Legislative Yuan Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) capped a cross-party delegation visit to Washington with a meeting at the Capitol alongside House Speaker Mike Johnson — and Taiwan's political class immediately split into rival camps, each determined to read the encounter through a domestic lens.
Some commentators hailed it as a new template for Taiwan-U.S. engagement. Others compared it pointedly to an earlier Washington trip by Kuomintang (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), with analysts floating claims that the U.S. State Department had engineered the contrast to fracture the KMT. Pro-government voices, meanwhile, framed the meeting as a rebuke to President Lai Ching-te (賴清德). None of these readings hold up under scrutiny.
What the reactions actually reveal are two persistent distortions in how Taiwan processes its own diplomatic reality. The first is that Taiwan's severely constrained international space makes routine access to Washington feel extraordinary. The second is that Taiwan's political class habitually filters foreign developments through domestic party competition — and consistently arrives at the wrong conclusion.
A Standard Practice Restored, Not a New Precedent Set
A meeting between Taiwan's Legislative Yuan Speaker and the U.S. House Speaker is not a diplomatic breakthrough. It is the baseline expectation for any such visit — and the historical record makes this plain.
In September 1998, then-Speaker Liu Sung-fan (劉松藩) traveled to the United States, ostensibly to receive an honorary doctorate from St. John's University in New York. Despite the unofficial framing, he met with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a thirty-minute session covering Taiwan-U.S. trade, security, Taiwan's international space, and cross-strait relations. He followed the meeting with a press conference at Twin Oaks Estate — the unofficial residence of Taiwan's representative in Washington — to lobby for U.S. support for Taiwan's WTO accession.
Liu's successor Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) served as Speaker for seventeen years and made multiple visits to Washington, meeting House Speakers across different administrations — including Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner — on topics ranging from arms procurement to presidential inaugurations. Former Speaker Su Chia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) held a private meeting with Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee Chair Cory Gardner before attending a memorial for the late Senator John McCain. His successor Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃) met with Pelosi — by then no longer Speaker — while an encounter with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy reportedly fell through for reasons that were never clearly explained.
The pattern is unambiguous: a meeting with the House Speaker is the standard deliverable for any visit by Taiwan's Legislative Yuan Speaker. Han's meeting with Johnson restores that standard after it was interrupted under Yu. It is not a new template for U.S.-Taiwan relations, and it should not be read as one.
DPP supporters should not use Han's itinerary to mock Cheng Li-wun's earlier visit. KMT commentators should not treat it as a rebuke to President Lai — who has faced his own restrictions on transit requests through the United States. Han traveled to Washington as Speaker of the Legislative Yuan, not as a KMT official. That institutional identity carries independent weight. Washington understands that the DPP does not hold a legislative majority in this term, even if the Lai administration has been slow to fully reckon with that reality.
The NT$780 Billion Defense Budget — Leverage Gained, Access Lost
A harder question deserves honest scrutiny: would Washington have extended this invitation without the Legislative Yuan's recent passage of a NT$780 billion (approximately US$24 billion) special defense appropriation? This is not to suggest the visit was a straightforward quid pro quo — but arms procurement has long been a central driver of congressional-level exchanges between Washington and Taipei.
When Wang Jin-pyng led a cross-party delegation to Washington in 2004, the primary purpose was to examine a proposed NT$610 billion special procurement package covering Patriot PAC-3 missiles, P-3C maritime patrol aircraft, and diesel-electric submarines. Wang was careful to frame the trip as an assessment of the purchases' content and necessity, not a commitment to buy. That package ultimately failed to pass as a special budget and was broken up into regular annual appropriations. The current visit carries directly comparable defense-budget context.
Yet there is a third dimension that cuts against the optimistic interpretation entirely. Regardless of how the Trump administration views the Lai government — and Washington has made no secret of its skepticism toward what it sees as provocative independence signals — the U.S. would not use a routine congressional visit to openly humiliate a sitting Taiwanese president. What it appears to be doing is more deliberate: sustaining robust legislative-track engagement while keeping executive-track access tightly limited.
The Taiwan Travel Act, passed during Trump's first term in 2018, encourages visits at all levels of government — but places no binding obligation on the executive branch. Senior officials including Li Ta-wei (李大維), Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), and Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) have made Washington visits under that framework. But Defense Minister Wellington Koo (顧立雄) was blocked from traveling to Washington last year, and President Lai's transit requests have repeatedly fallen short of expectations. There is no sign those restrictions are easing.
Read in that light, what Washington offered through Han's visit was a piece of congressional-diplomacy goodwill — while leaving executive-track access as restricted as before. For the Lai administration, that is not good news.
Congressional Lobbying Inside Taiwan's Legislature Carries Its Own Risks
There is a broader structural question worth watching: is the United States shifting toward a strategy of managing Taiwan primarily through legislative channels rather than executive ones? Congressional diplomacy has long been a feature of the relationship, but the current dynamic is more direct and more transactional.
On the NT$780 billion special defense budget, U.S. interlocutors were reported to be working legislator offices directly — a form of open congressional lobbying that, whatever satisfaction it produced among KMT and Taiwan People's Party (TPP) lawmakers, represents enormous financial interests pressing on Taiwan's democratic institutions. That is not without cost.
The risks of an excessively legislative approach became visible just days before Han's return. The Legislative Yuan — with KMT and TPP votes — rejected a separate NT$210 billion special budget bill for drone procurement. As defense and foreign policy questions migrate increasingly into the legislature, the danger is that all parties treat them as zero-sum political competitions rather than as matters of shared national interest. When that happens, no amount of congressional diplomacy can compensate for the domestic consensus that is missing.
Taiwan faces a structural reality: no single party commands a legislative majority in the current term. Building workable cross-party cooperation on core security issues is not optional. Without it, even the most polished diplomatic access in Washington provides only limited protection. （Related： Taiwan Hosts East Asia Democracy Forum to Counter Polarization and AI Challenges ｜ Latest ）
