china has raised the military threat to taiwan. we would be derelict if we didn t raise our capacity to deal with it. that s a question [ inaudible ] certainly for how we implement our strategy. so yousan, you disagree. why? well, i disagree because i think the best way to keep the peace in the taiwan strait is to maintain the continuity of this policy that we have had for so long. it s very hard to explain it to people. it sounds really silly. strategic ambiguity, what does that mean? what it really means is that all three parties have an interest in preserving the peace, and we certainly don t want taiwan to
timeline heading forward. i think one of the reasons they were willing to do this is they saw no upside, no potential in u.s.-chinese relations. people always call for bipartisanship in this country. we have a kind of competitive bipartisanship now when it comes to china policy. republicans under mike pompeo, he called for regime change, to get rid of the communist party. he s now calling for the independence of taiwan. nancy pelosi is talking about human rights and so forth. the president wasn t willing to tell the speaker of the house not to go, that it would be bad. in large part he was worried it would be criticized as appeasement of an aggressive, repressive china. and what s missing, this is the most important relationship of the 21st century. and what we don t have is a serious, strategic dialogue. we no longer have the
solution to the problem of taiwan in 1979, a solution known as one country, two systems. saying taiwan could maintain its own political system, laws, even own armed forces. taiwan rejected the offer, but he urged strategic patience and decided to demonstrate the vitality of this policy by applying it to hong kong, once the british handed over the city state to beijing in 1997. spelling out these promises in an agreement with great britain and in hong kong s basic law, it s de facto constitution. for several years, beijing observed one country, two systems in hong kong, and held out the prospect of the same for taiwan. trade between beijing and taipei increased dramatically. in 2015, president xi met with taiwan s then president and they spoke of enhancing ties.
months ago. but on the american side, a series of errors, many tactical and driven by domestic politics, have resulted in a dangerous reality. there is no serious working relationship between the 21st century s two most powerful actors. from the start, the biden administration adopted a policy toward china of open hostility and criticism. in the very first face-to-face meeting with senior officials from both side, secretary of state antony blinken decided to deliver a harang, to which his chinese counterpart defiantly responded. that blinken s remarks were delivered in public in front of television cameras, a format that would only harden beijing s position, not change it. as president obama s top adviser noted, despite having criticized
for a third term that he hopes to receive at the party congress in the fall. and he was struggling quite a bit, because of policy misjudgments that he himself had made over the past year or two. so the economy was slowing down. there s no way they re going to meet their growth target for 2022. and there was a lot of grumbling about the draconian covid-19 policy, about the alignment with russia on the ukraine war, and the crackdown on the private sector which resulted in the loss of a lot of jobs. so we ve got youth unemployment, economic problems. that s not the position that xi jinping hoped to be in two months before the party congress. so he took the opportunity to