China-Taiwan-USA Triangle Holds the Key to War and Peace in Eastern Asia

Tensions between Beijing and Taipei have escalated in recent times to the point that they could provoke a serious conventional, and some analysts believe even nuclear, war between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. The Cold War between Washington and Beijing, although Washington denies it, and Beijing is urging the rest of the world not to accept the logic of the Cold War, for which the ball is being transferred to Washington, has already begun and is felt in almost all strategically important regions. two superpowers collide. How is it at all possible that the question of Greater China’s relationship with a small island of 36,000 square kilometers off the coast of China could be the cause of an apocalyptic conflict such as the China-US war over Taiwan would surely be if it happened. The genesis of the China-Taiwan conflict is more than a century old. Although largely unrecognized by other countries as a state, Taiwan sees itself as an independent nation and its political leaders have vowed to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty from Chinese intentions to annex Taiwan to China, by grace or force. Taiwan, whose official name is the Republic of China (ROC) when it comes to defending against possible Chinese aggression from the United States, expects to protect it. Therefore, any increase in tensions between China and Taiwan causes additional mistrust and animosity and adds fuel to the fire of already strained relations between Washington and Beijing. Taiwan, called Formosa (beauty) by the Portuguese colonizers, is a small island located off the east coast of China. Seventy years ago, Chinese nationalists and anti-communists from the former Republican government withdrew from China to Taiwan after the 1949 Communist victory in the revolution and civil war that followed. Since then, Taiwan has continued to exist in international relations as the Republic of China (RoC). Taiwan is located in the East China Sea, northeast of Hong Kong, north of the Philippines and south of South Korea, and southwest of Japan. Therefore, its position is of special strategic importance because it is located between the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Therefore, the Taiwan issue has serious implications for global relations and concerns the whole of East Asia. After parts of Manchurian units revolted, resulting in the overthrow of the Chinese monarchy ruled by the Qing dynasty, 4,000 years of Chinese monarchist rule ended, and on December 29, 1911, the Republic of China was proclaimed. Its founder is considered to be dr. Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Kuomintang Political Party (KMT). At the head of the ruling party KMT, and the After parts of Manchurian units revolted, resulting in the overthrow of the Chinese monarchy ruled by the Qing dynasty, 4,000 years of Chinese monarchist rule ended, and on December 29, 1911, the Republic of China was proclaimed. Its founder is considered to be dr. Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Kuomintang Political Party (KMT). At the head of the ruling party KMT, and the new republic. Suna was later succeeded by General Chiang Kai-Shek, a well-known military leader who fought against Chinese communists who had previously, at the insistence of the Soviet Union, allied with the KMT in a joint fight against the occupying forces of the Japanese Imperial Army. It was a great civil war on the territory of today’s China, which ended with the triumphant victory of the communists. After suffering defeat, Chiang and his KMT supporters fled to Taiwan where they established their base, established control of the island after clashes with the domicile population, and established a state government in exile whose name is still the Republic of China. On the other hand, since its proclamation in 1949, the People’s Republic of China, led by the Communist Party of China, has insisted that must return to China and seeks to reunite Taiwan with the mainland. The Republic of China – Taiwan, on the other hand, is considered the legitimate government of China. During the first two decades, Taiwan gained a halo of non-communist borders and dams towards China in the context of the Cold War policy. Taiwan (RoC) at the time was the only ‘China’ recognized by the UN as a legitimate member of this world organization until 1971. After China bombed Taiwan-controlled Yinmen, Mazu and Dachen in 1954-55, the US Congress passed a Resolution on Formosa authorizing President Eisenhower to defend the territory of Taiwan (Republic of China). Chinese Prime Minister Zhou En-lai signaled at a non-aligned conference in Bandung, Indonesia, that he wanted to negotiate with the United States, but in 1958, China continued the bombing, provoking the United States to increase support for Taiwan.  The animosity between the United States and China over Taiwan lasted until 1971, when there was a serious turning point in the history of American foreign policy relations with China. However, as part of a policy of reprisals or detente between the US and China in order to counter the global threat and influence of the Soviet Union, relations between Washington and Beijing are warming up. Initially, the process took place in secret, and the main bearer of the rapprochement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China was Henry Kissinger, who at the time was a national security adviser in the Richard Nixon administration and later secretary of state. In 1979, the United States decided to recognize China, which received a seat and chair as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.  Despite recognizing China as an insurance policy, we would say, the United States continues to support Taiwan as a separate political entity and maintains ties with Taipei by supplying its government with weapons, although Washington has pledged to accept One China Policy, a concession to Beijing. Washington had to pay for China’s consent to act globally as an American partner in the containment of the Soviet Union. This treaty, which obliges Washington to agree to the existence of only one legitimate Chinese government, was in force until recently, when Washington, although

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The Only True Arab Democracy Challenged

