In September 1999 we wrote: "Until that happy day 16 months hence when Clinton and his team leave office, there is little point trying to deal with these people, better to focus on who is likely to replace them."
Now that "happy day" has come, champagne all round then? No quite. Seeing Slick Willie shuffle off to Arkansas or jail or wherever -- an Arkansas jail, perhaps? -- might be cause for celebration, but certain aspects of the new Bush administration make us nervous enough for the bubbly to lose a little fizz.
This might seem strange. After all, Bush has dissented from the stupidity that sees the US and China as strategic partners, seeing them -- correctly -- as strategic competitors instead. Bush also seems to have conveyed the message, though we cannot find his actual words, that the US would intervene should China try to achieve reunification by force. Surely all this is balm to Taiwan's troubled soul.
Our reservations center around the influence of another George Bush, his father. And perhaps more specifically the friends and colleagues of his father and the possibility that they might exert rather a lot of influence on the foreign policy making of the new president -- a man whose knowledge of the world has been shown to be, shall we say, modest.
For George Bush senior was no friend to Taiwan. Clinton's criticism of the elder Bush for coddling the "butchers of Beijing" -- sending Brent Scowcroft to the Chinese capital to guarantee business as usual while the blood still had to be cleaned from Tiananmen Square -- was just about the only accurate perception or opinion he ever had on US-China policy. True, of course, Bush did sell Taiwan 150 F-16s, thereby annoying his old friends in Beijing mightily, but that was just a ploy to gain votes in Texas in the election he lost to Clinton and has never, to our knowledge, been seen as anything else either side of the Pacific. Bush senior always thought he had some deep insight regarding China, with the result that Beijing's leaders played him like an old fiddle. The fact that George W.'s kitchen Cabinet on foreign policy might in fact contain pretty much the same people with the same advice that served Taiwan so badly in the late 1980s and early 1990s is worrying.
As is the prominence of Colin Powell. His appointment as secretary of state -- we assume no problems with his confirmation -- has been very well received, The Economist of London being one of the few media commentators to have reservations. Yet we too are less than sure about General Powell, if only because we wonder how committed he is to the doctrine that bears his name. There is, of course, nothing dishonorable about a soldier -- especially one with Powell's memories of the Vietnam quagmire -- believing that wars should only be undertaken if they are quickly winnable at small cost, something that comes about largely through having overwhelming superiority on the battlefield. The problem is that no US conflict with China is ever likely to meet these criteria, not just because of the size of China's armed forces and its enormous hinterland, but also because the "battlefields" that China might choose might not be the kind where sheer fire power makes a difference.
The answer here might be to let Taiwan take care of more of its own defense than it has previously been allowed the materials to do. "Give us the tools and we will carry out the job," to misquote Winston Churchill. Support for the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act would go a long way to dispelling Taiwan's worries.
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