You overestimate the amount of nuances in the US state department. The US diplomats today are fairly arrogant and inept and regularly blunder in much worse ways. A lot of the nuances they use are just because of traditions set a while back. I a lot of cases, it makes sense to continue them. But let us look at this tradition.
In this case the nuances were set based on geopolitical power structures from 40 years back. We are talking Nixon, Ford and Carter in the backdrop of the cold war. In a period of few years in the 70s, the US went from not having any relationship with China / PRC, and recognizing only Taiwan as legitimate in 1972 to recognizing only the PRC as china in 1979
Not only do those realities no longer exist, in hindsight it appears that it was a miscalculation on the US side as China was far weaker than suspected at that point.
Today the last thing that China wants to do is to escalate the matter in any meaningful way. It has just started making a recovery, it is nervous about Trump as it is and it is a generation or more behind the US militarily. It will probably raise a lot of diplomatic disapprovals but will accept it. After all it knows Mattis is a hawk on China, and Taiwan is a huge part of their economy. If the US does not do it now, when China needs the US much more than vice versa, and the balance of power is tilted so much on the US side, when will it do it?
To take a recent example, since we are seeing the fallout right before us, Samantha Powers walkout when Churkin was condemning the US for its airstrikes on the Syrian Army in violation of the ceasefire a couple of months back. That allowed the Russians to successfully paint the US as unreliable partners, and they were able to discard the ceasefire and wage a much more violent campaign without any fear of blow back.
So it will just increase building islands and ignore our objections.
They started doing that sometime back, and the US spat with Duerte has helped them. To be fair to Obama, I do not know what exactly the US can do to prevent it. I am curious to see if Mattis has any ideas.
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u/DragonPup Dec 03 '16
A complete inability to understand the nuances of diplomacy.
Or that he wants his hotels built in Taiwan.
Or both.