TAIPEI (AFP) – The United States should diplomatically recognize Taiwan as “a free and sovereign country,” former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a speech while visiting the island.
Pompeo, one of former president Donald Trump’s most hawkish advisors on China, arrived on Wednesday for a visit at a time of rising tensions between Washington and Beijing over the self-ruled island as well as the crisis sparked by Russia’s operation in Ukraine.
While Washington should continue to engage with Beijing as a sovereign government, offering Taipei diplomatic recognition “can no longer be ignored, avoided or treated as secondary,” Pompeo said in a speech hosted by a local think-tank.
“It is my view that the United States government should immediately take necessary and long-overdue steps to do the right and obvious thing, that is to offer the Republic of China (Taiwan) America’s diplomatic recognition as a free and sovereign country.”
The Republic of China is Taiwan’s official name.
Washington has remained Taipei’s most important ally and leading arms supplier despite switching diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1979.
But Pompeo said the move “isn’t about Taiwan’s future independence, it’s about recognition of an unmistakable, already existing reality”.
Beijing considers a formal declaration of independence as something that would cross its self-declared “red line” and has warned that such a step could trigger war.