U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Friday telephone call with Taiwan’s president is plunging U.S.-China relations into uncertainty, potentially jeopardizing crucial cooperation on a range of issues, perhaps most ominously North Korea. – Wall Street Journal (subscription required)
China’s leaders have been markedly reticent about what kind of leader they think Donald J. Trump will be. A pragmatic dealmaker, as his business background might indicate? Or a provocateur who tests the ways of statecraft? By talking on Friday with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, Mr. Trump answered that question in stark terms, Chinese analysts said Saturday. Breaking decades of American diplomatic practice, he caught the Chinese government off guard by lunging into the most sensitive of its so-called core interests, the “One China” policy agreed to by President Richard M. Nixon more than four decades ago. – New York Times