Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has made Taiwan’s allies uneasy with his China-friendly policies. Writing in the latest edition of the magazine Foreign Affairs, US academic Robert Gilley describes how, during the Cold War, Finland employed a policy of detente to curry favor with the Soviet Union, enabling it to retain its autonomy and avoid annexation by the USSR. Gilley notes that, since the Ma administration took office, Taiwan’s situation has come to resemble that of Finland. He goes on to suggest that the US should stop selling arms to Taiwan, and that it should let Taiwan become neutral and no longer count Taiwan among its Asian allies.

Hopes were high in Taiwan when Barack Obama became President of the United States in January 2009. Obama had campaigned on the promise of change and that gave many in Taiwan hope for a way out from the "strategic ambiguity" imposed on the island by the United States in 1945.

When World War II ended with the Japanese surrender to the United States in August 1945, the U.S. allowed the Japanese to continue to rule the island territory commonly called Formosa. Then, in October, the Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Navy landed Chinese Nationalist troops of Chiang Kai-shek on the island to process Japanese soldiers thus beginning the longstanding ambiguity that prevents the island residents a representative to the World Health Organization, membership in the United Nations, or even participation in a recent climate change conference.