As he entered office after his first election in 2000, President Chen Shui-bian received an unprecedented level of support from Washington, especially after George W. Bush became, a few months later, U.S. president. The Republicans regarded him as a true democratic leader, with a vision of Taiwan’s future, as well as a key element of the U.S. interests in East Asia. The new team in the White House, composed of a mixture of the Conservative and the so-called neo-conservative, shared Chen’s vision. Mainland China was then considered the potential threat, if not the next enemy of the U.S. -- recall the double diplomatic tension of the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the U.S. spy plane crisis in Hainan in 2001 --, and the support for Taiwan, both political and military, hence was a strategic necessity. The Bush administration promised new arms contracts, and repeated the American support to Taiwan in case of a confrontation with China.

Times change, so do political interests, and so did the priorities of Washington’s political agenda. September 11th’s terrorist attacks, while emphasizing the focus on the Greater Middle East and the radical movements, weakened the U.S. role and interest in East Asian security issues, as the military disengagement process in the Korean peninsula proved. In such a contest, the political support of mainland China was regarded as a priority, jeopardizing Chen’s dreams of independence. At the moment, Washington cannot afford pointing out Beijing as a strategic competitor, even if some American experts and policy makers believe it will be in the future. The U.S. has a difficult war on terror to conduct, and first things come first in a pragmatic foreign policy approach led by the State Secretary Condoleezza Rice.

On the other side, Chen misread Washington’s priorities, and slowly became extremely untrustworthy and a potential source of significant new problems for a U.S. administration facing bigger challenges, such as the war in Iraq and Bush’s disastrous approval rate. At the same time, the KMT engaged itself into a spectacular, if not historical, new relation with its all-time enemy in Beijing. Lien Chan’s trip to China in May 2005 has been regarded in Washington as a better guarantee for a long term peace in the Taiwan Strait than Chen’s provocative and unrealistic approach. The KMT victory in last year’s legislative election convinced the last sceptics in Washington that betting on Chen was not a good idea anymore, and that the U.S. should ignore Taiwan’s president gesticulation for the next two years, until he is replaced by a new, more pragmatic leader.

Chen Shui-bian and his team apparently have not yet noticed the political changes in the U.S.. In a recent trip to Washington, the DPP Chairman Yu Shyi-kun tried to convince his American auditors that a KMT victory in 2008, by engaging a dialogue with Beijing, would have disastrous effects on the relations between Taiwan and Japan, and hence would weaken the U.S. influence in the region. Such an argument may seduce a bunch of hawks in Washington, convinced that Beijing is building up an important military arsenal, and that Taiwan’s invasion is in process. But this won’t be enough to renew the U.S. government support to Taiwan’s foreign policy. Facing a large protest led by his old friend Shih Ming-teh, Chen tried both to blame his opponents for supporting a dangerous dialogue with China, and to put a domestic political crisis at the international level. But there again, he can not except any move from the U.S., and Washington will keep doing what it has successfully been doing in the past year: isolating Chen and look towards the future, which means after 2008.