BELLWETHER:American Enterprise Institute academic Gary Schmitt said that January’s elections would test if Beijing is turning into a benign or not-so-benign power

Taipei Times
Date:  Oct 21, 2015
By: William Lowther  /  Staff reporter in WASHINGTON

The US should normalize relations with Taiwan “as much as possible,” a former senior congressional official said.

Gary Schmitt, a former staff director of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who is now an academic at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said Washington should overturn the self-imposed strictures on relations that are required neither by domestic nor international law.

“Bringing democratic Taiwan in from the cold is as important as Washington’s opening to Cuba — arguably far more so,” he wrote in a commentary published by the Wall Street Journal.

Taiwan has been denied recognition as a sovereign state by the US “based on the diplomatic hocus pocus that there is only one China,” he said, adding that upholding the “one China” policy is a “charade.”     [FULL  STORY]