The U.S. Taiwan FTA during Bush-Chen Era Revisited : Trade and Strategic Accounts Compared

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Taiwan has faced both a deterioration in its trade position and a strong sense of isolation from the rapidly growing Asian regionalism due to numerous unsuccessful attempts to ink free trade agreements (FTAs) with major trading partners. Among these attempts, the effort to reach a U.S.-Taiwan FTA during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Chen Shui-bian warrants serious treatment. With reference to the two main approaches to analyzing FTAs in the current scholarship, this paper elaborates the trade and strategic approaches and makes a comparison between them. It is found that the substantial steps Taiwan took in 2004 and 2005 to resolve its trade disputes with the United States did not open the door to formal talks on an FTA before the U.S. fast-track legislation expired in 2007. On the contrary, the divergence in strategic interests between the two sides explains theU.S. decision to set aside Taiwan's request for an FTA in 2003 and to openly reject another such request in 2006. In other words, the strategic perspective provides amore satisfactory explanation than the trade perspective for the evolution of the U.S.-Taiwan FTA issue.