Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

The Trump administration played the first round of this new game, for better or worse. But future administrations will have to pick up where it left off and hopefully come up with a strategy that the entire country and our allies can join. Many career national security officials are already well aware of the threat and have long been calling for a broader response. “You have a bunch of liberal democracies that realize by 2016 that Xi Jinping is taking China backwards and we probably better start protecting ourselves. That’s the bigger story here,” said Turpin. “We needed a new strategic approach.” The Trump team mounted an imperfect and incomplete attempt to create that new approach. It will be up to their successors to continue, and improve, this vital endeavor.

1

The Transition

There was no calm before the storm.

Trump’s surprise electoral win on November 8, 2016, sent shockwaves through the global establishment. And it left everyone—in the United States and in China—to wonder what kind of a leader he would be, and whether his tough campaign rhetoric on China would become the basis for a new US foreign policy.

They would not have long to wait. The first indications about what a Trump presidency would look like in practice, not just in theory, came fast and furious during the ten weeks between his election and his inauguration on January 20, 2017. The signs were not reassuring to anyone in Beijing who might have held out hope that the incoming president would keep the relationship on an even keel. The transition showed a president who was already creating havoc and a team of advisers consumed over fighting for control of the policy and the attention of the boss. Relations between the two capitals were an early casualty of this tumult in Washington, DC.

When the Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi berated his American counterparts in their meeting at Jared Kushner’s office on December 9, he was not merely establishing the baseline of their relationship, or testing the Trump team for strengths and weaknesses. He was also conveying his government’s intense displeasure at one of the incoming Trump administration’s first official acts vis-à-vis China.

Everyone knew why the Chinese leadership was upset, but Yang made it clear anyway. Exactly one week prior, President-Elect Trump had taken a congratulatory phone call from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. This small act had broken four decades of precedent and sent shockwaves throughout Washington and Asia.

Beijing considered Taiwan a renegade province to eventually be subsumed back into China, one way or the other. But the majority of Taiwanese don’t consider themselves Chinese; the island has never been governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has a history and culture distinct from those of mainland China, characterized by its indigenous population, its period of Japanese colonial rule, and the waves of migration to Taiwan from mainland China. The CCP also thought of Taiwan as a “core issue,” meaning that it was nonnegotiable and off-limits for other governments.

Every minor interaction between Washington and Taipei was grounds for a diplomatic protest. A contact at this level was an assault on all these understandings. Trump had brazenly provoked Beijing right out of the gate, but nobody knew why. If it was part of a plan, then the fight was on. But if it was some sort of accident or one-off gesture, that meant something completely different. Chinese leaders could not have known it was part of a plan, just not Trump’s.

At the time, the mere fact that Trump had accepted a call from Taiwan’s president—and that the White House put out a press release saying the president had taken a call from the “President of Taiwan”—was proof enough for most of the media that the incoming president was either a reckless China hawk or a neophyte who had clumsily failed his first foreign policy test out of sheer ignorance and naïveté. But the story of how, exactly, Trump came to take a call from Taiwan’s president on Friday, December 2, remains in dispute, even among the people directly involved.

The story’s outcome, on the other hand, is incontestable: Trump ended up conceding one huge issue in the US-China competition almost immediately, for nothing in return. This incident, in turn, became the foundation for Trump’s personal relationship with Xi Jinping—a relationship that would have a massive influence on the course of history.

The Taiwan Call

In the first year of the Trump administration, the White House was a hall of mirrors. Like the Japanese movie Rashomon, every story was told from several perspectives, and even when all storytellers believed they were telling the truth, the stories often differed greatly. These competing narratives—not to mention the authorized leaks, the unauthorized leaks, the flat-out lies, and the fog of confusion—practically ensured that every story about the Trump administration during his first year in office got mangled as it was reported, and then mangled further as other versions emerged.

In the case of Trump’s Taiwan call, the most often reported version of the story also is the one the least believed by people actually in the know. This version was largely accepted by the Washington establishment because it was plausible enough and because, in the chaos of the moment, there were too many other scandals drawing the media’s attention to search for a better version after this basic explanation was printed.

This widely accepted version, as reported by the New York Times and others, credits the Taiwan call to former Kansas senator Bob Dole, whose lobbying law firm, Alston & Bird, gets paid $280,000 a year by the Taiwanese government. Dole “worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff.” The Times story even included an interview with Dole himself, speaking on behalf of the Taiwanese government. “They’re very optimistic,” Dole said.

But that’s not the way it actually went down, according to the people who were directly involved. The real connection between the Trump team and Taiwan, they say, was made when Randy Schriver, a former Pentagon official who at the time led a small think tank called the Project 2049 Institute that was partially funded with Taiwanese government money, reached out to a friend of his who was a staffer on the State Department transition team. Schriver told the transition staffer that he had spoken with Taiwanese government officials about a call between Trump and Tsai. The staffer added the call to Trump’s call sheet and sent the call sheet up to Trump Tower in New York.

Trump went through his calls that day until he got to the last one on the list: Taiwan. Because there was so much confusion during the transition, according to some White House insiders, nobody noticed in time to stop it.

But others involved still dispute that Trump was caught unaware. Steve Bannon, who at the time was set to become Trump’s chief strategist, insists that the president-elect was briefed on the call ahead of time—and that Bannon warned Kushner, and they both warned Trump, that the Chinese government would protest. In Bannon’s mind, however, provoking Beijing’s ire was a good thing—and according to Bannon, Trump felt the same way. “If you take the phone call, it will explode around the region but you will have [the Chinese government] on the back foot,” Bannon told Trump. “Well then, I’m definitely taking the phone call,” Trump responded.

The phone call itself was only a few minutes long and contained not much of substance: Tsai congratulated Trump on his victory and Trump rattled off his usual platitudes and basked in the attention. But the fact of the call was explosive, and it didn’t take long before the media was reporting it as a foolish blunder or, worse, a reckless provocation. Trump was surprised by the Washington media’s response to the call, according to Bannon, although not by Beijing’s—contrary to allegations from others on the transition team that Trump was blindsided by the Chinese government’s swift condemnation.