because Washington does not officially recognize Taiwan’s government, Taiwanese presidents cannot officially visit the United States. In 1994, Washington modified its previous ban on all visits by Taiwanese leaders to allow “transit visits,” in which Taiwanese leaders nominally stop in the United States on the way to Latin American countries—a handful of which recognize Taiwan.
In practice, though, these are visits to the United States in all but name, with Taiwanese leaders often using them as lobbying opportunities.
Trump’s move could face opposition from Congress. In 2018, Congress passed the Taiwan Travel Act, which supports high-level Taiwanese officials visiting the United States under “respectful” conditions. However, though Congress can still muster some bipartisanship when it comes to pressuring Beijing, Republicans are unlikely to be courageous enough to publicly speak out against Trump’s decision.
This latest move is a slap in the face to the many China hawks who backed Trump, continuing their trend of humiliating themselves in order to please a president whose view on China swings between xenophobia and praise for autocracy.
A good example is U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was a strong supporter of human rights in China as a senator. But since taking his current post, he’s backed the defunding of democracy promotion efforts in China and fired many of the State Department’s China’s experts.
The most prominent China hawk on the strategy side is Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy. Once considered a member of the foreign-policy establishment, the loyal Trumpist said he wants to realign U.S. strategic assets toward Asia to help counter China.
However, as Taiwanese writer Brian Hioe pointed out, Colby has repeatedly made hostile statements about Taiwan and seems to perceive the island as simply a U.S. chess piece.
It takes a certain amount of doublethink to reconcile Colby and other hawks’ desire for a workable Asia-Pacific strategy, in which the United States is deeply dependent on long-term alliances, with Trump’s aggressive attitude toward those same allies.
The U.S. submarine deal with Australia and the United Kingdom is threatened, for instance, principally because it was agreed to under former U.S. President Joe Biden. (I’ve heard defense experts suggest that the plan is to tear up the deal and then sign what’s essentially the same deal with Trump’s name on it, in order to keep the petulant president happy.)
Meanwhile, U.S. trade relations with China remain fraught, with tariffs at their highest levels in history, despite the two sides backing off from a full blown decoupling. As the Lai decision shows, Beijing has the advantage.
Trump now seems desperate to reach big trade deals—not least because he’s hoping to distract attention from the ongoing scandal about his involvement with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
With China, however, reaching such a deal won’t be quick or easy.
