US should recognise Taiwan as Ukraine war flares: Pompeo

Bloomberg

The US should immediately move towards recognizing Taiwan as a country, former US Secretary of State and potential presidential candidate Mike Pompeo said in Taipei, comments that garnered a testy response from Beijing.
“It is imperative to change 50 years of ambiguity,” said Pompeo, the top diplomat in the Trump administration who is visiting Taipei in an unofficial capacity at the invitation of a think tank.
“While the US should continue to engage with the People’s Republic of China as a sovereign government, America’s diplomatic recognition of the 23 million freedom-loving Taiwanese people and its legal, democratically elected government can no longer be ignored and avoided,” he said in a speech Friday, referring to the official name of the government in Beijing.
The change encouraged by Pompeo would upend more than four decades of US “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan, a policy intended to minimize the risk of a direct conflict with China, which claims the separately governed island as part of its territory despite never controlling it.
Pompeo’s call comes at a particularly sensitive time, as Taiwan’s status has drawn comparisons to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen this week played down concerns that the war in Europe could trigger a similar crisis in Asia, saying the two situations were “fundamentally different.”
Since it established diplomatic relations with Beijing’s Communist government in 1979, the US has maintained informal, “people-to-people” ties with Taiwan while avoiding taking a position on the island’s sovereignty. Any shift in the US stance would probably prompt a furious response from Beijing.
Earlier this year, China’s ambassador in Washington, Qin Gang, warned that his country and the US would likely engage in military conflict if Taiwan’s government moved towards formalizing its independence.

‘Babbling Nonsense’
Later Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin lashed out at Pompeo, calling him “a former politician whose credibility has long gone bankrupt.”
“Such a person’s babbling nonsense will have no success,” he added.
Pompeo’s trip overlapped with one by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen that Washington intended as a signal of support amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which shares similar security concerns as Taiwan. Both Pompeo and Mullen met President Tsai Ing-wen, who has angered Beijing by pushing back on its claims to sovereignty over the island.
That has prompted China to step up military, diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan, most notably by sending military aircraft toward the island. People’s Liberation Army warplanes made some 960 forays into Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone in 2021, more than double the previous year.
A small number of protesters from pro-unification parties gathered at the hotel in downtown Taipei where Pompeo made his remarks.