By Tom Fowdy
There is a Taiwan confrontation coming.
Right now, the US Presidential administration is focused on its "primary priority," which is to end the war in Ukraine, but one should note carefully the change in the discourse that is building under the Marco Rubio-led State Department.
First, Marco Rubio is an individual under the Taiwan sphere of influence. He is a founding member of IPAC, an organization that has received funding from Taiwan's foreign ministry and invests heavily in getting foreign legislators to visit the island, coordinating revisionist narratives that seek to negate and hollow out the "One China Policy."
Rubio himself has been careful not to visit Taiwan directly, mainly because he knows it can hurt his career progression; hence he would not have got the State Department job had he done so. However, he is not to be underestimated. First, he has significantly altered the State Department Press Release language to be much more hostile to Beijing, mentioning "coercing" and "threatening" Taiwan a lot more.
Secondly, he has had "We oppose Taiwan independence" removed from the State Department website. This is not an oversight or a careless update, every word on such sites tends to be placed politically, as it matches his other rhetoric. In his first week, he made an official visit to Guatemala, a country that still has official diplomatic ties with the island. In the joint statement, he openly praised them for maintaining ties with Taiwan and effectively said they support its independence.
Coupled with this, he then negotiated a new joint statement with Japan wherein the language went even further than before on the Taiwan issue, saying that both countries oppose a change in the status quo not only by "force" but also by "coercion", meaning even if China attempts to strongarm Taiwan into reunification without military force, it will still be seen as illegitimate. This is a goalpost moving akin to the salami-slicing strategy the US has progressively used over the years, and now Marco Rubio's State Department is actively going further on this issue than its predecessors.
Of course, where is the crisis? And when is it coming? The answer is although these subtle language changes are taking hold, the US is currently not prioritizing it. I believe that Trump has chosen to end the Ukraine war as his first foreign policy priority, similar to his focus on North Korea in 2017. When Trump does this, he generally starts applying pressure onto a given target to "get the problem out of the way" and then shifts to his primary agenda. Unusually, it appears that Ukraine is the target of his vitriol than Russia itself, with the President having publicly mocked and denounced Zelensky.
Once a ceasefire is secured, Trump will likely care little about what form the emerging peace takes, declare victory for his policy, and then move on. When this happens I believe, as it were in 2018 after he met with Kim Jong-un, that the focus will become China and Iran again respectively, and herein is where we will witness the full throttle of the NeoConservative Marco Rubio State Department. If China wants to be able to prevent a crisis, then it should seriously consider proper negotiations with Trump on the matter of trade.
History shows that when Beijing became combative in 2020, as it did over the COVID pandemic, this was a huge mistake and it allowed the utterly unhinged state department of Mike Pompeo to effectively run riot. Marco Rubio of course, is not Mike Pompeo, and we will assume as a foreign policymaker he is more astute, but no more amicable to Beijing. I believe all the signs are there of a future Taiwan confrontation, even if Trump himself is not looking for war. Taipei has invested heavily in buying Rubio's allegiance through its sophisticated lobbying machine, and we're only just starting to see the first seeds of that planted.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:
Opinion | Britain's plot to sabotage Ukrainian 'peace'
Opinion | The Transatlantic game over Ukraine begins
Opinion | The demolition of USAID is about realism and 'America First' not anti-foreign aid
Opinion | The disintegration of International law
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