President-elect Trump’s overtures to Taiwan represent a “healthy” approach to U.S. policy in the Pacific, according to Sen. John McCain, who on Monday backed Trump by saying Taiwan is an independent country.
“I think it’s healthy,” the Arizona Republican told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “They’re an independent nation, Taiwan, and I believe in the One China policy, but they are a democracy, which China is not and I believe that a conversation with the president of a freely elected, democratic Taiwan is more than appropriate.”
McCain’s remarks lend Trump the support of a leading Republican foreign policy maker in the Senate on an issue that has provoked broad criticism from national security experts. Trump rocked the foreign policy world by taking a phone call from President Tsai Ing-wen, the first known direct contact between an American Taiwanese leader since 1979, and then suggested that he might abandon the official U.S. position that Taiwan and mainland China form a single country.
“I don’t know why we have to be bound by a One China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade,” the president-elect said on Fox News. “And why should some other nation be able to say, I can’t take a call? I think it would have been very disrespectful, to be honest with you, not taking it.”
The United States has long maintained unofficial ties to Taiwan, which is the last bastion of the government overthrown by communist revolutionaries, despite paying lip service to the proposition that the island and mainland China form a single country. Taiwan is a valuable U.S. ally, in part due to its strategically important location off the coast of eastern China.
But the communist government has threatened to invade the island if the Taiwan declares itself to be an independent state. That makes McCain’s declaration about Taiwanese independence even more significant than a sign of his support for Trump, although he touted simultaneously the One China policy that the U.S. currently maintains.
The 2008 Republican presidential nominee suggested that conversations with Taiwanese leaders could form one aspect of a broader response to Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.
“We need to have a policy toward China and we need to have them understand that we expect them to obey the rules of international law and behavior,” he said. “I do not foresee conflict between the United States and China, because I believe that peace through strength such as we exercised in the past will be a sufficient deterrent to China.”
