Officials of the American Institute in Taiwan are said to have met behind closed doors with a number of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers early last week to express Washington's “anger” at President Ma Ying-jeou's move to confront Japan over the disputed islands called Senkakus by the Japanese and Diaoyutais in Taiwan. If it's true, there's something strange about the episode.
According to a foreign relations advisor to the opposition party who was present at the meeting, the Americans expressed concerns about a greater willingness in Taipei to cooperate with China on issues in which it sees their interests as aligned against those of the Japanese, which, however, are clearly indicated in a U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) report dated Jan. 13. As a matter of fact, the CRS report cites some analysts as agreeing there is an issue for U.S. policymakers surrounding whether Taiwan coordinated with the People's Republic of China in asserting sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands against Japan amid rising tensions last September. CRS reports are not confidential. Anybody can get online and download them. That means there is no need whatsoever for AIT officials to brief DPP legislators on the American position on the eight uninhabited islets, whose sovereignty dispute is caused by the arbitrary return of the Ryukyu Islands under U.S. trusteeship to Japanese control in 1972. Unless the lawmakers can't read English and nobody volunteered to translate a few paragraphs in the Jan. 13 CRS report that concerns Taiwan's move on the Diaoyutais.
Moreover, it's no secret that the Americans are concerned about Taipei-Beijing cooperation on the sovereignty issue over the disputed islands which the Chinese call the Diaoyus. The People's Republic has been urging cooperation over the tiny archipelago, only 100 miles northeast of Keelung, to advance ties across the Taiwan Strait, while Taipei has never tired of denying cooperating with Beijing.
But Washington's “anger” is nowhere to be seen the CRS report. Mention is made on the American concern that even without explicit coordination, the parallel actions of the People's Republic and Taiwan in the current East China Sea flare-up have added pressure against Japan as both of them deployed government patrol ships and military assets that raised concerns about the potential for accidental collisions and escalation of tensions.
In particular, according to the report, Taiwan deployed 12 Coast Guard ships to escort 60 fishing boats and fired water cannon toward Japanese patrol ships and dispatched military systems sold by the United States during the Sept. 25 incident.
The only complaint, which isn't made in the report, is that warships the Americans sold Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 were sent near the Diaoyutais to monitor the incident. One provision of the Act requires the United States to “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability” to resist the People's Republic but not the Japanese who are “invading” the Diaoyutais that are part of the Republic of China's inherent territory.
Perhaps an AIT official or two expressed the American anger as an aside in the closed-door meeting. Or isn't it a private complaint misperceived by the opposition party politicians as an official representation? Whatever it might be, the fact is that the Americans can and should officially complain but they haven't. The AIT officials didn't have to take the pains of meeting secretly to tell the DPP lawmakers what everybody knows and express Washington's unofficial anger at the American-made military systems dispatched to monitor the Sept. 25 incident. So the whole episode doesn't make any sense.
To tell the truth, Uncle Sam doesn't have to be concerned about the Senkaku flare-up in the first place. He has to be concerned about how the dispute which is his own making can be peacefully solved. Washington made the mistake of transferring the Senkakus together with Okinawa to Japanese control without consulting its World War II allies, including Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China, in violation of the provision in the Potsdam Declaration that the territory of Japan after the war should be limited to Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Hokkaido and those islands the allies would agree upon.
When Amami Oshima under American trusteeship was returned to Japan in 1953, the Republic of China protested because it hadn't been consulted in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration which Japan accepted to surrender to end World War II. Taipei wasn't consulted, again, when the United States returned Okinawa to Japan in 1972.
The Gordian knot of the Senkaku Islands was tied by the United States. It behooves the Americans to cut it. And it isn't difficult at all. The knot is tied because Taiwan and the People's Republic want to solve the Diaoyutai/Diaoyu dispute but Japan insists no such dispute exists at all. Japan claimed the Senkakus as terra nullius shortly before the end of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, though a Japanese naval strategist and cartographer, Hayashi Shihei, clearly marked them as belonging to China on his 1785 map of the three countries of Japan, China and the Kingdom of the Ryukyu Islands.
All it takes for Uncle Sam to cut the Gordian knot is to persuade Abe to accept that there exists the sovereignty dispute over the Senkakus by telling him no American help would be forthcoming if hostilities occur between Japan and China because the U.S.-Japan mutual defense treaty does not cover the islets over whose Japanese sovereignty claim is dubious at best.
Of course, U.S. President Barack Obama is not going to try to persuade Abe, because he has to protect the selfish interests of the United States, while the ultranationalist Abe doesn't seem to listen if he is talked to. Nevertheless, for Tokyo to admit the Senkaku dispute is the only way open to the three claimants to shelve that dispute to talk about the joint development of the rich resources of the disputed archipelago.
〈本文僅供參考，不代表本會立場〉
（本文刊載於102.02.18 The China Post 4版）
王順民
(
11月22日 15:13
)
劉新圓
(
2007年10月4日 15:04
)
