As the Ukraine conflict escalates, Pompeo says the US should recognize Taiwan

Key takeaways:

• In Taipei, Mike Pompeo, a former US Secretary of State and potential presidential candidate, said that the US should recognise Taiwan as a country as soon as possible.
• Pompeo's call comes at a sensitive time, with parallels between Taiwan's situation and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
• China has stepped up military, diplomatic, and economic pressure on Taiwan, including sending military planes.

Former US Secretary of State and potential presidential candidate Mike Pompeo said in Taipei that the US should move quickly to recognize Taiwan as a country, comments that Beijing reacted angrily to.

"It's critical to end 50 years of ambiguity," said Pompeo, the Trump administration's top diplomat, who is in Taipei on a non-official visit at the invitation of a think tank.

"While the United States might continue to engage with the People's Republic of China as a sovereign govt," he said in a speech Friday, "America's diplomatic acknowledgment of the 23 million freedom-loving Taiwanese individuals and its legal, democratically elected gov't can no longer be ignored and avoided."

The change advocated by Pompeo would overturn more than four decades of US "strategic ambiguity" on Taiwan, a policy meant to avoid a direct conflict with China, which asserts the separately governed island as part of the territory despite never having controlled it.

Pompeo's call comes at a particularly sensitive time, with comparisons between Taiwan's situation and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan, downplayed fears that the European war could spark a similar crisis in Asia, saying the two situations were "fundamentally different."

Since 1979, when the US established diplomatic relations with Beijing's Communist government, it has maintained informal "people-to-people" ties with Taiwan while avoiding taking a position on the island's sovereignty. Any shift in US policy would almost certainly elicit a vehement retaliation from Beijing.

In January, China's ambassador in Washington, Qin Gang, warned that the two countries would likely engage in military conflict if Taiwan's government moved toward formalizing its independence.

'Babbling Nonsense' 

Later Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin slammed Pompeo, calling him "a former politician whose credibility has long since gone bankrupt."

"Such a person's babbling nonsense will fail," he continued.

While delivering the govt's annual work report at the start of the National People's Congress on Saturday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stated that Beijing would "remain committed to the main principles as well as policies on work related to Taiwan."

Pompeo's trip coincided with Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which Washington intended as a show of support in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which shares comparable security concerns as Taiwan. Both Pompeo and Mullen met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who has enraged Beijing by rejecting Beijing's claims to the island's sovereignty.

As a result, China has increased military, diplomatic, and economic pressure on Taiwan, including dispatching military aircraft to the island. In 2021, 960 forays by People's Liberation Army warplanes into Taiwan's air-defense identification zone were made, more than double the previous year.

Pompeo is being protested.

A small crowd of pro-unification protesters gathered outside the hotel where Pompeo delivered his remarks in downtown Taipei. He stated in his speech that one of the things that made Taiwan's democracy unique was the right to demonstrate and joked that it "made me feel at home."

Pompeo, a vocal critic of China's ruling Communist Party, served as former President Donald Trump's top diplomat from 2018 to 2021. Two Cabinet-level officials paid visits to Taipei, the most senior American delegations since the US switched official ties to Beijing.

He has called China's treatment of the Uyghur ethnic group in the Xinjiang region of the country "genocide," and he has met with people who claim to have spent time in work camps there. These allegations have been dubbed "the lie of the century" by Beijing, which has held numerous press conferences to discredit some of the same people who met with the then-secretary of state.

Pompeo is a group of former Trump administration officials who are being eyed as presidential candidates in 2024. Last year, he founded a political organization to support conservative candidates for office, and he'll speak at a Republican Party fundraiser in Iowa later this month. Iowa plays a key role in the nominating process with its early caucuses.