When Taiwan’s minister of foreign affairs, Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), wrote an op-ed last week in advance of his trip to New York for meetings on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, he didn’t place it in a mainstream newspaper or foreign policy journal. He published it in Newsmax.
The article, titled “Time for UN to Recognize Taiwan,” is the latest in a string of moves by Taiwanese representatives apparently aimed at winning good will in President Trump’s orbit — while making sure to publicize those efforts. “Taiwan does not seek conflict with China and will not provoke it,” Lin wrote. “In fact, Taiwan is urging Beijing to resume dialogue on the basis of parity and dignity.”
Lin’s visit, which marked the first time a Taiwanese foreign minister has travelled to New York during a meeting of the U.N., came as Trump prepares to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Korea at the end of this month.
The recent agreement struck by Trump and Xi to allow TikTok to license its algorithm to continue operating in the U.S., along with Trump’s reported decision to withhold $400 million in military aid to Taiwan this past summer, has many wondering whether Trump plans to make the island a bargaining chip in negotiations with Xi.
In July, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had asked Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) to avoid stopping over in the U.S. on his way to Latin America. On Tuesday, in response to a Wall Street Journal report saying that Xi plans to pressure Trump to formally oppose Taiwan independence, a spokesperson from the State Department said the U.S. government’s position has not changed.
Alexander Gray, who served as National Security Council Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term and now runs the geopolitical consulting firm American Global Strategies, said in a video interview that the U.S.-Taiwan relationship is continuing in a positive direction. “When we’re evaluating the relationship holistically, I think that these individual news stories sometimes become treated as a bigger focus than the overall relationship,” he said.
Gray’s advisory firm hosted an event last Monday at a restaurant in Manhattan that Lin attended, along with representatives from countries including India, Japan and the U.K. Politico reported that several current State Department officials who have worked closely on China issues in the past were also there, including Anna Vu, who led the U.S. Mission to China prior to current Ambassador David Purdue’s confirmation this past May.
“I was happy to host them,” said Gray, who characterized his interactions with Lin at the event as ordinary “cocktail party conversation.”
“I think it’s terrific that in the middle of UN General Assembly week, Taiwan has its senior-most diplomat in New York,” he said. “It’s just a great symbolic rejection of how … China tries to restrict Taiwan’s diplomatic space.”
After the event, Palau President Surangel S. Whipps Jr. posted pictures on Facebook showing himself posing with Lin and Gray. Palau is one of the 13 countries that still diplomatically recognize Taiwan.
The Palau president’s pictures also show that Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the U.S. Alexander Yui (俞大㵢) was at the reception. The previous Friday, immediately after Trump spoke on the phone with Xi to discuss the TikTok deal, Yui gave an interview with Foreign Policy that ran with the headline: “Taiwan’s Message to Trump and the U.N.: ‘We’re Not a Freeloader.’” Yui came across unconcerned about engagements between Trump and Xi, telling the magazine: “I can reassure you that U.S.-Taiwan bilateral ongoings are pretty close, very tight, and our communications are ongoing.”
The commentariat has been less convinced. Last week, National Security advisor John Bolton warned in an op-ed for The Hill last week that Trump might be “abandoning Taipei to Beijing’s tender mercies.” A day later, a blog post from Derek Scissors and Zack Cooper at the American Enterprise Institute asked: “Is Trump Capitulating to China?”
“I think Taiwan has very limited leverage in this moment,” Cooper told this reporter recently. “There’s not much that Taiwan can do … because Trump is going to prefer his relationship with Beijing over his relationship with Lai.”
The same day Trump spoke to Xi, Reuters reported that Yui had recently met with members of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an appointed body meant to provide the president with independent counsel. The report cited unnamed officials who said that the advisory board was becoming a growing source of influence in the administration.
One of the unnamed officials told Reuters that Nunes was at the meeting with Yui, alongside Robert O’Brien, another member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board who served as Trump’s National Security Advisor during his first term. O’Brien was also Gray’s co-founder at American Global Strategies. Gray said he had no personal knowledge of the meeting or how it came about, but called contacts between Yui and the advisory board “a major success for TECRO and for Taiwan,” referring to the island’s de facto embassy in Washington.
Christian Whiton, who served as senior advisor in the State Department during the Bush and first Trump administrations, questioned the significance of the meeting. “This idea that they had an informal briefing where they received information from the de facto ambassador, and that that is somehow going to influence this administration, where policy is very tightly controlled at the top, very unusually, between Trump and Rubio and JD Vance is just not credible,” Whiton said, referring to the secretary of state and vice president.
In July, Whiton published an op-ed in this magazine describing what he saw as the Lai administration’s failure to appeal to Trumpworld. It sparked widespread debate over how Taiwan could effectively approach the new administration, a skill Gray agrees they have been slow to learn.
“There are plenty of people on both sides who are still stuck in 1995,” he said, referring to a time when U.S. dominance over China was far more absolute, and liberal internationalism still defined American diplomacy.
Last week, Philip Gordon and Ryan Hass, both fellows at the Brookings Institution, argued in an article specifically framed as a response to Whiton that concerns about Taiwan’s standing in the U.S. are “overblown.” But even Hass, a veteran of the Obama administration, agrees that appeals to the Trump administration based on Taiwan’s values are falling flat in an era of increasingly realist U.S. foreign policy.
Whether or not Taiwan has sufficiently taken that message to heart remains unclear. “Taiwan must shift from value-based diplomacy to value-added diplomacy,” Minister Lin told the Liberty Times in an interview before he left for New York. But then, he added: “The most fundamental factors, of course, are democracy, freedom, the rule of law and respect for human rights.”
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