President-elect Trump's phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen is to diplomacy what Happy Gilmore's slap shot was to the Pro Golf Tour. It defies all convention, is appallingly out of context — and should not even work — but it might just augur a new way of doing things.
That conversation disrupted previous norms, some of which resulted from decades of delicate, often secret, negotiations. Trump's action was supposedly not an accident, although he later petulantly tweeted, 'the President of Taiwan CALLED ME ... ' In the midst of the predictable, confected outrage it is worth considering the event within the context of contemporary US-China relations.
As with all matters Chinese, an historical perspective allows a more nuanced understanding of what went on, and whether or not it really mattered at all.
Taiwan's enduring capacity to pull heartstrings in the US is due largely to the following reason.
The commitment to Taiwan is viscerally linked to the descent of the iron curtain in 1945 and the initiation across the globe, east and west, of cold war hostilities. This mindset saw the new world order as a death struggle between atheism and Christianity, communism and democracy.
On the one hand were figures like Stalin and Mao, and on the other were Churchill and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen of New York, broadcasting anti-communist talks on television, the then new media.
At the time, China's ruling party (the Guomindang, led by Chiang Kai-shek) was losing to insurgent rebels (the Communist Party of China, led by Mao Zedong). Chiang's best weapon was his wife, Madame Chiang, or more properly, Soong Meiling, the youngest of the influential Soong sisters. (Sun Yatsen married another sister, Soong Chingling.)
Soong had successfully wooed the US media and politicians, appearing on the cover of Time magazine three times by 1943. It helped her, Chiang and the Republic of China that she was a Christian who had graduated from Wellesley College, Massachusetts and spoke fluent English with a southern US accent.
"The phone call was not only a courtesy call but also a strong expression of support for what Taiwan is perceived to represent to this type of politician in the US — a democratic nation in the shadow of an atheist bully."
To the anti-communist US public, therefore, Chiang Kaishek and his band of Chinese Christian democrats were just like them. US support remained strong for the Republic of China and its exiled power couple, now on nearby