Are naive or what?

Of course he reviews the briefings, more BS

"Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call from Taiwan not FROM Trump"

international crisis hardly unless MSM told you that.

Protocols will be re-written, he ran as a change candidate.

Maintaining the status quo is the best policy for Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen amid the cross-strait stalemate.

The biggest question facing Taiwan is what Trump’s Asia diplomacy will look like and how Taipei should respond to a complicated post-Obama world order.

In the first place, Trump’s win is a setback for Tsai in that her independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party bet on a Hillary Clinton win from the start.



[Bill Clinton delivers a speech in Taipei, Taiwan.


The reasons for that bet were simple. First, Taiwan had closer relations with the Clintons during Bill Clinton’s presidency between 1993 and 2001, which overlapped with Lee Teng-hui’s presidency in Taiwan between 1988 and 2000. The former US president had visited Taiwan several times as governor of Arkansas and after he left the White House, despite Beijing’s protests. Tsai and the DPP have no personal links with Trump.

Second, Trump’s pledge to kill the China-excluding Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact and his isolationist foreign policy stance will probably hurt Taiwan’s interests.

It might be music to Taiwan’s ears that the Republican National Convention included on this year’s election platform – for the first time – the “six assurances” that former president Ronald Reagan gave to Taiwan in 1982. It could also help that the previous DPP government under Chen Shui-bian between 2000 and 2008 built closer contact with a Republican US administration under George W. Bush.

And diplomatic observers might note that the Taiwan-US relationship is much deeper than just the executive branches, and the self-ruled island has long enjoyed bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.

A third of US senators belong to the Taiwan caucus, along with about half of 435 US representatives.

But the big question is whether Trump, a political novice with no strong link to the Washington establishment, will follow the party line or rely on professionals for his foreign and defence policy as all his predecessors did.

The US and Chinese economies are deeply dependent on each other, and under his “America first” mantra, Trump is unlikely to strain that relationship because of commitments Congress and previous administrations have made to Taiwan.

So the biggest uncertainty underpinning Taiwan’s diplomacy from now on hinges on whether Trump will prevail over the whole established litany, or just follow precedent.

Cary Huang, a senior writer with the South China Morning Post,