Open Questions | South China Sea flare-up risk ‘much higher’ than across Taiwan Strait, former US ‘envoy’ to Taipei Douglas Paal says
- No easily identifiable off-ramp for Beijing and Manila on Second Thomas Shoal, 2002-2006 unofficial US representative to Taipei tells the Post
- ‘Holy grail’ of common language on US-China military-level nuclear talks yet to be found, Paal says, cites lack of ‘common adversary’ for cooperation
In the years when you were in the White House, and during your time at the American Institute in Taiwan, what was the US-China interaction like and how would you compare it to the present times?
Well, before 1989, we had a common anti-Soviet focus, and that allowed a lot of cooperation to take place in areas that today would be impossible. We had military-to-military cooperation, and the [Jimmy] Carter administration had set out to create relationships among every major agency of the US government’s counterparts in China.
All those lasted and were a source of a lot of work until 1989. And then we started to reduce those connections in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise in differences between the United States and China.
Speaking of now, what would you say are the areas of possible cooperation missing in the interaction between Beijing and Washington?
I’d say that the areas of cooperation that normally are mentioned are environment and pandemics, and space and nuclear weapons proliferation – these are standard issues. I think one that you don’t hear so often is how to manage coexistence into the future with two very different types of political systems. And we haven’t figured out the means or the end of that coexistence programme yet, that’s still a little early and a little sensitive for both sides.
You say that there is not very much talk about how we can coexist with two different types of systems. Are there any lessons to be learned from the Carter administration?
