The U.S. should immediately move toward recognizing Taiwan as a country, former U.S. Secretary of State and potential presidential candidate Mike Pompeo said in Taipei, comments that garnered a testy response from Beijing.
“It is imperative to change 50 years of ambiguity,” said Pompeo, the top diplomat in the Trump administration who is visiting Taipei in an unofficial capacity at the invitation of a think tank.
“While the U.S. should continue to engage with the People’s Republic of China as a sovereign government, America’s diplomatic recognition of the 23 million freedom-loving Taiwanese people and its legal, democratically elected government can no longer be ignored and avoided,” he said in a speech Friday, referring to the official name of the government in Beijing.
The change encouraged by Pompeo would upend more than four decades of U.S. “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan, a policy intended to minimize the risk of a direct conflict with China, which claims the separately governed island as part of its territory despite never controlling it.
Pompeo’s call comes at a particularly sensitive time, as Taiwan’s status has drawn comparisons to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has played down concerns that the war in Europe could trigger a similar crisis in Asia, saying the two situations were “fundamentally different.”
Since it established diplomatic relations with Beijing’s Communist government in 1979, the U.S. has maintained informal, “people-to-people” ties with Taiwan while avoiding taking a position on the island’s sovereignty. Any shift in the U.S. stance would probably prompt a furious response from Beijing.
China’s ambassador in Washington, Qin Gang, warned in January that his country and the U.S. would likely engage in military conflict if Taiwan’s government moved toward formalizing its independence.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin lashed out at Pompeo later Friday, calling him “a former politician whose credibility has long gone bankrupt.”
“Such a person’s babbling nonsense will have no success,” he added.
On Saturday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said while delivering the government’s annual work report at the start of the National People’s Congress that Beijing would “remain committed to the major principles and policies on work related to Taiwan.”
Pompeo’s trip overlapped with one by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen that Washington intended as a signal of support amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which shares similar security concerns as Taiwan. Pompeo and Mullen met President Tsai Ing-wen, who has angered Beijing by pushing back on its claims to sovereignty over the island.
That has prompted China to step up military, diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan, most notably by sending military aircraft toward the island. People’s Liberation Army warplanes made 960 forays into Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone in 2021, more than double the previous year.
A small number of protesters from pro-unification parties gathered at the hotel in downtown Taipei where Pompeo made his remarks. He said in his speech that the right to demonstrate was one of the things that made Taiwan’s democracy special and joked that they “made me feel like I’m at home.”
A staunch critic of China’s ruling Communist Party, Pompeo was former President Donald Trump’s top diplomat from 2018 to 2021, a period that included visits to Taipei by two Cabinet-level officials, the most senior American delegations since the U.S. switched official ties to Beijing.
He has said that China’s actions toward the Uyghur ethnic group in its far western region of Xinjiang are “genocide” and met with people who said they had been in work camps there. Beijing calls these allegations “the lie of the century” and held frequent news conferences aimed at discrediting some of the same individuals who met the then-secretary of state.
Pompeo is among a group of former officials in the Trump administration who are seen as potential presidential hopefuls in 2024. Last year, he started a political group to back conservative candidates for office, and later this month he’s scheduled to speak at a Republican Party fundraiser in Iowa, which plays a key role in the nominating process with its early caucuses.
