It was a meeting preceded by controversy. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and the number three in the US House hierarchy, Republican Kevin McCarthy, met on the outskirts of Los Angeles this Wednesday for talks before it began it causes China’s uneasiness.
The meeting is the highest level a Taiwanese leader has held with a senior US position since the United States broke formal diplomatic ties with Taipei to establish them with Beijing in 1979. This is despite warnings from Beijing, which has threatened reprisals if Tsai, who is in transit to the US after a tour of Latin America, is treated remotely like a head of state.
“We are not isolated and we are not alone,” Tsai proclaimed at the end of the meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, McCarthy called Tsai a “great friend of the United States” and assured: “We will find ways for the people of the United States and Taiwan to work together to promote economic freedom, democracy, peace and stability.” .
The meeting at Ronald Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley, which was also attended by other U.S. Republican and Democratic lawmakers, came just as Taiwan has lost one of the dozen diplomatic allies it has around the world: Honduras has the diplomatic ties to Taipei to take them up with Beijing, in a new goal China has achieved in the pressure campaign it has been waging since Tsai took power in 2016 for countries that have diplomatic ties with the island to join them break her up and enter into formal relations with the People’s Republic. Tsai responded to this situation in his statements.
The meeting in California had been planned for weeks. Ahead of last November’s midterm elections, in which Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, McCarthy promised to visit Taiwan and lead the largest US delegation to visit the island in nearly 45 years. But the trip by his predecessor, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, last August drew a drastic response from Beijing, which was conducting live ammunition military maneuvers near the island. Concerns in Taipei and Washington about triggering further retaliation prompted the Republican politician to scrap his original idea and instead accept the California meeting.
But Beijing, which portrays Taiwan as one of its top national interests, is watching closely what could emerge from the meeting. Its Ministry of Defense has already warned that one of its aircraft carriers and its escort ships are in waters off the southeast coast of the island.
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Taiwan is the biggest sticking point in increasingly acrimonious China-US relations. Beijing regards the self-governing and democratic island as an inalienable part of its territory and is ready to achieve unification by any means necessary, including violence.
For its part, the United States enjoys extensive and excellent informal relations with the island, whose strategic importance has not stopped growing as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing has increased. Although it does not support Taiwan’s independence, it sells weapons for its defense. And it maintains an attitude of “strategic ambiguity”: It does not specify whether its armed forces would stand with the Taipei government or remain on the sidelines in the event of a Chinese attack.
Since the meeting of the two politicians in California began to loom, the US government has carefully appealed to Beijing to calm down. Both the White House and State Department have consistently emphasized that a Taiwanese president’s transit of the United States is daily business — in Tsai’s case, it will mark the sixth time he has transited through that country on his way to another seven years in office – and there is no reason for Beijing to retaliate or escalate tensions.
“Beijing should not use this transit as an excuse to take measures that increase tensions that push a little more to change the status quo between Beijing and Taipei,” Brussels Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said.
On Tuesday, the Chinese foreign ministry said it would “follow the meeting closely” and “resolutely uphold” Chinese sovereignty. In Washington, the congressman from the Chinese embassy warned lawmakers on the eve of the meeting: “China will not stand by in the face of strong provocations and will likely take the necessary and decisive steps in response to this unwelcome situation.” Let’s work together to avoid such a situation.”
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