Good grief. Bob Dole? I thought he was dead.China has urged Washington to deny Taiwan’s president entry to the United States as Donald Trump’s protocol-shredding conversation with Tsai Ing-wen continued to create frictions between the world’s two largest economies.
Tsai, who was elected Taiwan’s first female leader in January, is expected to fly through the US next month en route to a three-country tour of Central America with stops in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.
[...]
A spokesperson for the US state department appeared to dismiss China’s calls, noting that allowing Taiwanese leaders to transit through the US was part of a “long-standing US practice, consistent with the unofficial nature of our relations with Taiwan”.
China’s calls came as it emerged that former Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole may have played a role in setting up the controversial 10-minute conversation between Trump and Tsai that has so angered Beijing.
The New York Times reported that in the lead-up to that call Dole, now a Washington lobbyist, had spent six months working behind the scenes to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and Trump staff.
“It’s fair to say that we may have had some influence,” Dole was quoted as saying by the Wall Street Journal.
Dole’s law firm, Alston & Bird, reportedly received US$140,000 from the Taipei economic and cultural representative office, which functions as an unofficial embassy in the US.
Guardian
There's little evidence that Donald Trump knows how to do things any other way. In fact, we can just quote that as the "Trump Doctrine": lobbing hand-grenades and seeing what happens.Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a China expert from the University of California, Irvine, said] if Trump was determined to pursue a new policy towards Taiwan, and therefore China, it should be done through [a] set of measured moves “not by just lobbing rhetorical hand-grenades and seeing what happens”.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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