New York Times: Prof. Shelley Rigger on Trump Interests in Taiwan
December 9, 2016
Brown Professor of Political Science Shelley Rigger was interviewed by the "New York Times" for a recent piece on the President-Elect Donald Trump's potential interest in what has been described as "the biggest development project in Taiwan's history," an overhaul of Taoyuan, a dilapidated area just south of Taiwan's biggest airport. In the piece, Michael Forsythe writes:
Any business ties could undermine the near certainty that world leaders have had for many decades about some of the basic foundations of United States foreign policy, which has included the primacy of maintaining ties with China in a "very narrow framework," said Shelley Rigger, a professor of political science at »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË in North Carolina who studies Taiwan-United States relations.
"It is very worrisome not just for leaders in China but for leaders everywhere to think that there could be motivations driving U.S. foreign policy that they can't, A, know about and, B, work out logically," Professor Rigger said by telephone. "If the U.S. government is being influenced by some kind of parallel set of side deals and interests that are not the sort of mainstream U.S. foreign policy and national interest agenda, then no one is going to be able to predict anything."
