Likely pro-Taiwan picks for Trump's cabinet imply continuing U.S. support: Experts

Taipei, Nov. 7 (CNA) The Taiwan-friendly candidates tipped to be Trump's secretary of state and secretary of defense pointed toward U.S. support for Taiwan continuing under the incoming Donald Trump administration, experts said Thursday.

Several of the prospective secretaries of state predicted by the media were outspoken in their support for Taiwan, including Republican House Representative Mike Waltz and Trump's national security adviser Robert O'Brien.

Mike Pompeo, who served as secretary of state during Trump's first term as U.S. president, and Waltz were also secretary of defense hopefuls, said Albert Chiu (邱師儀), a professor of political science at Tunghai University, at a forum in Taipei discussing the results of the U.S. presidential election and its implications.

Echoing Chiu's views, Taipei City Councilor Chao Yi-hsiang (趙怡翔) of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that every individual who has been tipped to be Trump's secretary of state so far are pro-Taiwan, and that most of them have recently visited Taiwan.

"I think the Taiwanese people need not worry about his (Trump's) cabinet... we should even be very confident about it," said Chao, who previously headed the political division at Taiwan's representative office in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Taiwan's former representative to the U.S. Stanley Kao (高碩泰) said that about 1,200 of the more than 4,000 political appointments in Trump's administration would be senior officials.

Kao added that the people in those positions could potentially directly influence U.S. policy on Taiwan. Taiwanese diplomatic agencies in the U.S. would therefore be working on establishing who those individuals were likely to be and trying to make contact with them.

In late 2016, former President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) had a telephone conversation with then-U.S. President-elect Trump, marking the first time since 1979 a U.S. president or president-elect had directly spoken with a Taiwanese president.

That phone call was arranged by decision-makers in Taiwan and its diplomatic institutions in the U.S., and took a "considerable amount of time," Kao said.

Kao explained that when he was posted in the U.S. in 2016, there were many "self-imposed limitations" in interactions between Taiwan and the U.S. that he and his Taiwanese colleagues had to work around.

Hopefully, through arrangements such as those that made the Trump-Tsai phone call possible, the red tape in official interactions between Taiwan and the U.S. would continue being reduced during the second Trump term, Kao said.

"The challenge for the Taiwanese government at hand is how to leverage its 'bargaining chips' while delivering a message to 'friends in high places,' communicating Taiwan's positions and concerns over the many issues awaiting discussion with the U.S.," Kao noted.