I don't do weddings.
Look, all that Russkie activity is simply in response to geo-political provocations by teh pychotic yanke scum and their 'yurpeon minions. 'specially that raving lunatic Stoltenbarger.
Pull back the troops and disallow Georgia and Ukraine from ever becoming part of NATO and everthing will chill bro'.
Article below is dope history...
snip...
So far one DPP candidate, Chen Shui-bian, has been elected, and served two terms from 2000 to 2008. (As part of Taiwan’s democratic transition, a native Taiwanese and ardent nationalist, Lee Tenghui, was made president as chairman of the KMT in 1988. After leaving office in 2000, he became a fixture in the independence movement). When Chen Shuibian took office for his second term in 2004, he flirted with a referendum constitutional reform (which would have inched Taiwan toward a more lawyerly version of independence) until he was dissuaded by the US government.
Actually, he was dissuaded by secretary of state Colin Powell, only after Powell was able to gain the upper hand over that enthusiastic pot-stirrer, creative destroyer, and regime-changer, vice president Dick Cheney. Lawrence Wilkerson, a senior staffer with Powell, told the story to Jeff Stein of Congress Quarterly:
“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week…essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian … that independence was a good thing.”
Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department”.
“This went on”, he said of the pro-independence efforts, “until George Bush weighed in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist [and] told him multiple times to re-establish military-to-military relations with China”.
Wilkerson’s account was supported by Douglas Paal, former head of the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto US embassy in Taipei.
“In the early years of the Bush administration”, Paal said by e-mail last week, “there was a problem with mixed signals to Taiwan from Washington. This was most notably captured in the statements and actions of Therese Shaheen, the former AIT [American Institute in Taiwan] chair, which ultimately led to her departure”.
Sheehan was the previous head of AIT – and was married to Larry DeRita, Rumsfeld’s chief press flack at the Pentagon. She used her bully pulpit to push for Taiwan independence and support the credibility of the DoD approach until Colin Powell demanded her resignation and she was removed in 2004.
So, chalk up US support for the One China doctrine as a “sometime thing”, to paraphrase George Gershwin. As the anecdote quoted above demonstrates, US allegiance to the One China principle is, as most of our undertakings with our geopolitical adversaries, conditional, laden with formal and unspoken caveats, and ripe to be discarded once a geopolitical opportunity is perceived.