Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

30 JEFF EDWARDS
“Perhaps not,” the president said. “But firing a ballistic missile directly
over Taiwan is an overtly hostile act.”
“Hostile to whom, Mr. President?”
“To Taiwan, the Democratic People’s Republic of China.”
The ambassador smiled. “Mr. President, there is no Democratic
People’s Republic of China. It does not exist. It never has existed.”
“I understand that your government holds such an opinion,” the
president said. “But you must realize that the United States does not share
your view.”
“There is only one China, Mr. President—a simple truth that even the
United Nations acknowledges. There are two chairs for Korea in the
General Assembly, one for South Korea and another for North Korea.
That is because there are two Koreas.
“You will note that there is only one chair in the United Nations
General Assembly for China. That is because there is only one China. If
there were two Chinas, there would be two chairs, would there not? The
citizens of our troublesome island province may style themselves as
renegades, but they are Chinese citizens nonetheless.”
“The citizens of Taiwan have a democratically elected government,”
the president said. “They have their own laws, their own currency, their
own national identity. They do not wish to be part of your country.”
The ambassador sighed. “We cannot let the wishes of a few million
miscreants threaten the integrity of our sovereign nation. Their desires are
irrelevant.”
“How can the wishes of millions of people be irrelevant?”
“Perhaps my memory for American history is a little fuzzy,” the
ambassador said, “but I seem to recall that your country was faced with a
similar situation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of
your Southern provinces … excuse me … you call them states, do you
not? A number of your Southern states decided to secede from your
Union. If I am not mistaken, your government used military force to
repatriate the renegade states. I believe the casualties from that war totaled
something just short of seven hundred thousand people. Yet, your citizens
seem to regard the loss of nearly three-quarters of a million lives as a
reasonable price to pay for reacquiring the lost territories and reabsorbing
the inhabitants.”
“A fair point,” the president said. “But we are in the twenty-first
century, not the nineteenth. The world is a different place. The tools and
attitudes that served us well a hundred and fifty years ago have no place in
the modern age.”