Climbing down from a position that put the United States on a collision course with Beijing, President Trump has told Chinese President Xi Jinping in a telephone call that he would abide by the “one China” policy that effectively recognizes Beijing’s sovereignty over Taiwan.
Climbing down from a position that put the United States on a collision course with Beijing, President Trump has told Chinese President Xi Jinping in a telephone call that he would abide by the “one China” policy that effectively recognizes Beijing’s sovereignty over Taiwan.
The belated concession in a telephone call Thursday shows that the practicalities of modern geopolitics are beginning to sink in for the three-week-old Trump administration.
Trump hadn’t spoken to the Chinese leadership since taking office — a delay widely seen as a sign of Beijing’s irritation at Trump’s hints that he would fundamentally change U. S. policy toward the world’s second-largest economy.
According to a White House statement, Trump told Xi he would honor the diplomatic understanding, first established after President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, that the United States will not challenge Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty over Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing views as a breakaway province.
“The two leaders discussed numerous topics and President Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our ‘One China’ policy,” the statement said. It described the call as “extremely cordial.”
The shift is the latest sign that Trump has had to moderate some of his more provocative foreign policy pronouncements.
“I have a sense that Trump has become tweeter in chief, but he has some cooler heads around him who are taking care of business,’’ said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U. S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. Schell said some of Trump’s more impetuous statements had “left people off-balance and scared and confused, but his lieutenants have realized we have to get this world stabilized.’’
Earlier this week, Trump vowed “strong support” for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example, weeks after calling the 38-nation military alliance “obsolete.”
Last week, his ambassador to the United Nations said the administration would not lift sanctions on Russia until it withdraws from Ukraine, weeks after Trump had suggested he might ease sanctions.
And Trump has backpedaled on a promise to move the U. S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a move that would infuriate the Muslim world since Palestinians also claim the city as their capital.
The reboot with China appears to be the handiwork of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House aide Jared Kushner , Trump’s son-in-law, who met with Chinese ambassador Cui Tiankai before a Lunar New Year event last week in Washington. Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump, attended the event with the couple’s 5-year-old daughter and released (to the delight of many Chinese) a video of the girl singing a song in Chinese.
Trump has repeatedly criticized China’s trade policies during and since the campaign. His promise to get tough on China has been a central element of Trump’s claim that his experience as a businessman would allow him to get better deals for the United States than his predecessors achieved.
The Chinese had shrugged off Trump’s campaign rhetoric as American politics as usual, but his statements about Taiwan rattled Beijing to the core.
In December, Trump said in an interview with Fox News, “I don’t know why we have to be bound by a one China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.”
Shortly before his inauguration, he told the Wall Street Journal that “everything is under negotiation, including one China.”
The “one China” policy is essentially an agreement to disagree — a diplomatic fiction that allowed the United States and China to set aside their differences and build a relationship that by now dominates the world economy.
