My Take | Tsai Ing-wen and Liz Truss are embarrassing each other
- When a hawkish senior UK parliamentarian, the leftist Guardian newspaper, the British government and Beijing all agree in their assessments of Truss’ visit, you know it’s a trip to nowhere
Having failed to be her hero Margaret Thatcher, Liz Truss is now trying to do a Nancy Pelosi. Talk about lowering one’s standards. But the former British prime minister won’t even achieve that this week. At most, there will be a few angry official statements coming from Beijing, but there won’t be any fireworks from the People’s Liberation Army.
The shame of being Britain’s shortest-serving leader and one of its most incompetent! There are some reputations that simply cannot be salvaged. But that is the harsh reality political hacks such as Truss will find hard to accept. You know the five stages of grief; she still seems to be at the early stages of denial and anger.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so harsh with Truss. The real fault lies with the Prospect Foundation, an outfit of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which invited her, and with the Tsai Ing-wen government, which clearly sanctioned the visit.
They may have the decency to decline Truss and advise her on a wiser and more productive course less open to ridicule. The foundation has called Truss “a friend of Taiwan”. But nowadays, Tsai and the DPP welcome any politician from the West, however lowly or irrelevant. That of course cheapens and diminishes any provocation Tsai may hope to level at Beijing, to the point of being like children thumbing their noses at each other. Tsai is a one-trick pony, but that trick delivers rapidly diminishing returns.
You know Truss is on a trip to nowhere when Alicia Kearns, the hardline Conservative chairwoman of the UK parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, the editorial board of the leftist Guardian newspaper, the British government and Beijing all agree in their assessments of her visit.
Kearns, who recently accused China of threatening her safety and that of her family because of her hawkish stance, called the visit “performative, not substantive” and “the worst example of Instagram diplomacy” that is “deeply unhelpful because it escalates the normal situation in Taiwan”.