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‘FT’ source said to
be from White House
TRASHING TSAI: Some US analysts believe a call
to the ‘Financial Times’ about the impact of Tsai Ing-wen’s meetings in
Washington was aimed at crippling her campaign
By William Lowther / Staff Reporter in Washington
The “senior official” in Washington who tried to undermine Democratic
Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) presidential campaign last
week was almost certainly from the White House and not the US Department of
State, analysts in the US say.
The official called the Financial Times to claim that Tsai had left US President
Barack Obama’s administration with “distinct concerns” about her ability to
maintain stability in the Taiwan Strait.
The resulting story has been seen as particularly damaging to Tsai and a clear
attempt to influence Taiwan’s Jan. 14 presidential election in favor of
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
It is not considered to be coincidental that China strongly favors the
pro-Beijing policies of Ma over Tsai’s more independence-minded views.
During a three-day visit to Washington, Tsai met with both State Department and
US National Security Council (NSC) officials.
Some analysts now believe the unsolicited call to the newspaper, aimed at
crippling Tsai’s campaign, may have been unprecedented as a calculated and
virtually open political attack.
The newspaper described the caller, who was well known to reporters, as a
“senior administration official.” The official’s message was clear: The Obama
administration did not trust Tsai to keep the peace and it would be better to
re-elect Ma.
Tsai’s aides and entourage were shocked because there had been no trace of such
sentiments in their meetings.
At the State Department, she had met with US Deputy Secretary of State Thomas
Nides and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell and their
response to her views and policies had appeared to be positive, Tsai’s aides
said.
US Senator James Inhofe, the Republican who is co-chair of the US Senate Taiwan
Caucus, immediately asked the State Department for an explanation.
“The ‘official’ mentioned in this [Financial Times] article is totally unknown
to us and certainly does not speak for the Obama administration,” the State
Department replied.
To reinforce this position, Campbell has since told other political figures on
Capitol Hill that the State Department was not involved and that the views
expressed to the Financial Times did not reflect State Department thinking.
This leaves the NSC, where Tsai met NSC Senior Director for Asia Danny Russel
and China Director Evan Medeiros.
Washington experts who specialize in China are now speculating that Russel and
Medeiros reported their own views on Tsai — those contained in the Financial
Times article — to a more senior White House figure close to the Oval Office.
And this figure, identity unknown, either authorized someone within the council
to call the Financial Times or authorized another White House senior official or
made the call himself.
Whichever, the call was made without the knowledge and without the support of
the State Department.
According to one diplomatic source, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
has since been briefed on the situation and was “not pleased” at what had
happened.
Behind all of this lies a long-running disagreement — some insiders call it a
feud — between the State Department and the NSC.
Chris Nelson, a well-regarded Asia analyst, has written in his privately
distributed Nelson Report newsletter that there is a “highly personal, often
bitter animosity between senior White House officials and senior Asia players at
State.”
He now wonders if that animosity will have a “deleterious effect” on foreign
policy formulation because the senior administration official’s decision to call
the Financial Times has raised the dispute to a new level.
Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation,
has written that Tsai has “assiduously sought to project reasonableness and
responsibility.”
“The White House comments [in the story] reflect an all-too-well-trained
instinct for carrying China’s water on cross-Straits issues. It is the PRC
[People’s Republic of China] that is dictating the terms of the ‘stability’ the
US is concerned with maintaining. It is the PRC that declares any deviation from
the trend in the direction of unification ‘destabilizing’ and threatens to
resort to force to preclude any movement counter to this trend — as it alone
perceives it,” he wrote.
“And judging by the White House response to its encounter with Tsai this [last]
week, the PRC’s perception is the only one it cares about,” Lohman wrote.
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