The Interagency Process Behind US Policy on Taiwan
Abstract : How the US government interacts with Taiwan on economic, political, and security issues has long been a mystery to me. The US does not maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which is a breakaway province of China, and the unresolved status of Taiwan is the main challenge to US relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC). This paper will endeavor to shed light on how the current interagency process on US-Taiwan relations came into being since the US, under the Nixon Administration, began normalizing relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC). It will examine the bilateral documents and US laws that are the foundation of US-Taiwan relations, focusing on the roles played by the people, organizations, and processes that formulate and implement US policy regarding Taiwan. US arms sales to Taiwan are now at an all time high, will illustrate the complexities of this interagency process.
Lessons from the taiwan relations act
Twenty years ago the United States severed its diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (ROC). The Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) was then enacted in 1979 to preserve and promote commercial, cultural, and other relations between the United States and Taiwan, and has been instrumental in maintaining peace, security, and stability in the Taiwan Strait. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., former assistant secretary for international security affairs in the U.S. Department of Defense, observed that the rise and fall of great powers has historically been accompanied by severe instability in international state systems. The power structure in East Asia today is marked by just such a rise and fall of great powers. The Soviet Union has collapsed, North Korea is dangerously volatile, Japan’s role is evolving, and China’s power is rapidly rising. Moreover, the Taiwan Strait crises of 1995–96 demonstrate that peace and stability in the region can no longer be taken for granted. According to a Pentagon report, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) now has 150–200 ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan, and the island has a dangerously limited capacity to defend against missile attacks and threats. On July 9, 1999, President Lee Teng-hui told a German radio interviewer that the cross-strait relationship is a “special state-to-state relationship,” in sharp contrast to Beijing’s long-standing position that Taiwan is a renegade province of China and its government merely a local one. Since July 9, the PRC has mounted a publicity barrage against President Lee and used the Hong Kong media to conduct psychological warfare against Taiwan. PRC fighter planes flew more than a hundred sorties over the Taiwan Strait in the month after President Lee’s remarks, on two occasions in July crossing the
The fight against the ‘anti-nation’ as a historical mission: the delegitimization of the enemy in Italian Fascism and Spanish Fascism
For the Italian Partito Nazionale Fascista (Pnf) and the Falange Española (Fe), the political community coincided with the nation, conceived not as an undifferentiated conglomeration of citizens but as a community of believers in a ‘religion of the Fatherland’. The common goal of the Italian and the Spanish fascists, since their appearance on the political scene of their respective countries, was the defence of national values. But the claim to being the only and exclusive representatives of those values denied any effective freedom of dissent, even to those who respected national values but intended them in a different way. This article will analyse how the ideologues of the Pnf and the Fe articulated their respective campaigns against the anti-national enemies in order to legitimise their own parties and pave the way to the effective realization of their own nations: nations that had to be clearly and totally fascist.