A phone call between President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen was arranged with the help of former GOP senator and presidential nominee Bob Dole, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday night.
The Journal cited an unnamed Trump transition official with the news of Dole's involvement in the controversial call last Friday – one the Journal reported may signal the start of a more adversarial relationship between the United States and China.
Dole told the Journal the law firm he's affiliated with does work with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States – and that the firm played a role in arranging the phone call.
"It’s fair to say that we may have had some influence," Dole told the Journal.
According to the Journal, the 12-minute phone call wasn't simply congratulatory, as Vice President-elect Mike Pence declared two days later,
but instead was a conversation in which Trump stressed to Tsai that his top priority is the U.S. economy.
"The conversation was about regional stability," one unnamed source told the Journal, adding the call had been planned weeks in advance.
Tsai had a prepared set of talking points and was surrounded by Taiwan’s foreign minister, David Lee, as well as two top National Security Council officials and her spokesman, Alex Huang, the Journal reported.
"To my knowledge, Taiwan was on" a list of foreign leaders whom Trump wanted to speak to, "and it took some time to arrange," Stephen Yates, a former national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, told the Journal.
"It was a message in the sense that Donald Trump is not necessarily going to be told what he can or can't do because a foreign leader says so. That's exactly the kind of thing that millions of Americans detest about Washington."
"If it's going to cause some pain, then so be it," he added.
Yates said it was also a call for which Trump had been prepared.
"Definitely, there was preparation so the president-elect was not blindsided that there might be reaction from China, from China experts, from the State Department and the White House," Yates said, the Journal reported.
"I don’t think any part of the Trump team is looking for a military conflict. But I also don’t think you have to walk on eggshells to get anything out of Beijing."
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