In The Asia Times Online, Rober Sutter, professor of Asian Studies at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, wrote:
Overshadowed by the difficulties facing US policy in the Korean peninsula is the success of relatively quiet but effective US diplomacy in East Asia’s other major hotspot, the Taiwan Strait. Interviews with officials in Washington, Taipei, and Beijing in May-June make clear that the US diplomatic interventions in late 2004 were critically important in changing what up to that point were weakly constrained moves by President Chen Shui-bian and his allies to pursue assertive pro-independence initiatives that China said risked war.
