America’s foreign policy elites are in an uproar. Again. Or maybe it’s still. It’s hard to keep track of where one censorious tantrum ends and the next begins. This time their casus belli is the President-elect’s phone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

They warn us that this upsets the delicate international balance and that Donald Trump is a know-nothing cowboy acting without either knowledge or understanding.

Distinguished academics like NYU’s Ian Bremmer assumes that Trump’s political acts are nothing more than involuntary spasms, postulating that he “inadvertently caused a major diplomatic incident.”

The presumption is that since Trump is breaking with the current orthodoxy that he must be doing so accidentally.

It also ignores the fact that Trump is being counseled by Ambassador John Bolton, who wrote back in January that the United States should be countering China’s aggression in East Asia “may involve modifying or even jettisoning the ambiguous ‘one-China’ policy.”

Yet the more the critics talk the more they expose their own ignorance. American policy regarding the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China) is really not that complicated. Rather, it is predicated on a conflict and a fiction. Both are Made in America.

Read the rest at The Hill.

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