Hit the Ground Running on Korea and Know Your Taiwan Talking Points

[ 49 ] special roundtable • advising the new u.s. president “The inevitable change of personnel and attendant acclimatization of new line-ups in the White House, Foggy Bottom, the Pentagon, and elsewhere will be time consuming, but the United States can ill afford lost time and policy drift.” • Hit the Ground Running on Korea and Know Your Taiwan Talking Points Andrew Scobell The new administration will face a multitude of challenges from the economy to Iraq. Among these are a series of challenges in policy toward Asia that include, in particular, dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue and managing the Taiwan issue. The inevitable change of personnel and attendant acclimatization of new line-ups in the White House, Foggy Bottom, the Pentagon, and elsewhere will be time consuming, but the United States can ill afford lost time and policy drift. There are important reasons for the new administration to hit the ground running on North Korea and to know its talking points on Taiwan. The six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue have entered a critical stage, and the United States cannot afford to lose this opportunity. Dealing with North Korea is difficult even under the best of circumstances so it is essential not to lose continuity or momentum in the six-party talks. One must recall that the Bush administration wasted valuable time in the early years of the president’s first term by not talking to Pyongyang— initially equating dialogue with appeasement—and it was not until 2002 that Washington concluded there was no alternative to talking with Pyongyang. When the United States became serious about talking with North Korea, it took about a year of bilateral conversations prior to switching to a multilateral format before progress could slowly be made. Yet even these few years of talks did not prevent Pyongyang from going nuclear in October 2006. The six-party talks are the last best hope for addressing the North Korean nuclear issue. Of course there are no guarantees. Washington cannot afford to waste time by selecting a new chief negotiator and spinning up a new team. Members of the U.S. team will need to become acquainted not just with their counterparts from Pyongyang but also from Seoul, Tokyo, Moscow, and of course Beijing. The new president should therefore andrew scobell is Associate Professor with the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He can be reached at . [ 50 ] asia policy ask Ambassador Christopher Hill to stay on as the Department of State’s special envoy to the six-party talks. Moreover, this position should be made separate from the post of assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific affairs; otherwise, the rest of the region will receive short shrift from the State Department. Unlike on the North Korean nuclear issue, the United States does not urgently need to be proactive on Taiwan. Indeed, the most urgent imperative for Taiwan policy is simply to know the issue. Senior officials in the new administration—including the president, vice president, secretaries of state and defense, and national security advisor, not to mention the chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan—all need to be conversant in the fundamentals of the existent U.S. policy toward Taiwan and familiar with the history of the issue’s centrality in U.S.-China relations. They need to know the essence of the three communiqués (the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, the 1978 Normalization Communiqué, and the 1982 Communiqué) and the Taiwan Relations Act. Rather than demonstrate policy initiative and activity, the new administration needs to avoid a diplomatic blunder or misstatement. But this is not as simple as it might seem. Both China and Taiwan pay extraordinarily close attention to the prepared statements as well as the off-the-cuff remarks of senior officials in a new administration in Washington for signs of change or consistency in policy, however slight. With the election of Ma Ying-jeou as president of Taiwan in March 2008, a significant window of opportunity has emerged for progress in Taipei’s relations with Beijing. The last nine months have witnessed a new climate of cooperation and goodwill across the strait—something not...