This editorial is published in the etaiwannews.com:
It is now part of the “conventional wisdom” that the authoritarian People’s Republic of China is rising while the political and economic influence of the United States is declining.
Outgoing right-wing Republican President George W. Bush wants to leave a legacy of Sino-American rapprochement and both Republican Party presidential candidate Senator John McCain and Democratic Party contender Senator Barack Obama affirm they will “engage China” if elected. But just because a declining power wishes to accommodate a rising power does not mean that it is can treat every country whose existence is “inconvenient” to such ambitions as a “trouble maker” and a target for “regime change.”
A case in point concerns the comparison drawn between Taiwan with the troubled Republic of Georgia in two articles by U.S. foreign policy analysts, namely “Georgia’s Lessons for Taiwan” by Jeffrey Bader and Douglas Paal in the September issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review and “From Georgia to Taiwan” by Richard Bush and Kenneth Lieberthal in the Wall Street Journal on September 16.
