Final sellout of Taiwan in the works?

With President Bush’s younger brother, Neil, acknowledging involvement in what intelligence professionals might call Chinese honey traps and princeling business deals, the last thing the president needs is a China scandal.

But that’s precisely where some of his top aides appear to be taking him, starting with the National Security Councils Senior Director for Asian Affairs, James Moriarty.

Moriarty is in Taiwan right now, issuing a stern warning to democratically-elected President Chen Shui-bian not to hold a referendum on whether the people of Taiwan should vote for their country to be a sovereign nation.

Disregarding President Bush’s recent speeches that commit the US to a strategy of supporting democracy and freedom around the world, Moriarty and other sinapologists have set out on their own course to un-do presidents 2001 pledge to do whatever it takes to defend Taiwan.

Their idea is to change the administration’s stated, neutral non-support of Taiwanese independence into one of active opposition. Moriarty and others reportedly are planning to make US military sales to Taiwan conditional on Taiwan not having “provoked” Beijing – code language for cutting off military sales if the Taiwanese people vote for independence and a green light for Beijing to attack.

This is a huge policy shift and one that has not been vetted throughout the administration. It comes as a prominent China scholar, Arthur Waldron, warns in the Wall Street Journal that the US must be wary of Beijing’s intentions at a time when diplomacy concerning North Korea is causing the West and its friends in Asia to let down their guard and fragment their alliances.

Sources say that the Pentagon has been completely been cut out of the policy change, and that National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is under intense pressure to cave.

Moriarty, a career foreign service officer, has been working on this policy shift for quite some time. Joining him has been the US representative to Taiwan, Douglas Paal, whom critics say has been an apologist for the Beijing regime.

As the Center notes in a recent Decision Brief, Such a shift would not only signal the evisceration of Bush’s commitment to defend Taiwan; it would seemingly support Beijing in any step it felt necessary to prevent an action both the PRC and United States opposed.