From Des Moines to Detroit to Palm Beach to Staten Island, the first answer was always the same when you asked a Trump voter why they supported the man: “He tells it like it is.”
This didn’t mean his supporters always agreed with him. “He tells it like it is,” meant, for the most part, that he didn’t care for PC pieties. Voters reacted viscerally to this, and it brought him victory.
President-elect Trump trampled one such piety on Friday when he took a congratulatory phone call from Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen.
The foreign policy establishment and the legions of reflexively critical anti-Trump pundits, have responded — how many times has it been since Election Day? — as though the sky was falling. The only acceptable response, they say, would have been to decline to take the call. Washington foreign policy dogma is that Taiwan has no president because it is part of China.
U.S. leaders have mouthed the cringing pieties of the “One China” policy for decades whilst nevertheless selling arms to Taiwan. A year ago, for instance, President Obama sent $1.8 billion worth of anti-tank missiles and amphibious attack vehicles to Taiwan. This is the norm, as Washington Examiner commentary writer Philip Wegmann documented Monday:
From President Jimmy Carter to George Bush, the United States has made upwards of $24 billion in arms trades according to the Arms Control Association. In the last eight years, President Obama has made $14 billion in weapons available for purchase.
In short, China and the U.S. have been living a lie.
Diplomacy is full of lies, which often serve the cause of peace and American interests. But there are falsehoods that deserve smashing.
In 1987, American diplomats in West Germany warned President Reagan not to mention the Berlin Wall when he visited the city. The State Department and the National Security Council repeatedly deleted “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” from the speech that the president was to deliver. He ignored them, to very good effect.
Their freakout was similar when Reagan called the Soviet Union “evil.” But the Soviet Union was evil, and speaking the truth helped bring about good.
Trump is ill informed on many issues and, apparently not knowing what he does not know, shows none of the self-restraint that such humbling knowledge engenders.
But Trump’s Taiwan phone call was no clueless fumble. Taiwan specialists on Trump’s team planned the call for weeks.
He promised to take a tougher line with China and is, pleasingly, doing so. There is no good reason why the Washington and its chief executive should duck, tiptoe, bow and scrape around the aggressive and dishonest sensitivities of the tyranny in Beijing. His phone call, plus his assertive follow-up tweets are a necessary corrective to the timidity of the cowed creatures of Foggy Bottom.
U.S. leaders have gone to contemptible lengths to isolate the democracy that is Taiwan to suck up to the People’s Republic. The semantic gymnastics extended to, for example, always being sure to refer to the “government on Taiwan,” rather than the “government of Taiwan.”
Trump’s brusque dismissal of the niceties is refreshing, and have elicited a measured and somewhat hesitant response from Beijing. This is good, they have already stopped assuming that America will kowtow.
