TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A former U.S. Marine has once again published an anti-Taiwan opinion piece in China’s state-run Global Times, complaining the U.S. system is being gamed by Taiwan lobbyists.
This is interesting coming from someone who has been in the U.S. military since he signed up for the Marines as a 17-year-old. Further spice is added when it is revealed that Franz Gayl has a reputation for being a whistleblower.
He was a significant figure behind negative publicity the U.S. military received for not armoring enough vehicles to withstand improvised explosive devices (IED) in Iraq during the early part of the conflict, which raged from 2003 to 2011.
On LinkedIn he describes himself as a policy advisor in Burke, Virginia. However, the U.S. government has suspended his security clearances and formally investigated him.
Gayl’s article on Thursday (Sept. 16) is headlined “Taiwan secessionists poison US Congress.” Further, he says the Taiwan Caucus is “the second largest and one of the most powerful in Congress and serves as the greatest single influence over U.S.' China policy.”
He says members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have been “inflaming a political distinction between the remote island of Taiwan and the nation of China.” He says it is an example of pork-barrel politics that would more accurately be called “bribery” and “corrupted” representative democracy.
He adds that “Congress' greatest feat was the enactment of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) in 1979.” In a previous Global Times editorial, he talked about “Why US will lose a war with China over Taiwan island.”
As for why a once-loyal American has turned on his country, Gayl himself told The Washington Post, “If we don’t talk about this now, we are going to sleepwalk into this conflict” with China.
His turn toward China may derive from a meeting he had with a Chinese diplomat in 2005 for a graduate school research paper he wrote called “Realism and Realpolitik.” This stated the U.S. was a declining power and China was a rising power.
In 2011, he started reading religious texts and studying Chinese. He has also advocated the U.S. recognize China’s dominion over the nation of Taiwan, while current policy is moving in the opposite direction, toward stronger support for Taiwan.