Tunisian President Kais Said dissolved parliament on July 25th, removing the prime minister temporarily by decree. Encouraged by military and security officials, Sayed also lifted parliamentary immunity for democratically elected lawmakers, threatening to subject allegedly corrupt lawmakers to the letter of the law “despite their wealth and positions.” A day later, on July 26th, the president went a step further and introduced a curfew for a period of 30 days. Those better acquainted with the situation in Tunisia believe that this kind of demonstration of force by the President of the Republic represents the most serious challenge for Tunisia’s young democracy to date, much more serious than the 2013 protests that almost derailed Tunisia’s transition from dictatorship to political pluralism and democracy. Tunisia is considered the only true modern Arab parliamentary democracy, so the latest crisis in this easternmost Arab Maghreb country is a blow to the democracy project in general in the Arab world and its future prospects, and a particular disappointment to the moderate Islamic-oriented democratic movements engendered by the Arab awakening that started from Tunisia in 2011, later straddling a wide area of North Africa and the Levant, all the way to the south of the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Whether Tunisia will remain the only Arab democracy or fail the test as a victim of an anti-democratic reactionary intervention that some political scientists call a “self-coup” or a temporary takeover, will depend on how the domestic and international public will react to the latest political saga in Tunisia. Every time a coup takes place the likely outcome of which seem to be to the detriment of those democratic forces that are not closely associated with leading Western powers or are a thorn in the side of regional autocracies, many analysts and ‘academic acrobats’ leave the stone unturned to find such terminology to devalue or minimize the danger such a coup may represent for a democratic processes and society as a whole. Despite the transition from dictatorship to democracy, following the adoption of a new constitution reflecting progressive secular ideas and values that was reached by broad consensus, Tunisia has been hit hard by the deep economic crisis, widespread corruption and growing dissatisfaction of ordinary citizens with poor political party performance and with the entire ruling establishment. Deep economic crisis and people’s dissatisfaction with the political situation in the country gave impetus to the political rise of President Kais Saied to the helm of the country. Saied, a professor of constitutional law, was a political outsider, but he convincingly won the 2019 presidential election being perceived as a ray of hope and an independent force who will be able to reign in dysfunctional political parties squabbling for power in perpetuity while the country was sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss. Despite his popularity among the masses, Tunisia’s 2014 constitution limited the constitutional powers of the newly elected president, establishing a semi-presidential system in which President Saied shared power with the prime minister who draws his legitimacy from the democratically elected parliament that elects him.Analysts believe that this duality of power, both a diluted and divided system, has paralyzed political processes in Tunisia and further led to its stagnation. The system of government established in way has caused a situation in which President Saied, Prime Minister Hisham Meshishi, and Parliament Speaker Rachid Ghannouchi have seriously clashed over their powers on several occasions in recent years. Allegedly, these divisions also produced a paralysis of state institutions, which had detrimental effects on strategies as to how to resolve the crisis caused by the corona virus pandemic, which further worsened the economic and political situation in Tunisia. In this situation, there are sizable segments of the population who believe in the justification of the power illegally acquired by the President of the Republic at the expense of the Prime Minister and the Speaker of Parliament, hoping that greater presidential powers could help unblock political institutions, but these are not in any way in majority. For the president, the limitations of authority in the 2014 constitution are an obstacle to making some important decisions that are necessary for the country to emerge from the crisis and to effectively fight the endemic corruption that has widely spread in the recent decade. However, in a serious democratic system, constitutional reforms are negotiated within the political system in order to reach the best solutions. In Turkey, for example, which has been subject to systematic criticism for authoritarianism, the entire system was transformed from parliamentary to presidential, but it was done through democratic processes and with the approval of citizens who voted in the referendum no matter how much some may view it as flawed. However, instead of negotiating a constitutional revision within the system and elected officials, the Tunisian president opted for usurpation of power usually akin to that of an absolute monarch or a South American dictator. David Hearst, editor of Middle East Eye (MEE), a leading and highly influential media portal covering the political situation in the Middle East, wrote about this very explicitly. Hearst, after announcing the possibility of an impending coup in Tunisia in May, was accused of “spreading political fantasies projected in the circles of his Islamist friends”. However, Hearst claims that his sources were from secular circles within the Tunisian presidency rather than from Islamist sources. Since 2011, when a wave of Arab protests against autocratic rule, later called the Arab Spring, swept through much of the Arab world, Tunisia has been going through frequent crises, although the country has avoided armed conflict like those in Syria and Libya. In addition to numerous difficulties, Tunisia managed to maintain peace and a kind of compromise between the dominant and moderate Islamists gathered around post-Islamist Ennahda party and secular political parties. Tunisia is considered a bastion of moderate Muslim democracy, primarily thanks to the political pragmatism of Rashid Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda and the current speaker of parliament whose work the president of Tunisia has just suspended. Ghannnouchi

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