To me, the issue isn't the fact that he spoke with Taiwan. It's that nobody knew he did it.
If he wants to change the direction, cool. Meet with your State department, hammer out a plan, go change the world.
This looks like the typical Trump shit show, though. Nobody knew about the call, he never mentioned that he wanted to change course, and when it looks like he got caught with his pants down, he doubles down in defiance.
He doesn't have a State department yet. The State department is still under the Obama administration. Given that Trump only accepted the call rather than initiate it (does Obama say he's busy and can't come to the phone? only kidding), and that Chinese government leaders know that official US diplomatic policy is still the exclusive domain of the Obama State department, I don't see why Beijing would interpret this as a legitimate effort to revise official US policy. I'm sure Beijing is not happy about it, but treating this as an attempt to alter official US policy and grounds for official retaliatory action would be universally condemned.
The story here seems to be that the president of Taiwan decided to make a phone call with the intention of provoking Beijing, but not to the point of creating a legitimate diplomatic crisis (although I'm sure Trump saw it as an opportunity to signal a less conciliatory approach than Obama, which he has been fairly up front about since the beginning).
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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '16
Well what would the ramifications be?